Lorax451

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

The Democrats may have taken control of the House and the Senate, they may have humiliated Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but the real fight is only beginning. It is not simply a battle to hold the corrupt Trump regime to account, something that can only be done if the Democrats are willing overcome their reluctance to carry out impeachment proceedings against the president. It is also a battle to sweep away the corporate-indentured hierarchy of the Democratic Party, including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.

The Democratic Party since the presidency of Bill Clinton, who gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and gutted New Deal-era welfare programs such as the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, is a more polished version of corporate and oligarchic rule, abjectly subservient to the war machine, the Israel lobby and their funders in the billionaire class.

The country is broken. Corruption, in both parties, is endemic. Federal agencies have been hollowed out and destroyed. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have been handed over to right-wing ideologues. The working class is crippled with debt peonage and substandard wages. Constitutional norms and protections have been erased. Billionaires, including Trump, pay little to no income tax. The 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which allows big business to fund their hand-picked candidates, sustains a system of legalized bribery.

The public may clamor for a raise in the minimum wage, Medicare for All, regulation of the big banks and private equity firms, an end to arms shipments to Israel and campaign finance reform, but no one in the leadership of the Democratic Party listens or cares. They serve their paymasters.

Will cutthroat capitalism, sold to us under the sanitized name of neoliberalism, be allowed to continue to impoverish the citizenry and funnel wealth upwards into the hands of the 1 percent? Will corporations be regulated and policed? Will corporate criminals be brought to trial? Will our democracy be restored? Or will the grotesque sight of a trillionaire, Elon Musk, gutting federal agencies and pouring hundreds of millions into elections to try and control the outcome be normalized?

The handful of politicians who attempt to confront the corruption and the devastation visited on the American working class through deindustrialization and deregulation, such as Bernie Sanders, see their campaigns sabotaged by the Democratic Party leadership, including Barack Obama.

We must demand that progressive candidates, including Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson, build coalitions to oust the Democratic Party leadership, raise the minimum wage, enact universal health care, prosecute corporate crime and impeach Trump. It will be up to us.

The Democratic Party hierarchy will see the results not as a repudiation of Trump, but an endorsement of the flaccid and ineffectual position of a party that stands for little and fights for less. This would be yet another betrayal by the Democrats of voters. It would keep alive the very real prospect of another fascist, one better organized and more intelligent, taking the White House in two years.

Of course, this fight will mean not only jettisoning a corrupt Democratic Party leadership, but turning on the mega-donors, lobbyists and corporations that fund and control the Democratic Party.

The effort to wrest the party back from the hands of corporations and oligarchs will be vicious and difficult. It will require us to rely on the power of mass movements to sever these bonds. Nothing else will work.

If we fail, our anemic democracy will not be saved by these midterm elections, but doomed.

[Lorax451 @Lorax451]

@yanisvaroufakis Thank you, Yanis. 🙏🌸

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

WHAT LULA’S RE-ELECTION TELLS US: The Class War Need Not End in Fascism

On Sunday, Brazilians did something that the commentariat had told us was a lost cause. On the eve of his eighty-first birthday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former metalworker, turned the Trumpist, evangelical, neofascist, Zionist tide in Latin America to get re-elected President of Brazil.

Three weeks earlier, he had come second in the first round, behind Flávio Bolsonaro, son and political heir of the man who trumpeted the merits of fascism, who had embraced Trump as his lord and master, who plotted a cynical coup against Brazilian democracy – moreover, the main candidates that were eliminated were rightists whose voters were meant to move to Bolsonaro. Yesterday, Lula overturned this deficit and won with a margin of nearly four and a half million votes.

I want to use Lula’s victory to tell a broader story. A story about a war, the class war that the few are waging against the many across the Western world. And a story about how that war need not end, as so many now fear, in a neofascist revival.

THE HIDDEN CLASS WAR

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Warren Buffett once said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Mr Buffett was not exaggerating. For almost four decades, Western governments and central banks have pulled every policy lever in the same direction: to make the assets of the few burgeon at the expense of the incomes of the many.

Consider the numbers. Between 1952 and 1988, economic growth explained nearly all the gains of the West’s stock market. From 1989 onwards, growth explains only about a quarter. The largest share, around 40 per cent, came from income diverted from workers to shareholders. Another third came from cheaper money and lower perceived risk. That is not wealth creation. It is wealth extraction: a transfer from those who work to those who own, inflated by cheap money and paraded on the evening news as “a strong economy”.

Then look at the rescues. 2001, 2008, 2020, the British gilt crisis of 2022, Silicon Valley Bank in 2023: each time, the state rushed in to save the asset holders. Together they reveal the rule: to save the economy, you must save the wealth of those who own it – not those who produce stuff, not even productive companies. In the United States, the top tenth own almost 90 per cent of all shares. The Fed and the US federal government insure it for them, doing ‘whatever it takes’ to prop them up whenever their prices tank. The rest of us in the West pay the premium, in the form of the austerity that always follows the bailout.

And the owners need never sell. Why do billionaires pay so little tax? Because they do not earn incomes - they accumulate capital gains, taxed only when sold. So they borrow against their soaring assets at 1 or 2 per cent and live on the loan. Then they die and pay no tax on their capital gains, passing on the loot to their kids at ridiculously low inheritance taxes. Meanwhile, to pay bills and put food on the table, the worker borrows on a credit card at 20 per cent, her debts the mirror image of their fortunes.

Then, a large chunk of these accumulating assets seek even higher rents in places like Brazil where the US government intervenes to ensure that the local governments will also place the defence of these assets’ values above all else.

CAPITAL IS NOT A THING, NOT MERELY AN ASSET

Why does austerity keep returning, even though it is economically self-defeating? Marx tells the story of Thomas Peel, who in 1829 sailed to Western Australia’s Swan River with £50,000 of provisions and three hundred working-class men, women and children. On arrival, his workers walked off into the bush and worked for themselves. Peel had brought money, tools and labour, but he could not bring capitalism along, because his workers had an alternative.

Capital, Marx concluded, is not a thing but a social relation: the power of those who own to get those who don’t own to do things they’d rather did not do. Austerity is not an economic policy. It is a disciplinary device, keeping the many sufficiently insecure and indebted to accept whatever is on offer. The ruling class’s deepest fear is not inflation or debt. It is to end up like Peel: rich, but without the power to compel.

IS FASCISM INEVITABLE?

Here is the part of the story that keeps so many of us awake at night. When centre-left politicians, from Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Tony Blair to Gerhard Schröder, Francois Hollande and Andy Burnham abandoned the language of class, a void opened up in the working-class heartlands of the West. Into that void stepped a venomous storyteller with a century of experience in filling such voids: the recalcitrant far right, the rebranded fascists. They offer left-behind workers a story of dignity, then redirect their fury away from the owner who shipped their factory abroad or sold their council house to some fund and towards the migrant next door. It does not end the class war. It merely divides one side – the workers – to rule over them. It camouflages it.

From the red suburbs of Paris to south Piraeus, from England’s red wall to Italy’s rust belt in Taranto, from the American rust belt to eastern Germany, the pattern seems relentless. And so, a fatalism has set in: the class war waged from above, we are told, must inevitably end in a neofascist, racist, misogynist revival.

Brazil has just refuted this fatalism. Brazil knows the monster intimately. It lived through four years of Jair Bolsonaro, with his nostalgia for the military dictatorship. On 8 January 2023, his followers stormed the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. Brazil’s far right is not a fringe. Unlike Trump’s rag tag storm troopers, they had years of running a dictatorship. It won the first round of this election. They had the White House fully behind them, while the US Democrats, once again demonstrating their irrelevance, stayed mute. And yet, yesterday, they were defeated.

How? Not by hand-wringing about “populism”, nor by a centrist promise to manage the status quo more efficiently. Lula won because he did what the Western centre-left forgot how to do: he spoke the language of class, and backed it with policies that shifted power, however modestly, from the few to the many. His government exempted those earning up to five thousand reals a month from income tax and paid for it with a minimum tax on the very richest. During Brazil’s G20 presidency, it proposed a global minimum tax on billionaires. When Lula tells Brazilian workers that the elites have rigged the game, he points his finger upwards, at the rentier and the speculator, not sideways, at the migrant or the poor.

PIX – AN EXAMPLE OF AN ANTI-OLIGARCHY DIGITAL TOOL

But the most innovative weapon in Brazil’s arsenal is one that few outside Latin America have heard of. It is called Pix.

Every time you tap a card to pay for a coffee, a toll is levied. Visa, Mastercard and the banks take a cut, often 2 or 3 per cent, from every transaction. Multiply this by billions of purchases a day and you grasp one of the most lucrative rent-extraction machines ever devised. These are not profits made in competitive markets but rent extracted by those who own the digital rails on which our economic lives now run. It is part of what I call technofeudalism.

Unlike Britain, Europe or, of course, America, Brazil’s central bank moved to limit this rabid exploitation. It launched an alternative: a public, instant payment system, free for individuals and with capped fees for merchants. A Brazilian pays a street vendor in Salvador or sends money to her mother in Recife, instantly, using Pix from her phone, with no card company or bank taking its slice. Brazilians took to it with astonishing enthusiasm. Last year, Pix processed almost 80 billion transactions and overtook credit cards as the most popular way to pay online.

Pix is, in effect, the Swan River of the digital age. It gave tens of millions of Brazilians, including the poorest, who had never had a bank card, an alternative to the toll booths of Big Finance. And, like Peel, the toll collectors did not take it lying down. This summer, Washington imposed 25 per cent tariffs on most Brazilian exports, and its trade representative explicitly named Pix as a grievance, complaining that it “unfairly disadvantaged” American payment companies! The most powerful government on Earth deployed its trade arsenal against a free public service for being too successful at denying rents to Visa and Mastercard.

Lula did not blink. He defended Pix as a Brazilian public good, and Brazilians rewarded him for it. Here, at last, is a concrete example of limiting the power of Big Business, Big Finance and Big Tech: not with slogans, but by building public digital infrastructure that removes the opportunity to extract rent in the first place.

NOT A REVOLUTION, BUT AN AUSPICIOUS PORTENT

Let me not romanticise. Lula is no revolutionary. His margin was narrow. Brazil’s Congress remains in the grip of agribusiness and evangelical blocs. Its central bank still keeps interest rates punishingly high, a weapon of the class war if ever there was one. Lula himself has compromised much too much with these vested interests, and lost support as a result.

But Brazil has shown three things the rest of us must learn. First, the class war waged against the many does not have to end in fascism. Fascism wins only when the left vacates the battlefield of class. Second, a progressive government can win by pointing upwards, at those who extract rent, rather than downwards, at those who suffer. And third, Big Business can be defeated, at least forced to lose some battles, by building public alternatives to its rent-extracting machines.

So, here is the challenge to Britain, to Europe, to the people of the United States.

-Build your own Pix: public payment rails that end the tolls of Visa and Mastercard.
-Tax capital gains, ill-gotten wealth that is, not just income.
-Make every rescue conditional, with the public receiving real, permanent equity in return.
-Create a public investment bank as an alternative to the bond markets. Restore the bargaining power of the workforce. And give working people what Peel’s workers found at Swan River: an alternative, and the freedom to say no.

Buffett was right. There is a class war, and his class has been winning hands down. But yesterday, in Brazil, it lost a battle though not the war. It lost because a working-class president dared to name the war and fight it using weapons fashioned to defend the many.

https://t.co/ns3sxkDpsH

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

I am going to write something below that should be seen as the musings of one who celebrated – and still celebrates – Lula’s victory over Bolsonaro Jr. Here it goes:

I cannot for the life of me justify why o why Brazil’s courts had to demand of Bolsonaro that he hands over his passport the moment he lost the election. That he disputed the veracity of the election result is a sign of a faulty character, evidence that he is a bad loser. BUT, he had every right to being a bad loser; to dispute, rightly or wrongly, any result.

As for the argument that he was being investigated for other misdemeanours or crimes, that doesn’t wash either: What would have happened if Bolsonaro had won the election? Would the judges also prevent him from travelling abroad, as President-elect? I very much doubt that – which means that the judges were conflating executive and judicial powers.

To those who tell me that the Bolsonaro clan is a fascistic, criminal family, my reply is: You and I may very well think that. Alas, the judiciary has no right to use its powers to indict and to pursue someone because – or immediately after – they lost an election. It is shameful, to be precise. And it is also dangerous for those of us on the left who know what it means to be banned and hounded by rogue judges and police commissioners.

But I also have a message to Bolsonaro supporters, or those sitting on the fence, who assume that Lula is somehow behind the judges. He is not! This is the same court that imprisoned, falsely, Lula himself. What we have in Brazil is a judiciary that overreaches and habitually crosses the line that ought to separate judicial from political power.
It is such a shame that a judge took it upon himself to go after Bolsonaro on the eve of his defeat and, in doing so, to sully Lula’s stupendous victory.
One last point that my comrades in Brazil should note: If Bolsonaro and Rubio wanted to mount a campaign against Lula and Brazilian democracy they could never have been aided better than by that judge’s reckless writ.

[Lorax451 @Lorax451]

@PaulineHansonOz What they do know is how to manage the tax office (at the ATO) and how to manage the budget for a country. Which is vastly different to that for a small business.

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

In 1930, a church delegation from abroad arrived in the Jordanian city of Karak—specifically the town of Adir—to purchase land to build a church.

When they found an ideal site, and intended to buy it, they discovered it belonged to the Al-Ma’ayta Muslims. Instead of selling it, the Al-Ma’ayta member, led by their sheikh, welcomed the idea and decided to donate the land to their Christian neighbors.

The sheikh added a lighthearted yet deeply meaningful condition: "The priest must be one of our own—a Jordanian!" Since that day, a popular saying has lived on in Jordan: "We want a priest from the Muslims, and a sheikh from the Christians."

This is the spirit of Karak, the city where terrorists targeted one of its churches. The attack was not meant to target Christians alone, but rather the deep-rooted coexistence between Christians and Muslims.

Terrorism doesn't have a religion. If a person is an extremist or a terrorist, their Islam, their Christianity, or their Judaism is going to be extremism or terrorism. People are extremist, terrorist, or peaceful, not religions; it depends on what a person in that religion brings to it.

Terrorism is not a religion; it is an act.

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

The GRU hacked into Jared Kushner's iPhone. Dutch military intelligence (MIVD) then recruited a GRU spy who gave them access to the hacked phone. What MIVD discovered was that Kushner had access to two bank accounts --one Azerbaijani, the other Israeli --where Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emirati ruler Mohammed bin Zayed deposited money. It sounds like a slightly far-fetched episode of "Slow Horses," but it's real. And it proves just how eye-poppingly corrupt this administration was and continues to be as its "special envoy" decides the fate of tens of millions in Europe in the Middle East. Simply incredible reporting by Matthew Cole, drawn from his new book on Kushner. https://t.co/8AyV60gg1X

[William Peynsaert @PeynsaertBill]

When celebrity protest was costly and not done for naughty vibes and extra followers.
34 years ago this month, an Irish woman committed an act of defiance on American television that would make her one of the most hated celebrities in the world.

She tried to get people to pay attention to children being abused by the very institution that claimed to be their moral guardian.

On 3 October 1992, Sinéad O'Connor appeared on Saturday Night Live, one of America's most popular television programmes.

She was 25 years old.

Two years earlier, Nothing Compares 2 U had made her a global superstar. She had an extraordinary voice, enormous commercial potential and a future that could have made her fabulously wealthy.

Every incentive in the entertainment industry told her to keep smiling, singing, looking pretty and making money.

Instead, she chose to make people profoundly uncomfortable.

She performed Bob Marley's War, completely alone, without instrumental accompaniment, changing the lyrics to explicitly condemn child abuse.

At the end, she held up a photograph of Pope John Paul II.

And tore it to pieces.

"FIGHT THE REAL ENEMY!"

Silence.

The audience didn't know what to do.

Neither did the producers, who had no idea she was planning this.

Within days, the machinery of outrage was operating at full capacity.

Sinéad had insulted Catholics!

She had insulted the Pope!

She had insulted religion!

How DARE this young woman with a shaved head disrespect something so sacred?

Funny how much more offended people could get about a torn photograph than about children being raped and abused by people entrusted with their care.

Actor Joe Pesci subsequently appeared on the same programme and declared that, had he been there, he would have given her a smack.

The audience laughed and applauded.

A grown man threatening to hit a woman for protesting child abuse.

Apparently THAT was entertainment.

Madonna criticised her.

People destroyed her records.

Her career suffered enormously.

Two weeks later, she appeared at Madison Square Garden for a concert honouring Bob Dylan.

Thousands of people had come to celebrate a musician whose reputation rested partly on decades of songs about injustice, rebellion and refusing to submit to authority.

And when Sinéad appeared, a substantial part of the audience BOOED her.

For having actually rebelled.

Kris Kristofferson approached her and told her not to let the bastards get her down.

"I'm not down," she replied.

And instead of singing the Bob Dylan song she had prepared, she launched into War AGAIN.

What happened in the following decades?

Investigations revealed extensive sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy and institutional efforts to conceal it.

Sinéad wasn't attacking the ordinary believer who found comfort in religion.

She was confronting the immense power of an institution whose moral authority had protected perpetrators and helped silence victims.

[Amin Sharaf 🌍 @AminSharaf]

Ich hab mir gestern #NAZA angesehen.

Ich habe noch nie erlebt, dass der komplette Kinosaal während des Abspanns bis zum Ende vor Betroffenheit mucksmäuschenstill war.

Es wurde bereits viel über den Film berichtet, ich will das nicht wiederholen.

Ein paar Dinge haben mich aber doch überrascht und getroffen.

Wir haben ein Monster erschaffen. #Israel ist ein Monster

Ich hätte nicht gedacht wie ähnlich sich Nazi-Deutschland und Israel in Ihrer Perfektion der Vernichtung sind.

Nazis tätowiertenNummern auf Menschen die sie töten wollten, Israel nummeriert Häuser, die es zerstören will.

Diese ganze Tötungsmaschinerie entstand nicht mit dem 7. Oktober. Sie war lange vorher bereits vorbereitet. Der Film berichtet, dass jedes Handy in Gaza genau zugeordnet, lokalisiert, abgehört werden konnte. Dass jeder Sensor verwendet werden konnte.

Wie kann es dann sein, dass die IDF nichts vom 7. Oktober wusste? Wie kann es sein, dass sie auf einmal genau wissen, wer ein Hamas-Offizier ist, weil er seine Kumpels mit „Hamas Ahmed“ im Handy gespeichert hat - was Ahmed zum nächsten Ziel macht - aber vorher nichts mitbekommen haben?

Die IDF sah sich Familienfotos an um herauszufinden, von welcher Seite man ein Wohnhaus am einfachsten vernichten konnte, sie hörten live ihre Opfer ab, während ihre Raketen sie töteten.

Sie warteten gezielt, bis Daddy zu Hause ist, um die ganze Familie auszulöschen - es war einfacher. Das System hieß „Where‘s Daddy“. Wer meine Timeline liest, findet den Bericht dazu schon 2024.

Im Film berichtet ein IDF Soldat, wie er in Polen ein Konzentrationslager besucht hat und nicht verstehen konnte, wie Deutsche mit dieser Schuld leben können. Jetzt versteht er es und es geht ganz gut, sagt er. Auf die Frage, ob es ein Genozid sei, zögert er keine Sekunde: „Ja!“

Jeder Interviewte sagte 2 Dinge: er hätte nur Befehle ausgeführt, das wäre seine Rolle gewesen, hinterfragen wäre nicht angebracht gewesen und er wäre ja nur ein kleines Rädchen gewesen.

So bringt man Menschen dazu, bei den furchtbarsten Verbrechen mitzumachen. 1940 wie 2024.

Dass sie unverhohlen zugeben, Spaß am töten gehabt zu haben, geht dabei fast unter.

Eine meiner Sichtweisen muss ich revidieren. Ich hatte bisher angenommen - auch nach den Aussagen der israelischen Politiker und Militärs nach dem 7. Oktober - die Reaktion wäre irrational im Affekt gewesen. Vernichten aus Wut und Rachegelüsten.

Das stimmt nicht. Israel wusste von Tag Eins was es tat, tötete gezielt und gewollt. Zerstörte gezielt und geplant, Mensch um Mensch, Haus um Haus.

Israel wusste von Tag Eins um die zivilen Opfer. Es nahm sie in Kauf.

Sie waren #NAZA - Kollateralschäden.

[S.B.S @Wallface]

Israel's social media operation, mapped:
6 contractors, 13 websites they are tied to, 38 groups and tools the Diaspora Ministry lists for supporters, 5 AI chatbots citing the sites.
105 organizations and sites. Here is the whole web.

[Lorax451 @Lorax451]

@Calliope1925 @MFWitches @helenhainesindi I heard that clip on RN, it was revolting. Was it called out at the time?

[Gianluca Martino @gianlucamart1]

Heil Austria 🧵
Mustafa Ayyash cresce nel campo profughi di Nuseirat a Gaza, a quindici anni crea il forum online "Gaza Now" che riscuote un successo clamoroso. Raggiunto il sogno di fare il giornalista, fonda "Gaza Now news" che in pochi anni diventa uno dei media più popolari della regione.
Nel 2017 riesce a raggiungere l'Austria da dove pensa di raccontare liberamente i crimini di Israele senza il pensiero di ricevere in regalo un missile in camera da letto.

A differenza di quei cialtroni dei media mainstream europei, ignoranti e felici di raccontare Gaza attraverso le veline degli invasori, Ayyash racconta la sua città, la sua gente, e non si può parlare di Gaza omettendo i combattenti della Resistenza.
Ayyash pubblica tutto, senza censura. Pubblica i video di Hamas ma anche quelli di altre fazioni e personalità politiche che si oppongono ad Hamas.

Con l'inizio dello sterminio, Israele vieta ai media di entrare a Gaza, il mondo deve sapere solo attraverso i portavoce dell'esercito sterminatore.

"Gaza Now" è una spina nel fianco della narrazione israeliana, diventa la principale fonte di informazione su Gaza per i giornalisti internazionali, pubblica in continuazione video dall'inferno di Gaza che ottengono milioni di visualizzazioni.
Su Telegram, "Gaza Now" raggiunge due milioni di iscritti.

Tutto questo per Israele è intollerabile, e contrattacca con i suoi noti metodi democratici.

A novembre del 2023, un missile colpisce l'abitazione di Ayyash a Gaza e uccide la madre, il padre e venti parenti tra i quali bambini e una neonata.

Gli Stati Uniti sanzionano "Gaza Now" e il giornalista Ayyash in quanto "presunto facilitatore finanziario chiave" (?) di Hamas.
(Classica pagliacciata tipicamente americana: "Gaza Now" pubblica migliaia richieste di donazioni provenienti da Gaza ma i canali che effettuano il passaggio di denaro sono americani o europei).

Nell'aprile del 2024 la polizia austriaca irrompe all'alba in casa di Ayyash e lo arresta insieme alla moglie.
Sequestrano tutti i dispositivi elettronici.
Dopo un luogo interrogatorio, vengono rilasciati.

Ayyash ha paura, capisce che questo è solo l'inizio, ma continua i suoi viaggi nelle città europee per raccontare la distruzione di Gaza.

Nell'agosto del 2024 l'Austria spicca un mandato di arresto europeo per Ayyash, la polizia olandese esegue e lo arresta.
Israele chiede l'estradizione, Ayyash entra in sciopero della fame, gli olandesi scendono nelle piazze per manifestare contro la detenzione del giornalista.
Dopo due mesi rinchiuso in carcere, l'Olanda consegna Ayyash alle autorità austriache.

Da novembre del 2025, il giornalista Ayyash è rinchiuso in attesa di processo in cella di isolamento per 24 ore al giorno, vietata l'ora d'aria, vietato avere colloqui con altri detenuti.

Le accuse della giustizia austriaca a carico del giornalista palestinese sono un'offesa al diritto, l'ennesimo passo verso l'israelizzazione delle società europee.

Ayyash, assente da Gaza da nove anni, è accusato di finanziare e APPARTENERE contemporaneamente ad Hamas, Fronte Popolare per la Liberazione della Palestina, Jihad Islamica, Brigate dei Martiri di al-Aqsa e pure la libanese Hezbollah.
(Un record da Guinness dei primati!)

Il processo dovrebbe iniziare a dicembre, gran parte delle accuse si basano su informazioni e prove SEGRETE fornite dai servizi di intelligence israeliani.
Ed essendo segrete, l'imputato e l'avvocato difensore non possono prenderne visione.

Questa non è più una questione palestinese, qui siamo davanti all'abbattimento delle colonne portanti delle nostre democrazie.

Dovrebbe interessare tutti.

[Meidas_Charise Lee @charise_lee]

Education is so attractive 💙@AbdulElSayed is on another level

[David Pocock @DavidPocock]

A lot of good work gets done by parliamentarians behind the scenes. I'm concerned that is compromised when this sort of thing happens.

We need to ensure parliament is working for the people and delivering evidence based policy recommendations, however inconvenient they may be for the government of the day.

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

The US is starving and killing babies in Cuba just like Israel is starving and killing babies in Gaza.

Despite the UN Human Rights Council’s affirmation that the U.S. blockade imposed on Cuba violates human rights and international law—call for immediately lift the illegal sanctions—the U.S. continues blocking thousands of containers loaded with medicine, food, and power from reaching Cuba.

This is collective punishment. This is a crime against humanity that no one is talking about it.

[Khalid Abdalla @khalidabdalla]

My words at the @PSCupdates protest on three years of genocide, the journey ahead, and the @TheGreenParty motion.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

I am shocked by the political inertia in the face of what Israelis -settlers and soldiers- are doing in Palestine, where terror has become a daily reality. In the West Bank, torching century old trees and poisoning livestock. When will the EU take action against Apartheid Israel?

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

The question “Does Israel have the right to exist?” is meant as a trap – and one directed at what the media like to call the “hard” or “far” left (very much in scare quotes). It requires that the interviewee concede at the start of the conversation the very ground they are trying to challenge.

This is what the BBC’s Nick Robinson was up to in demanding that Zack Polanski affirm “Israel’s right to exist” in an interview with the Green party leader last week. It was a classic of the genre. Note Robinson’s heavy framing of the question:

“What we’re talking about is whether a state created by the United Nations, in the aftermath of pogroms and Holocaust, the worst act of racism in the history of the planet, has a right to exist or not. This is a question you have always dodged.”

That’s very much in the “How many times a day do you beat your wife?” tradition of interviewing. In a post on X, Robinson again challenged Polanski: “Why is this a difficult question to answer?”

Both, let us note in passing, are Jewish. But only one is assumed to accrue moral standing in the exchange from their views about Israel.

We could easily turn the question around against Robinson:

“Do you think the state of Israel – as a state illegally occupying and oppressing Palestinians for decades and committing the crime of apartheid, as determined by the world's highest court, and one deemed to be committing genocide according to a consensus of legal and human rights authorities as well as genocide scholars – has a right to exist?

“Did apartheid South Africa have a right exist?”

The answer to Robinson’s question is very simple. States come and go. They don’t have a right to exist, peoples do. And importantly, according to international law, people enjoy the same, universal rights. Which is exactly why Israel as a state committing the crime of apartheid – as ruled by the International Court of Justice in 2024 – has no right to exist as it is currently constituted.

Polanski responded with the entirely reasonable assertion: “Israelis and Palestinians should have equal rights in a democracy.” Which was the solution accepted by the international community for black and white South Africans, post-apartheid.

And yet Robinson keeps interrupting Polanski, treating his sensible, moral position – one in line with his party’s new official policy that “Zionism is racism”, as determined by its members – as though it is proof of extremism, of antisemitism. As if Polanski is being slippery by refusing to accept what is, in fact, Robinson’s extreme premise.

Robinson is arguing that, even after Israel has been judged to be an apartheid state by the world’s highest court and to be committing genocide according to leading authorities on the subject, it should have an inviolable right to carry on exactly as it is.

Robinson’s implied position is that Palestinians and their supporters should simply shut up and live with the fact that Israel has been slaughtering and maiming hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s people. Nothing to see here, is Robinson’s message.

So who is the real extremist, who the real racist: Zack Polanski or Nick Robinson?

This is an extract from my latest article How the BBC sets a trap to make sure leftwing politicians never get a fair hearing. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Fox News and some Zionist sites are accusing me of having played a part in last Saturday's Global Palestine Alliance London rally. Yes, I did. Proudly. A tiny part. I wish I had played a larger one. But I was in Athens and could only send this video - whose text I past below in the interests of full disclosure. Read/watch and judge:

Greetings from Athens to the UK Alliance for Palestine. Kudos to all of you for continuing to mobilise against our generation’s greatest crime, our generation’s genocide in Gaza and the systematic state-backed ethnic cleansing and ruthless land seizures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

As I have said before, if this were the 1930s, we would have only one moral duty: to defend Jewish people from the Nazis. Today, we again have only one moral duty: to defend Palestinian people from Israel.

Friends, I am not going to finish this message of solidarity by caressing your ears. I am going to do the opposite. At the risk of upsetting you, I am going to suggest that we stop congratulating ourselves. So far, we have failed. The genocide, the ethnic cleansing, the white-washing of this century’s greatest crime is continuing despite our efforts.

Our governments remain utterly complicit. Even when they do some windowdressing, like Andy Burnham sanctioning exports from the Occupied Territories (as if Israel will brand them as such!), they only do it to ENSURE that there is no trade and arms embargo against Israel to force Israel to cease and desist from its genocidal practices. What PM Burnham has done was to take the wind out of our sails by lulling the majority into thinking that there has been a change when there hasn’t been.

Look at the way the media are still at it. Copying the playbook that demonised and vilified Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, for ‘insufficient support of Israel’s genocide’, they are applying the same playbook today against Zack Polanski and the Green Party.

Wherever we look – if we are honest – we see the evidence of our movement’s failure to dent Israel’s determination to complete its genocide and of our political and economic system’s to lend the Apartheid state a hand.

I know: Many of you are tired, after years of campaigning often at high personal cost. But now is not the time to feel the fatigue. Now is the time to do more. To do better. To end genocide, ethnic cleansing and land seizures across Palestine. To make it possible to imagine – not just as a slogan – a Palestine free of Apartheid.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

In 1975, as Israel entrenched its illegal and violent military occupation over Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, a majority of United Nations member states approved a resolution identical to the Greens’ motion.

The General Assembly declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”.

That resolution lasted 16 years, until 1991, when the world changed dramatically. The Soviet Union collapsed, leaving smaller states exposed and vulnerable to the sole military super-power of the US.

President George HW Bush exploited the moment to bully UN member states into reversing their support for the resolution, while Israel began a gaslighting campaign in which it refused to engage in peace talks with the Palestinians unless the resolution was revoked.

That was the context in which the UN General Assembly rescinded its determination that Zionism was racism.

The subsequent peace process – the Oslo Accords – led to the signing in 1993 of a deal on the White House lawn that many Palestinians assumed would lead to a Palestinian state alongside Israel. They were to be bitterly disappointed.

Israel expanded its settlements at an unprecedented rate through the Oslo years, devouring the territories meant to form a Palestinian state.

Memorably, Michael Tarazi, a Palestinian negotiator, observed of the bogus Oslo process that it was like negotiating over a piece of pizza while one party was eating it.

Israel repeatedly failed to withdraw from the territories it occupied, as promised under the Olso formula. Gradually Palestinian trust in Israel’s good faith evaporated.

The Palestinian “moderates” who engaged in the negotiations looked discredited. Hamas’ popularity rocketed, especially in the concentration camp Israel had made of Gaza.

Israel not only sealed off Gaza but put it on a starvation diet and then intermittently “mowed the lawn”, blowing up neighbourhoods and slaughtering civilians indiscriminately.

All of that culminated in Hamas’ break-out from Gaza in October 2023 and Israel’s genocidal rampage afterwards.

That genocide is once again forcing a moral reevaluation of Israel – and a recognition that it was never serious about peace. Israel was born as a settler-colonial project. It never had any intention of conceding territory or allowing a Palestinian state. The dehumanisation of Palestinians was integral to its mission.

In other words, Israel was always a racist project. The Greens have finally – very belatedly – recognised what should have been obvious all along. They should not be shamed for doing so.

Instead we need to shame those whose goal is to buy more time for Israel to carry on committing its daily racist crimes against the Palestinian people.

We have already been far too indulgent and waited far too long. Israel is not about to change. Its racism runs too deep.

This is an extract from my latest article What’s shameful is that no party before the Greens called Zionism racist. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️