#South African Mass Murderer

[ausetkmt]

Mass killer who ‘hunted’ black people says police encouraged him - The Apartheid Killer

A convicted South African murderer who shot dead dozens of black men during apartheid has told the BBC the police sanctioned his violence. Louis van Schoor says others should share the blame for the killings he carried out as a security guard. But in talking to BBC Africa Eye over the past four years, he has also let slip horrifying details that raise serious questions about his early release from prison.

Standing in the bedroom of a killer, your eyes naturally hone in on the details.

The Apartheid Killer Watch on iPlayer (UK only) or on Monday 22 July at 23:05 on BBC Two (Northern Ireland 23:35). Outside the UK, watch on the BBC Africa YouTube channel.

Van Schoor’s bed is immaculately neat - the duvet so flat it looks like it has been ironed. The air is heavy with the smell of cigarettes, their stubs piled high in an ashtray. Strips of sticky paper are dangling from the ceiling, writhing with trapped and dying flies.

The so-called “Apartheid Killer” has lost his teeth. His health is waning. Following a heart attack, both his legs were recently amputated, leaving him in a wheelchair, with painful scars. When his surgeon carried out this procedure, Van Schoor requested an epidural instead of a general anaesthetic - so he could watch them remove his legs.

“I was curious,” he said, chuckling. “I saw them cutting… they sawed through the bone.”

In speaking to the BBC World Service, Van Schoor wanted to persuade us that he is “not the monster that people say I am”. His enthusiastic description of his legs being removed did little to soften his image.

Over a three-year period in the 1980s under the country’s racist apartheid system - which imposed a strict hierarchy that privileged white South Africans - Van Schoor shot and killed at least 39 people.

All of his victims were black. The youngest was just 12 years old. The killings occurred in East London, a city in South Africa’s windswept Eastern Cape.

Van Schoor was a security guard at the time, with a contract to protect as many as 70% of white-owned businesses: restaurants, shops, factories and schools. He has long claimed that everyone he killed was a “criminal” who he caught red-handed breaking into these buildings.

“He was a kind of vigilante killer. He was a Dirty Harry character,” says Isa Jacobson, a South African journalist and filmmaker, who has spent 20 years investigating Van Schoor’s case.

“These were intruders who were, in a lot of cases, pretty desperate. Digging through bins, maybe stealing some food… petty criminals.”

Van Schoor’s killings - sometimes several in a single night - struck terror into the black community of East London. Stories spread through the city of a bearded man - nicknamed “whiskers” in the Xhosa language - who made people disappear at night. But his shootings were not carried out in secret.

Every killing between 1986 and 1989 was reported to the police by Van Schoor himself. But the release from prison of anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela in 1990 signalled an end to this impunity. Ripples of change swept across South Africa and, following pressure from activists and journalists, the security guard was arrested in 1991.

Van Schoor’s trial was one of the largest murder trials in South Africa’s history, involving dozens of witnesses and thousands of pages of forensic evidence.

However, the case against him largely collapsed in court. At the time of his trial, much of the apparatus of the apartheid system was still in place within the judiciary. Despite killing at least 39 people, he was only convicted of seven murders. He would go on to serve just 12 years in prison.

His other 32 killings are still classified as “justifiable homicides” by the police. Apartheid-era laws gave people the right to use lethal force against intruders if they resisted arrest or fled once caught.

Van Schoor relied heavily on this defence to maintain his innocence, claiming that his victims were running away when he killed them.

Louis van Schoor pointed out the places where he would track down intruders

The BBC’s investigation into Van Schoor scrutinised the evidence underlying these so-called “justifiable” shootings, delving deep into long-forgotten police reports, autopsies and witness statements.

The investigation was led by Isa Jacobson, and involved years of archival research in multiple cities across the Eastern Cape. The most important files were scattered among hundreds of boxes, hidden away in vaults.

“The whole scale of it is just mesmerising,” she said. “It's astounding that any court of law could allow this to happen.”

Some of the most harrowing evidence Ms Jacobson found were witness statements from people who were injured by Van Schoor, but survived. These accounts contradict the security guard’s argument that they had been running away when he shot them.

Multiple people said Van Schoor shot them while their hands were up, after they had surrendered. Others describe him toying with them, asking if they would prefer to be arrested or shot - before shooting them in the chest. Another victim described being shot in the abdomen, begging for water, before being kicked in his wound by Van Schoor.

The security guard was armed with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, frequently loaded with hollow-point bullets, which cause severe internal ruptures when entering a victim. In one case, he fired eight shots into an unarmed man.

In a particularly brutal case on 11 July 1988, Van Schoor shot a 14-year-old boy who had broken into a restaurant searching for petty change.

The boy - who we have not named to protect his privacy - told the police he hid in the toilet when he saw Van Schoor with his gun. He says the security guard called him out, told him to stand next to the wall, and then shot him repeatedly.

“He told me to stand up, but I couldn’t,” said the boy, in his recorded testimony. “While I was lying there, he kicked me in the mouth. He picked me up and propped me up against a table and then he shot me again.”

The boy survived, but he was not believed. He was charged for breaking into the building. Many young black men and boys who gave first-hand accounts of being assaulted and shot by Van Schoor faced a similar fate.

Testimonies such as this were heard during Van Schoor’s trial, but the judge repeatedly dismissed the witnesses as “unsophisticated” and “unreliable”. There are no jury trials in South Africa. The opinion of the judge is final.

At the time of Van Schoor’s trial, many members of the white community in East London supported him. One entrepreneurial businessman printed bumper stickers with pictures of the security guard. They said ��I Love Louis”, next to a heart full of bullet holes.

“There was evident racial bias in the legal system,” says Patrick Goodenough, a South African journalist who led the 1980s investigation into Van Schoor. He also attended his trial.

“The support for him was massive… He would not have been able to get away with a fraction of what he got away with without it.”

There is no statute of limitations for murder or attempted murder in South Africa. In theory, there is nothing stopping the police from reopening Van Schoor’s case and re-assessing these “justifiable” shootings.

“Louis van Schoor was basically going out and murdering people for sport,” says Dominic Jones, a journalist who helped raise awareness of the security guard’s killing spree in the 1980s.

Some of the most shocking findings from the BBC's investigation came from interviews with Van Schoor himself, which strongly suggested he got a thrill from his activities.

“Every night is a new adventure, if you want to put it that way,” he told the BBC.

Journalist Isa Jacobson has spent years going through public records to scrutinise Louis van Schoor's case

Many of the businesses he protected installed silent alarms. When someone broke in, Van Schoor would receive an alert which allowed him to surprise the intruder - and identify exactly where they were inside the building. And he always went alone.

“I was barefoot. It’s quiet. You don’t have your shoes squeaking on tiles and stuff,” he said.

He would never switch the light on. Instead, he relied on his sense of smell.

“If somebody breaks in, the adrenaline gives off an odour. And you can pick that up,” he said.

Van Schoor claims he never went out “with the intention of killing black people” and says he is not a racist. But he admits he found stalking them in the dark “exciting”.

Before becoming a security guard, Van Schoor was a member of the East London police force for 12 years. He used to handle what he calls “attacker dogs”, which he used to track down and catch protesters and criminals - almost all of whom were black.

He compared this to “hunting, but a different species”.

Tetinene “Joe” Jordan, a former anti-apartheid activist who was operating in East London at the time of Van Schoor’s killings, remembers this well.

“He was hunting, literally hunting people,” he says.

Van Schoor strongly denies he is a “serial killer” and believes everything he did was “within the law”. If people feel aggrieved over his killings, he says they should blame the South African police.

He says the police never criticised or warned him, but actively supported and encouraged him.

“Every officer in East London knew what was going on… all the police officers knew,” he said. “Not once did anybody say ‘Hey Louis, you’re on the borderline or you should cool it or whatever’… they all knew what was happening.”

In the police records held in public archives, Ms Jacobson found instances of killings where officers had been present at the time of the shootings. At no point did they appear to question Van Schoor as a suspect.

In many instances, the police failed to take photos of the deceased at the scenes of shooting and failed to collect key forensic evidence, such as bullet casings. Van Schoor was often the only witness to his shootings, so this evidence could have been crucial for determining what had actually happened in each case.

“These were cover-ups… He had the backing from police officers from junior rank and senior rank,” said Mr Goodenough.

“They wouldn’t investigate. They’d sit down with him and have a cigarette while chatting, with bodies lying nearby.”

In all cases Van Schoor pulled the trigger - but between the police and the businesses that hired him, an entire community played a role in the killings which took place in East London.

“Van Schoor was a serial killer because there was a society that allowed him to be one,” says Ms Jacobson.

For the relatives of Van Schoor’s victims, his freedom, and the failure of the state to thoroughly investigate his killings, is a constant source of pain. Some never recovered the bodies of their loved ones.

“It seems like we are stuck in this phase of being heartbroken, being angry,” says Marlene Mvumbi, whose brother, Edward, was murdered by Van Schoor in 1987. His remains were dumped in an unmarked grave by the authorities without the family’s consent.

“Lots of people are still missing and not even in the graveyard… there is no closure.”

Van Schoor’s case pre-dated South Africa’s 1995 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which gave compensation to many victims of apartheid-era crimes.

Sharlene Crage, a former activist who played a key role in pressuring the South African authorities to prosecute Van Schoor, is outraged that he was ever allowed to walk free.

“It’s a shocking miscarriage of justice,” she said. “There is no reason his case shouldn’t be reopened.”

Louis van Schoor admitted he found tracking intruders down thrilling

Van Schoor was sentenced to more than 90 years in prison at the conclusion of his trial in 1992, but the judge allowed him to serve each term concurrently. He was freed on parole in 2004.

The early release of apartheid-era killers from prison has become a contentious issue in South Africa.

In 2022, there were protests in Johannesburg over the parole of Janusz Walus, who killed anti-apartheid politician Chris Hani. A few years previously, Eugene de Kock, in charge of a death squad responsible for the abduction, torture, and murder of dozens of black activists was also freed.

Nowadays, Van Schoor spends most of his time watching rugby, smoking and playing with his pet rottweiler, Brutus. He says he has no memory of many of his killings.

Some reports have stated, without verification, that he shot as many as 100 people. Van Schoor denies this, but concedes his number of shootings may exceed the documented number of 39.

“I honestly don’t know how many I shot. Some say over a 100, some say 40… Let’s say for argument’s sake I shot 50 people,” he told us.

He says he is proud of his past actions.

“I don’t feel any guilt,” he said. “I’ve got no remorse inside.”

The BBC contacted the South African police for comment, but they did not respond. The authorities have given no explanation for why Van Schoor’s killings have not been reassessed in the post-apartheid era.

“There is too much pain, and for now I don’t feel that there is enough that is done for us to heal,” says Marlene Mvumbi.

“It’s not only the ones that were killed by Van Schoor. The ones that have similar stories from the killings of the apartheid regime.”

[oldtvandcomics]

I suppose it's kind of inevitable, but also kind of funny, just how many queer dramas have the person-who-is-out-and-doesn't-care-what-soeciety-thinks x person-who-wants-to-be-with-them-but-also-isn't-ready-to-actually-dedicate-themselves-at-the-cost-of-the-bigger-social-system-they-were-part-of dynamic.

I'm currently watching The Valley of a Thousand Hills on Netflix, and, guys. I've seen this exact same conflict before. The last time, it was called Good Omens.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 8 April 2013, former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher died. Street parties broke out across the UK, particularly in working class areas and in former mining communities which were ravaged by her policies. Her legacy is best remembered for her destruction of the British workers' movement, after the defeat of the miners' strike of 1984-85. This enabled the drastic increase of economic inequality and unemployment in the 1980s. Her government also slashed social housing, helping to create the situation today where it is unavailable for most people, and private property prices are mostly unaffordable for the young. Thatcher also complained that children were "being cheated of a sound start in life" by being taught that "they have an inalienable right to be gay", so she introduced the vicious section 28 law prohibiting teaching of homosexuality as acceptable. Abroad, Thatcher was a powerful advocate for racism, advising the Australian foreign minister to beware of Asians, else his country would "end up like Fiji, where the Indian migrants have taken over". She hosted apartheid South Africa's head of state, while denouncing the African National Congress as a "typical terrorist organisation". Chilean dictator general Augusto Pinochet, responsible for the rape, murder and torture of tens of thousands of people, was a close personal friend. Back in Britain, she protected numerous politicians accused of paedophilia including Sir Peter Hayman, and MPs Peter Morrison and Cyril Smith. She also lobbied for her friend, serial child abuser Jimmy Savile, to be knighted despite being warned about his behaviour. Margaret Thatcher was eventually forced to step down after the defeat of her hated poll tax by a mass non-payment campaign. Pictured: Jimmy Savile welcoming Thatcher to hell, reportedly. Learn more about the great miners' strike of 1984-5 in our podcast series: https://workingclasshistory.com/tag/1984-5-miners-strike/ https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=605239344982618&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[rotzaprachim]

essential reading.

Opinion - There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. - by Peter Beinart

 And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?

"In 1988, bombs exploded at restaurants, sporting events and arcades in South Africa. In response, the African National Congress, then in its 77th year of a struggle to overthrow white domination, did something remarkable: It accepted responsibility and pledged to prevent its fighters from conducting such operations in the future. Its logic was straightforward: Targeting civilians is wrong. “Our morality as revolutionaries,” the A.N.C. declared, “dictates that we respect the values underpinning the humane conduct of war.”

Historically, geographically and morally, the A.N.C. of 1988 is a universe away from the Hamas of 2023, so remote that its behavior may seem irrelevant to the horror that Hamas unleashed last weekend in southern Israel. But South Africa offers a counter-history, a glimpse into how ethical resistance works and how it can succeed. It offers not an instruction manual, but a place — in this season of agony and rage — to look for hope.

There was nothing inevitable about the A.N.C.’s policy, which, as Jeff Goodwin, a New York University sociologist, has documented, helped ensure that there was “so little terrorism in the anti-apartheid struggle.” So why didn’t the A.N.C. carry out the kind of gruesome massacres for which Hamas has become notorious? There’s no simple answer. But two factors are clear. First, the A.N.C.’s strategy for fighting apartheid was intimately linked to its vision of what should follow apartheid. It refused to terrify and traumatize white South Africans because it wasn’t trying to force them out. It was trying to win them over to a vision of a multiracial democracy.

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Second, the A.N.C. found it easier to maintain moral discipline — which required it to focus on popular, nonviolent resistance and use force only against military installations and industrial sites — because its strategy was showing signs of success. By 1988, when the A.N.C. expressed regret for killing civilians, more than 150 American universities had at least partially divested from companies doing business in South Africa, and the United States Congress had imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime. The result was a virtuous cycle: Ethical resistance elicited international support, and international support made ethical resistance easier to sustain.

In Israel today, the dynamic is almost exactly the opposite. Hamas, whose authoritarian, theocratic ideology could not be farther from the A.N.C.’s, has committed an unspeakable horror that may damage the Palestinian cause for decades to come. Yet when Palestinians resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.

The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people. It will require new forms of political community, in Israel-Palestine and around the world, built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend tribal divides. The effort may fail. It has failed before. The alternative is to descend, flags waving, into hell.

As Jewish Israelis bury their dead and recite psalms for their captured, few want to hear at this moment that millions of Palestinians lack basic human rights. Neither do many Jews abroad. I understand; this attack has awakened the deepest traumas of our badly scarred people. But the truth remains: The denial of Palestinian freedom sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before Hamas’s creation in the late 1980s.

Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an “open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care. From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable” for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents called home, though most may never step foot in it.

Palestinians in the West Bank are only slightly better off. For more than half a century, they have lived without due process, free movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government that controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that includes ministers openly committed to ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from their homes in what Palestinians compare to the mass expulsions of 1948. Americans and Israeli Jews have the luxury of ignoring these harsh realities. Palestinians do not. Indeed, the commander of Hamas’s military wing cited attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in justifying its barbarism last weekend.

Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a system that has earned the same designation from the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own. After last weekend, some critics may claim Palestinians are incapable of resisting in ethical ways. But that’s not true. In 1936, during the British mandate, Palestinians began what some consider the longest anticolonial general strike in history. In 1976, on what became known as Land Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens demonstrated against the Israeli government’s seizure of Palestinian property in Israel’s north. The first intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which lasted from roughly 1987 to 1993, consisted primarily of nonviolent boycotts of Israeli goods and a refusal to pay Israeli taxes. While some Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails, armed attacks were rare, even in the face of an Israeli crackdown that took more than 1,000 Palestinian lives. In 2005, 173 Palestinian civil society organizations asked “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”

But in the United States, Palestinians received little credit for trying to follow Black South Africans’ largely nonviolent path. Instead, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call for full equality, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return home, was widely deemed antisemitic because it conflicts with the idea of a state that favors Jews.

It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; and the suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.

And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said, the famed literary critic, declared himself “horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American historian, called the suicide bombings of the second intifada “a war crime.” After Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the Israeli parliament, Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being repudiated by some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which represents more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North America, called Hamas’s attack “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” that proves that “total return and liberation to Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South Africa to Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.

The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion underlying this celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of hideous war, Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no Algerian solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to which to return. They are already home.

Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle East,” he advised Palestinians in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.

The failure of Hamas and its American defenders to recognize that will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist together in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. And there were signs in the United States, where almost 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 told the Jewish Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an apartheid state. More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.

That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.

The struggle to persuade Palestinian activists to repudiate Hamas’s crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence and continue the spirit of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian camp. The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the conditions that allow ethical resistance to succeed.

Palestinians are not fundamentally different from other people facing oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States, organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had even detonated a bomb outside Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”

Israel, with America’s help, has done exactly that. It has repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure. As part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced violence and began working with Israel — albeit imperfectly — to prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary groups like the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their people remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist, has detailed, Palestinians supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it would deliver them a state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the Oslo process reached 80 percent while support for violence against Israelis dropped to 20 percent.

The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak, who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in 2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw Mr. Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words, “The loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.

After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians “question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.”

As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.

Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.” About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Palestinians have noticed. In the words of Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist, “Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest as well as the possible role of the international community.” Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited this disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. “In light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence,” he declared, “we’ve decided to put an end to all this.”

Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.

Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.

Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political party, not because it can win power but because it can model a politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe. American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally alongside them in safety and freedom.

From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?

Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.

[girlactionfigure]

As South Africa spews its Orwellian blood libel against Israel at the #ICJ, you should seek answers to several ?'s.

Here’s one: what did South Africa do when the butcher of Darfur, Omar al-Bashir, landed in their country with an outstanding arrest warrant for genocide?

Nothing. 

That’s right. Nothing.

Two South African courts recognized the country's obligation to arrest & surrender al-Bashir to stand trial for his monstrous campaign of genocide against three ethnic groups: the Fur, Masalit, & Zaghawa people.

But al-Bashir - who was responsible for directing the murder of more than 300,000 innocents, along with countless thousands of rapes, mutilations, torture, & deportation - was permitted to land safely on #SouthAfrican soil, remain in that country during three days in June 2015, and then leave without any complication or barrier whatsoever. 

Two years later, in July 2017, #SouthAfrica was admonished by the #ICC for failing to comply with its obligation to prevent & punish #genocide by permitting al-Bashir to visit & then freely leave despite al-Bashir being a man whose name should be known among the worst human rights violators & mass murderers in history.

That same South Africa, less than a decade later, has the audacity to bring a complaint of “genocide” against the world’s only #Jewish State.

Plainly, South Africa’s complaint is not worth the paper on which it is written.

People are suffering in #Gaza as a result of #Hamas - the only genocidal actor in this war.

And yet …

- South Africa’s compliant completely ignores that it is Hamas that clearly states its intent to commit genocide against Israel & #Jews the world over in its charter & in statements repeated over decades;

- South Africa’s complaint completely ignores that it is Hamas that has repeatedly taken actions in various murder campaigns, suicide bombings, & other terrorist actions over the last 30+ years in an effort to carry out its explicit genocidal intentions against Jews & Israel;

- South Africa’s complaint completely ignores that there was a ceasefire on 10/7 before Hamas committed a #genocidal #massacre when 3,000+ #HamasTerrorists raided Israel with the express purpose of murdering, raping, mutilating, torturing, & kidnapping as many Jews as possible; and 

- South Africa’s complaint completely ignores the statement of Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad from shortly after 10/7 when he he stated Hamas’ intent to “remove [Israel]” by committing similar massacres “again and again.”

In short, South Africa ignores the one and only genocidal actor in this war - Hamas.

South Africa ignores or is willfully blind to the fact that Hamas’ “dispute” with Israel has nothing to do with land or borders.

Hamas explicitly seeks the total destruction of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

So the real “dispute” is actually quite simple: Hamas wants Israelis & Jews to be dead, and the Israelis & Jews want to live.

But South Africa ignores reality when it comes to Hamas, and instead vilifies Jews and the one and only Jewish State.

In its complaint, South Africa distorts & misrepresents facts while flat-out lying about others.

Through its complaint, South Africa is attempting to give international legitimacy to #antisemitic Hamas #propaganda that attempts to justify Hamas’ genocidal brutality as “#resistance,” while labeling Israel’s actions in #SelfDefense as “genocide.”

Get yourself educated on the facts.

Do not be another mindless puppet of the propaganda machine that ignores true human rights violators across the world while seeking to demonize & delegitimize only one people, the Jews, and only one state, Israel.

Captain Allen

@CptAllenHistory

[democratthatlovesguns]

MAGA Descendants of Illegal Immigrants Should Be Deported In Mass

I was reminded today that I am, in fact, genetically more Native American than any other race. As such, I claim authority to speak on behalf of my ancestors.

The descendants of ILLEGAL EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS WEARING MAGA HATS have overstayed their welcome, just like their ancestors did. And it's time for them to leave our land.

As is common from the MAGA world, every accusation is actually a confession. MASS MURDERERS AND RAPISTS DID NOT ARRIVE FROM LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES IN MODERN TIMES, THEY ARRIVED AROUND 400 YEARS AGO FROM EUROPEAN COUNTRIES.

And once again, in a few weeks, the descendants of these rapists and murderers will celebrate that my ancestors, the natives of the north and south American continents, were so naïve and trusting that they feasted happily with the assholes that would rape and kill them the following day.

Then came one of the biggest assholes in American history, Andrew Jackson. Manifest Destiny is what he called the genocide of the real natives of this land. I'm surprised we don't have a federal holiday to celebrate this genocide as well.

Let us not forget the happy times of the California gold rush. What a fun time is must have been to commit genocide once again against the only group of people that have a natural birth right to this land.

The way I see it, my brothers and sisters and their children from Latin American countries share more of my Native American blood than the representatives of the ILLEGAL GOVERNMENT OF THE ILLEGAL EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS, and have more a right to immigrate to anywhere they wish on this land.

MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS AND THEIR CHILDREN FROM PUERTO RICO ARE NOT TRASH. And it is not a harmless joke as the asshole JD Vance would seek to convince you. It's a harmless joke in the same way that Hitler calling the Jewish people rats was such a charming and harmless observation by a wildly misunderstood but charismatic guy, as Jordan Peterson would describe him (such a hilarious guy right Jordan?).

MAGA Republicans have overstayed their welcome in our land, and it's time for them to go. Especially the SOUTH AFRICAN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT ELON MUSK, he definitely needs to have his naturalization rescinded and needs to be deported immediately - he can take his mom with him.

[mariacallous]

The advice I used to impart to young correspondents arriving at the BBC’s bureau in Washington was to remember that the United States had fought a civil war in the mid-19th century and was still arguing over the terms of a fractious peace.

Much like the modern-day phrase “sorry but not sorry,” which is used sarcastically to indicate a lack of remorse, the brief ceremony at Virginia’s Appomattox Court House in April 1865, which brought the armed fighting to an end, was a surrender but not a surrender. White supremacists in the states of the old Confederacy wanted still to reign supreme. Little over a decade later, following the collapse of Reconstruction—an attempt to make good for African Americans the promise of emancipation—enslavement was replaced by segregation. Across the American South, Jim Crow was in the chair.

Now, though, I would amend my advice. I would urge young reporters to reach back even further into history. The roots of modern-day polarization, and even the origins of former President Donald Trump, can be located in the country’s troubled birth. Division has always been the default setting. Victory over the British Redcoats at the Battle of Yorktown paved the way for independence but did not mean U.S. nationhood was a given.

Between the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 and the start of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787, it seemed as if the states might enter into two or three confederations rather than a singular nation as the former British colonies struggled to overcome their antagonisms. “No morn ever dawned more favourable than ours did,” a melancholic George Washington wrote to James Madison in November 1786, “and no day was ever more clouded than the present!”

The Constitution that Washington pushed for, and which was eventually hammered out in Philadelphia, was in many ways an agreement to keep on disagreeing. Compromises that prolonged and protected the institution of slavery—a Faustian bargain that became the price of national unity—created a fault line that was always likely to rupture and explode. It rumbles to this day. Even a Black presidency could not repair the breach.

So many contemporary problems can be traced back to those founding days. U.S. democracy has become so diseased because for most of the country’s history, it has not been that healthy. “We the People,” the rousing words that opened the preamble to the Constitution, was not conceived of as an inclusive statement or catchall for mass democracy. Rather, this ill-defined term referred to what in modern terminology might be called the body politic. Much of the deliberations in Philadelphia focused on how that body politic should be restrained in an intricately designed straitjacket, hence the creation of countermajoritarian mechanisms such as the Electoral College and Senate.

To describe the outcome as an experiment in “democracy” is misleading: The Founding Fathers did not care for the word, which is nowhere to be found either in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. When the country’s second president, John Adams, used the term “democratical,” it was intended as a slur. The fear of what some of the founders called an “excess of democracy” explains the thinking behind a quote from Adams that has resurfaced during the Trump years: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Adams’s fear was not of unchecked presidential power, the meaning projected onto the quote in relation to Trump. More worrying for him was unchecked people power.

The right to vote was never specifically enshrined in the Constitution, an omission that continues to astound many Americans. To this day, there is no positive affirmation of the right to vote. It is framed negatively—it should not be denied, rather than it should be granted. With good reason, voting is often called the missing right.

Not until the mid-1960s, with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, did the United States finally achieve what could truly be described as universal suffrage. In the South, Black people could finally cast ballots without being subjected to humiliating “literacy tests,” where they would be asked unanswerable questions such as how to interpret arcane clauses of state constitutions.

No sooner had this landmark legislation become law, however, than efforts to reverse it cranked into gear. So began what has turned out to be a decades-long campaign of de-democratization. It was spearheaded by the Republican Party, which needed to restrict minority voting rights because the demographic trend lines, and the transition toward a minority-majority nation, were thought to favor the Democrats.

These efforts were aided to a disconcerting degree by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, with rulings that drastically weakened the provisions of the Voting Rights Act. For example, in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the act’s all-important Section 5, which forced jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to “preclear” with the Justice Department any proposed voting changes. In a 5-4 judgment, the conservative justices decided that preclearance was now obsolete because voter registration had shown such dramatic improvements. Yet as the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in an unusually strong dissenting opinion, ending preclearance was akin to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

The insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, then, should not be seen in isolation. It was the culmination of a prolonged assault on democracy that predated the rise of Trump. The attack continued, moreover, after the insurrectionists had been dispersed and the floors of Congress scrubbed clean of excrement. That night, 147 Republicans returned to the chambers to cast votes to challenge or overturn Joe Biden’s presidential victory.

Political violence is a core part of the U.S. story, although much of this history has often been buried and concealed. At the end of the 1960s, a commission appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate why the United States was so prone to political assassination concluded that the country suffered from “a kind of historical amnesia or selective recollection that masks unpleasant traumas of the past.” It also noted that “the revolutionary doctrine that our Declaration of Independence proudly proclaims is mistakenly cited as a model for legitimate violence.”

Indeed, the Jan. 6 insurrection showed how political violence is still seen as legitimate and even rendered glorious. Many of the insurrectionists chanted “1776” as they stormed the Capitol. “We’re walking down the same exact path as the Founding Fathers,” claimed Stewart Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper with a Yale University law degree. (Rhodes helped establish the Oath Keepers, a militia group launched on April 19, 2009, the anniversary of when rebels and Redcoats first exchanged fire.) The day before the insurrection, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene described it as “our 1776 moment.”

Many far-right extremists are inspired by words from Thomas Jefferson that, unlike the poetry of his Declaration of Independence, never made it into high school textbooks or onto the teleprompters of modern-day presidents. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” Jefferson wrote in 1787, a quote that has now become a far-right meme. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots” is another of Jefferson’s sayings that has been co-opted by modern-day militias.

Often I recall the day of Biden’s inauguration, which took place on a platform that only two weeks earlier had been used as a staging post for the insurrection. It was festooned with red, white, and blue bunting, but it still felt like a crime scene that should have been sequestered with yellow tape. As I made my way to my camera position on the press stand, I noticed that technicians were testing the giant teleprompter in front of the presidential podium. And I recognized the words on the screen: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

The teleprompter had been loaded with the 272 words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in November 1863. Maybe it was some kind of sick joke. A rogue technician, perhaps, with a dark sense of humor. But these passages from the country’s most celebrated sermon could hardly be described as out of place. The question at the heart of the speech, and which had also been posed at the country’s founding, was being asked anew: Can this nation long endure?

My sense—my ardent hope—is that the conditions do not yet exist for all-out armed conflict, a second civil war, partly because the United States has accumulated so much muscle memory in coping with its perpetual state of division. But nor do the conditions exist for reconciliation and rapprochement. Nowhere near. So the United States occupies a strange betwixt and between: close to abyss, but a step or two back from the edge. Going to hell, as the wit Andy Rooney once observed, without ever getting there.

The U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter, famed for identifying what he called the “paranoid style in American politics,” put it well: “The nation seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.” The fact that Hofstadter published those words at the start of the 1970s speaks to how the United States remains stuck in a rut—revisiting the same arguments, going over the same ground. Americans remain tethered to their contested past. The news cycle is the historical cycle in microcosm. As Lincoln put it in his message to Congress in December 1862: “We cannot escape history.”

So even if the United States does not descend into civil war, it is hard to envision it ever reaching a state of civil peace. The forever war will continue: America’s unending conflict with itself.

[workersolidarity]

[ 📹 An Israeli warplane fired three missiles into a United Nations school sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinian families in Camp 2 of the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in the central Gaza Strip, late on Wednesday night, resulting in more than 100 casualties in total. The casualties included more than 40 civilians who were killed, including 14 children and 9 women, while another 74 citizens were wounded, including 23 children and 18 women. The strikes come after weeks of fighting in Gaza's north and south have driven tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of civilians into the central areas of the enclave. ]

🇮🇱⚔️🇵🇸 🚀🏘️💥🚑 🚨

ISRAELI GENOCIDE OPERATION CONTINUES IN GAZA FOR DAY 244: MORE THAN 100 CASUALTIES IN ISRAELI AIRSTRIKE ON A UN SCHOOL HOUSING DISPLACED CIVILIANS IN GAZA, SPAIN TO JOIN SOUTH AFRICA'S LAWSUIT AT ICJ, MEDICAL EXPERTS SAY 25'000 SEVERELY SICK AND WOUNDED MUST LEAVE GAZA FOR TREATMENT ABROAD, ISRAELI OCCUPATION INVADES CENTRAL GAZA

On 244th day of the Israeli occupation's ongoing special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) committed a total of 6 new massacres of Palestinian families, resulting in the deaths of no less than 68 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, while another 235 others were wounded over the previous 24-hours.

It should be noted that as a result of the constant Israeli bombardment of Gaza's healthcare system, infrastructure, residential and commercial buildings, local paramedic and civil defense crews are unable to recover countless hundreds, even thousands, of victims who remain trapped under the rubble, or who's bodies remain strewn across the streets of Gaza.

This leaves the official death toll vastly undercounted as Gaza's healthcare officials are unable to accurately tally those killed and maimed in this genocide, which must be kept in mind when considering the scale of the mass murder.

Spain will join South Africa's lawsuit before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, according to an announcement made by Spanish Prime Minister, José Manuel Albarez.

Albarez is quoted as saying that “It seems that the application of the International Court of Justice’s precautionary measures towards Israel is still far away," adding that he hoped the decision would help the Court.

Spain becomes the second European country to join the South African lawsuit at the ICJ, while Ireland has also joined the suit. Chile and Mexico also recently joined the South African suit.

In other news, 90%, or nine out of ten children in the Gaza Strip, suffer from deficiencies in the nutrients that ensure their healthy growth and development. That's according to the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, also known as UNICEF.

In a statement issued on Thursday, UNICEF cautioned that “in the Gaza Strip, months of hostilities and restrictions on humanitarian aid have led to the collapse of the food and health systems, leading to catastrophic consequences for children and their families.”

The United Nations Children's Fund stated that data collected between December 2023 and April 2024 discovered that 9 out of 10 children from the Gaza Strip suffer from extreme food poverty and food insecurity, which means they consume two or fewer food groups each day to survive.

"This is evidence of the horrific impact of conflict and restrictions on families' ability to meet children's nutritional needs and the rapid rate at which children are at risk of life-threatening malnutrition," UNICEF warned, adding that "27 percent of children worldwide suffer from severe food poverty in early childhood, which amounts to 181 million children under the age of five."

Similarly, medical personnel in the Gaza Strip warned on Thursday that as many as 25'000 sick and wounded Palestinians in Gaza must travel outside the besieged enclave to receive treatment in foreign countries.

This comes as the Israeli occupation forces continue the closure of the Rafah and Karm Abu Salem border crossings, south of Gaza, preventing thousands of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid supplies from reaching desperate civilians, and also preventing the thousands of sick and wounded citizens from leaving Gaza for treatment abroad.

The medical sources pointed out that thousands of lives could be saved by allowing the severely sick and wounded to travel abroad for treatment, while their situation worsens under continued intense bombardment in Gaza, with the vast majority of hospitals in the enclave no longer functioning.

Previously, just 4'895 sick and wounded civilians were allowed by the Israeli occupation to travel to other countries for treatment during the period when the Rafah border crossing was still open.

Since then, the Israeli occupation has not allowed any Palestinians to travel abroad as a result of the closure of the crossings, beginning in early May.

Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation continued its assault on the Gaza Strip, with new ground offensive launched into Central Gaza after many weeks of fighting in the north and south of the enclave drove tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian families into the central areas of the enclave.

According to reporting in the occupation media, the Zionist army carried out new ground offensives, launched by the 98th Division, focusing on the areas of the Bureij Refugee Camp, in addition to neighborhoods east of Deir al-Balah, both in the central Gaza Strip.

The occupation army earlier battled Hamas and other Resistance forces in the Bureij Camp back in January, but have not operated in Deir al-Balah until now.

Previously, the 98th Division was deployed to the Jabalia Camp, in the northern Gaza Strip, where occupation forces destroyed the vast majority of the camp's housing and infrastructure, leaving behind a shattered landscape of skeletal building frames and charred remains that included upwards of 70 decomposing bodies scattered around the camp.

The same Division also fought in the city of Khan Yunis, in Gaza's south, in an extraordinarily destructive ground operation that saw large sections of that city obliterated as well.

Although Deir al-Balah has not witnessed ground advances until now, the city has often been targeted by the occupation's bombing, shelling, missile and drone strikes.

The Zionist occupation army says the ground operation was launched in response to "intelligence on operatives and infrastructure" belonging to local Resistance forces in the area, both above and below ground, according to the army's claims.

The occupation army also admitted to launching a large wave of airstrikes against Resistance forces, including a strike that targeted a United Nations School housing displaced Palestinian families in the Nuseirat Camp, killing dozens of civilians and wounding many others.

The latest Zionist army massacre targeted the Al-Sardi prepatory boys' school in Camp 2 of the Nuseirat Camp, in the central Gaza Strip, where thousands of Palestinians were taking shelter from the occupation's bombs and bullets, resulting in the deaths of at least 40 displaced civilians and wounding scores of others.

Initial reports put the number of dead at 32, with at least 50 wounded from the assault, while the death toll continued to rise as the wounded succumbed to their injuries and the true toll of the strike came into focus, raising the number of killed overnight to 40.

Among those killed in the strike were 14 children and 9 women, while another 74 citizens were wounded from the occupation's criminal attack, including the wounding of at least 23 children and 18 women.

Gaza's media office says the Israeli occupation's bombing of the UN school was conducted by Israeli combat warplanes, which fired at least three American-made missiles into the school, resulting in over 100 casualties, many of whom were women and children.

At the same time, occupation attacks continued at dawn on Thursday, as occupation forces resumed their genocidal campaign for a 244th day.

In another atrocity, Zionist fighter jets bombed a residential house belonging to the Al-Madani family, also in the Nuseirat Camp, in the central Gaza Strip, killing at least 6 civilians and wounding a number of others.

IOF artillery detatchments also launched a violent bombardment of neighborhoods east of the Bureij Camp, also in central Gaza, while an occupation quadcopter drone opened fire near the Nakheel Hall in the Bureij Camp.

The occupation's artillery shelling also targeted east of the Bureij and Al-Maghazi Camps, in central Gaza, while occupation soldiers stationed along the so-called Netzarim axis fired several artillery shells into residential buildings belonging to civilians in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood, southwest of Gaza City, as well as towards homes in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, southeast of the city.

Zionist warplanes similarly launched several raids targeting the eastern and central neighborhoods of the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, while the Israeli occupation's armored vehicles fire heavy machine guns towards civilian residences east of Khan Yunis, south of Gaza.

Israeli artillery also shelled residential homes belonging to Palestinian citizens east of Al-Qarara, northeast of Khan Yunis.

Another citizen was killed when occupation warplanes bombed a civilian riding a motorcycle in the Nuseirat Camp, in central Gaza.

Between the series of devestating airstrikes that targeted the Al-Bureij, Al-Nuseirat and Al-Maghazi Camps, as well as east of Deir al-Balah, to Al-Qarara and Khan Yunis, more than 100 civilians were killed in total.

As a result of the occupation's assaults, all hospitals in the Rafah Governate, south of the Gaza Strip, have ceased functioning aside from field hospitals.

The Israeli occupation army also bombed an entire residential square in the center of the Shaboura Refugee Camp, in central Rafah, south of Gaza.

In the meantime, north of Gaza, Zionist occupation forces bombed several residential buildings in the al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, resulting in the deaths of more than four civilians, while another airstrike targeted a residence in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City, killing another three Palestinians.

Local civil defense personnel said they were able to recover a number of dead and wounded after an assault by Israeli occupation aircraft that targeted a residential building belonging to the Khala family, near the Khalla Station, north of Gaza City.

As a result of the Israeli occupation's ongoing special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, the endlessly rising death toll now exceeds 36'654 Palestinians killed, including over 15'000 children and at least 10'000 women, while another 83'309 others have been wounded since the start of the current round of Zionist aggression, beginning with the events of October 7th, 2023.

June 6th, 2024.

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#videosource

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Meghan Blonder

New York Democratic congressman Jamaal Bowman is touting an endorsement from a left-wing group that denounced a resolution commemorating "End Jew Hatred Day" in New York City. That resolution was "dangerous" and "a farce," the group said.

In a Monday tweet, Bowman heaped praise on Indivisible Brooklyn, calling their work "crucial in ensuring that everyday people are actually represented in our democracy."

"I am honored to have their endorsement and continue working with them," Bowman said.

Roughly one year prior, in June 2023, Indivisible Brooklyn blasted a bipartisan New York City Council resolution that established an "End Jew Hatred Day" in an attempt to combat rising anti-Semitism in the city. "That 'End Jew Hatred' bill was a total farce and is dangerous," the group said, adding that one of the two Brooklyn Democrats who voted against the resolution "was right to oppose it." The resolution passed with 41 yes votes.

Bowman's praise for Indivisible Brooklyn comes as the lawmaker faces a difficult primary challenge from Westchester County executive George Latimer, a pro-Israel Democrat whom local rabbis encouraged to run, citing Bowman's hostility toward the Jewish state. In the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7 attack, the two-term congressman has accused Israel of "mass murder," "genocide," and "ethnic cleansing."

"Many of us tried to engage the congressman early in his term, seeking constructive dialogue about the damaging positions he took—especially on matters related to America's relationship with Israel," the rabbis wrote in an October letter. "Regrettably, Congressman Bowman disregarded our outreach and doubled down on his anti-Israel policy positions and messaging."

Neither Bowman nor Indivisible Brooklyn responded to requests for comment.

The "End Jew Hatred Day" resolution, which was sponsored by Republican councilwoman Inna Vernikov, came as New York led the nation in anti-Semitic incidents and experienced a record number of anti-Semitic assaults, according to data from the Anti-Defamation League. In 2022, 72 anti-Semitic assaults were reported in the state, the highest on record at the time. That number represented 65 percent of all anti-Semitic assaults reported in the United States.

Vernikov's resolution aimed to "acknowledge this reality and to express support for this historically victimized community," according to New York GOP chair Ed Cox. Still, in addition to the two Democrats who voted against it, four others voted to abstain. One of those four, Charles Barron, said he did so because the "Jewish community … supported apartheid in racist South Africa and said nothing about African people dying."

A bipartisan group of lawmakers denounced the New York City Democrats who refused to back the bill.

"Antisemitism has a long and ugly history. It has seen a resurgence in NYC with a record number of hate crimes," Rep. Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) said at the time. "How can anyone vote against a resolution to end antisemitism?"

Since Latimer's entry into the race in December, Bowman has done little to improve his relationship with his district's Jewish leaders.

During a January panel discussion titled, "Palestine Oct. 7th and After," Bowman glowingly introduced anti-Israel author Norman Finkelstein, who celebrated Hamas's massacre as a "heroic resistance" that "warm[ed] every fiber" of his soul.

"I'm also a bit starstruck, because I watch them all the time on YouTube," Bowman said of Finkelstein and two other anti-Israel panelists. "You have given me the knowledge on YouTube even before coming here."

One month later, Bowman teamed up with fellow anti-Israel House member Cori Bush (D., Mo.) to hold a joint fundraiser in Los Angeles. That fundraiser was hosted by a number of activists who defended Hamas's attack, including one who called it "a desperate act of self-defense," the Washington Free Beacon reported. Bowman also held a joint fundraiser with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), during which the lawmakers filmed themselves leading a "Free Palestine" chant.

In addition to Indivisible Brooklyn, Bowman in January touted an endorsement from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a left-wing nonprofit that blamed Israel for provoking Hamas's attack. The group has also argued against sending anti-Semitic hate criminals to jail, saying those criminals should be met with "restorative, community-based education and healing," not "a police-driven response with criminal penalties."

[thethief1996]

In November, displaced children in Al Shifa posted a video pleading in English to be protected. It was the first of four raids that were conducted on the hospital before Israel burned it down this week. Gaza's Civil Defense Office says all departments and buildings were purposefully destroyed. According to verified reports, two vendors who sold water and food to the refugees at Al Shifa revealed themselves to be IDF soldiers as the raid began and instructed the troops to start the massacre. Anybody who didnt flee was indiscrimately executed. Euro Med Human Rights Monitor estimates that 1.500 people were injured or killed, of which at least 13 were children and 22 were shot in their hospital beds. Some of the bodies found after the carnage were zip tied. Doctors report that some of the victims were buried alive. We have graphic videos of bodies crushed and buried by bulldozers. Al Shifa is the site of a mass grave. I keep thinking how many of those children are still alive.

The official narrative by Israel is that not a single civilian was killed. It is laughable that they expect us to believe this shit. They lie to our faces, against a barrage of videos showing they are conducting a very clear and unapologetic extermination campaign in Gaza, and yet every single western media outlet hems and haws around their intent like there's plausible deniability. Biden approves unconditional military aid for Israel and Gazzans show us the remains of missiles with name and address of the American factories that produced them but he can mumble through phlegm about red lines and no newspaper calls bullshit. Hillary Clinton can come on national television and condescendingly tell voters to get over themselves like they're doing you a fucking favor by putting up a serial killer for you to vote, and nobody calls bullshit on her manipulation. Ursula Von Der Leyen can smile cynically at a protester who calls her a war criminal and nobody calls bullshit. And we know why. The New York Times said they found no anti Palestinian bias in their reporting of October 7th only for a memo to come out showing they instructed reporters to not show any ounce of sympathy for Palestinians, even avoiding the word Palestine. Why are those people up there? Why do they act like we are children, when they are the ones who damned their souls? I refuse that narrative.

Palestinians are not more resilient to atrocities. Do not let the world dehumanize them. The terror Palestinians feel is the same you would feel if babies were killed in your neighborhood. If a crazed maniac started shooting at a family as they walked down the main avenue of their city, it would be national news. War is not an extenuating circunstance for these actions. The people who are conducting these massacres are serial killers who live among you by justifying their murders as acts of war, like Nir Maman, USAmerican cop and Bernaya Cherlow, who was invited to Congress. They should not know peace.

Giving up hope is not a choice for us to make. For 75 years, Palestine has resisted and it will be free within our lifetimes.

I have said this before and I will say it again, The South African apartheid collapsed due to boycotts. We have to do everything in our power to stop Israel's hegemony. Even talking to a group of friends about Palestine changes the status quo. There's no world where we can live peacefully if Israel accomplishes their goals.

If you have Israeli citizenship and wish to denounce it, a group of Jewish anti zionists have organized a guide on how to.

Keep yourself updated and share Palestinian voices. Muna El-Kurd said every tweet is like a treasure to them, because their voices are repressed on social media and even on this very app. Make it your action item to share something about the Palestinian plight everyday. Here are some resources:

Al Jazeera, Anadolu Agency, Mondoweiss

Boycott Divest Sanction Movement

Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing protests and direct action against weapons factories across the US

Muhammad Shehada (twitter)

Hind Khoudary - reporting directly from Gaza.

You can participate in boycotts wherever you are in the world, through BDS guidelines. Don't be overwhelmed by gigantic boycott lists. BDS explicitly targets only a few brands which have bigger impact. You can stop consuming from as many brands as you want, though, and by all means feel free to give a 1 star review to McDonalds, Papa John, Pizza Hut, Burger King and Starbucks. Right now, they are focusing on boycotting the following:

Carrefour, HP, Puma, Sabra, Sodastream, Ahava cosmetics, Israeli fruits and vegetables

Push for a cultural boycott - pressure your favorite artist to speak out on Palestine and cancel any upcoming performances on occupied territory (Lorde cancelled her gig in Israel because of this. It works.)

If you can, participate in direct action or donate.

Palestine Action works to shut down Israeli weapons factories in the UK and USA, and have successfully shut down one of their firms in London.Some of the activists are going on trial and are calling for mobilizing on court.

Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing direct actions to stop the shipping of wars to Israel. Follow them.

Columbia students are organizing in coalition with Jewish Voices for Peace to divest from Israel. Support them if you are on site.

Educate yourself. Read into Palestinian history and the occupation. You can't common sense people out of decades of propaganda. If your arguments crumble when a zionist brings up the "disengagement of Gaza", you have to learn more.

Read Decolonize Palestine. They have 15 minute reads that concisely explain the occupation (and its colonial roots) and debunk popular myths, including pinkwashing.

Read on Palestine. Here's an amazing masterpost.

Verso Book Club is giving out free books on Palestine (I personally downloaded Ten Myths about Israel by Ilan Pappe. If you still believe in the two states solution, this book by an Israeli professor debunks it).

Call your representatives. The Labour Party in the UK had an emergency meeting after several councilors threatened to resign if they didn't condemn Israeli war crimes. Calling to show your complaints works, even more if you live in a country that funds genocide.

FOR PEOPLE IN THE USA: USCPR has developed this toolkit for calls, here's a document that autosends emails to your representatives and here's a toolkit by Ceasefire in Gaza NOW!

FOR PEOPLE IN EUROPE: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace targeting the European Parliament and one specific for almost all countries in Europe, including Germany, Ireland, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Greece, Norway, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Austria, Belgium Romania and Ukraine

FOR PEOPLE IN THE UK: Friends of Al-Aqsa UK and Palestine Solidarity UK have made toolkits for calls and emails

FOR PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA: Here's a toolkit by Stand With Palestine

FOR PEOPLE IN CANADA: Here's a toolkit by Indepent Jewish Voices for Canada

Join a protest. Here's a constantly updating list of protests:

Global calendar

Another global calendar (go to the instragram of the organizers to confirm your protest)

USA calendar

Australia calendar

Feel free to add more.

[theculturedmarxist]

As with the South African case, according to court procedure the Israeli case was introduced on Friday by their “agent”, permanently accredited to the court, Tal Becker of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He opened with the standard formula “it is an honour to appear before you again on behalf of the state of Israel”, managing to imply purely through phrasing and tone of voice that the honour lay in representing Israel, not in appearing before the judges.

Becker opened by going straight to the Holocaust, saying that nobody knew more than Israel why the Genocide Convention existed. Six million Jewish people had been killed. The Convention was not to be used to cover the normal brutality of war.

The South African case aimed at the delegitimisation of the state of Israel, he said. On Oct. 7 Hamas had committed massacre, mutilation, rape and abduction. 1,200 had been killed and 5,500 maimed. He related several hideous individual atrocity stories and played a recording he stated to be a Hamas fighter boasting on WhatsApp to his parents about committing mass murder, rape and mutilation.

The only genocide in this case was being committed against Israel. Hamas continued to attack Israel, and for the court to take provisional measures would be to deny Israel the right to self-defence.

Provisional measures should rather be taken against South Africa and its attempt by legal means to further genocide by its relationship with Hamas. Gaza was not under occupation: Israel had left it with great potential to be a political and economic success. Instead Hamas had chosen to make it a terrorist base.

Hamas was embedded in the civilian population and therefore responsible for the civilian deaths. Hamas had tunnels under schools, hospitals, mosques and U.N. facilities and tunnel entrances within them. It commandeered medical vehicles for military use.

South Africa had talked of civilian buildings destroyed, but did not tell you they had been destroyed by Hamas booby traps and Hamas missile misfires.

The casualty figures South Africa gave were from Hamas sources and not reliable. They did not say how many were fighters? How many of the children were child soldiers? The application by South Africa was ill-founded and ill-motivated. It was a libel.

This certainly was a hardline and uncompromising start. The judges appeared to be paying very close attention when he opened with the Oct. 7 self-defence argument, but very definitely some of them started to fidget and become uncomfortable when he talked of Hamas operating from ambulances and U.N. facilities. In short, he went too far and I believe he lost his audience at that point.

Next up was Professor Malcolm Shaw KC. Shaw is regarded as an authority on the procedure of international law and is editor of the standard tome on the subject. This is an interesting facet of the legal profession, where standard reference books on particular topics are regularly updated to include key extracts from recent judges, and passages added or amended to explain the impact of these judgments. Being an editor in this field provides a route to prominence for the plodding and pedantic.

I had come across Shaw in his capacity as a co-founder of the Centre for Human Rights at Essex University. I had given a couple of talks there some twenty years ago on the attacks on human rights of the “War on Terror” and my own whistleblower experience over torture and extraordinary rendition. For an alleged human rights expert, Shaw seemed extraordinarily prone to support the national security interests of the state over individual liberty.

I do not pretend I gave it a great deal of thought. I did not know at that time of Shaw’s commitment as an extreme Zionist and in particular his long term interest in suppressing the rights of the Palestinian people.

After 139 states have recognised Palestine as a state, Shaw led for Israel the legal opposition to Palestine’s membership of international institutions, including the International Criminal Court. Shaw’s rather uninspired reliance on the Montevideo Convention of 1933 is hardly a legal tour de force, and it didn’t work.

Every criminal deserves a defence, and nobody should hold it against a barrister that they defend a murderer or rapist, as it is important that guilt or innocence is tested by a court. But I think it is fair to state that defence lawyers do not in general defend those accused of murder because they agree with murder and want a murderer to go on murdering.

That however is the case here: Malcolm Shaw speaks for Israel because he actually wants Israel to be able to continue killing Palestinian women and children to improve the security of Israel, in his view.

That is the difference between this and other cases, including at the ICJ. Generally the lead lawyers would happily swap sides, if the other side had hired them first. But this is entirely different.

Here the lawyers (with the possible exception of Christopher Straker KC, an other attorney who represented Israel on Friday) believe profoundly in the case they are supporting and would never appear for the other side. That is just one more way that this is such an extraordinary case, with so much drama and such vital consequences, not least for the future of international law.

For the reason I have just explained, Shaw’s role here is not that of a simple barrister plying his trade. His attempt to extend the killing should see him viewed as a pariah by decent people everywhere, for the rest of his doubtless highly-paid existence.

Shaw opened up by saying that the South African case continually spoke of context. They talked of the 75 years of the existence of the state of Israel. Why stop there? Why not go back to the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate over Palestine?

No, the context of these events was the massacre of Oct. 7, and Israel’s subsequent right of self-defence. He produced and read a long quote from mid-October by European Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen, stating that Israel had suffered a terrorist atrocity and had the right of self-defence.

The truth is that this is not genocide but armed conflict, which state has existed since Oct. 7, he said. That was brutal, and urban warfare always involved terrible civilian casualties, but it was not genocide.

He then turned to the question of genocide. He argued that South Africa could not bring this case and the ICJ had no jurisdiction, because there was no dispute between Israel and South Africa on which the ICJ could rule, at the time the case was filed.

South Africa had communicated its views to Israel, but Israel had given no substantial reply. Therefore a dispute did not yet exist at time of filing. A dispute must involve interaction between parties and the argument had been on one side only.

This very much interested the judges. As I noted on day one, this got them more active than anything else when Professor John Dugard addressed the same point for South Africa. As I reported:

“The judges particularly enjoyed Dugard’s points, enthusiastically rustling through documents and underlining things. Dealing with thousands of dead children was a bit difficult for them, but give them a nice jurisdictional point and they were in their element.”

They were even more excited when Shaw tackled the same point. This gave them a way out! The case could be technically invalid, and then they would neither have to upset the major Western powers nor make fools of themselves by pretending that a genocide the whole world had seen was not happening. For a while, they looked visibly relieved.

Shaw should have given up while he was ahead, but he ploughed on for an hour, with some relief when he continually muddled his notes. A senior KC with zero ability to extemporise and recover was an interesting sight, as he kept stopping and shuffling paper.

Shaw argued that the bar for judging whether South Africa had a prima facie case must be significantly higher because of the high military and political cost to Israel if the court adopted provisional measures.

It was also necessary to show genocidal intent even at this stage. Otherwise the genocide was a “car without an engine”. If any illegal actions had taken place within Israel’s carefully targeted military action, Israel’s own military courts would investigate and act on them.

Random Israeli ministers and officials making emotional statements was not important. Official policy to protect civilians would be found in the minutes of the Israeli war cabinet and national security council. Israel’s strenuous attempts to move civilians out of harm’s way was an accepted measure in international human law and should not be viewed as mass displacement.

It was South Africa which was guilty of complicity in genocide in cooperation with Hamas. South Africa’s allegations against Israel “verge on the outrageous”.

Israel’s next lawyer was a lady called Galit Raguan from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. She said the reality on the ground was that Israel had done everything possible to minimise civilian deaths and to aid humanitarian relief. Urban warfare always resulted in civilian deaths. It was Hamas who were responsible for destruction of buildings and infrastructure.

There was overwhelming evidence of Hamas’ military use of hospitals. In every single hospital in Gaza the IDF had evidence of military use by Hamas. Mass evacuation of civilians was a humanitarian and legal measure. Israel had supplied food, water and medicine into Gaza but supplies had come under Hamas fire. Hamas steals the aid for its fighters.

Next up was lawyer Omri Sender. He stated that more food trucks per day now entered Gaza than before Oct. 7. The number had increased from 70 food trucks to 109 food trucks per day. Fuel, gas and electricity were all being supplied and Israel had repaired the sewage systems.

At this stage Israel had again lost the judges. One or two were looking at this man in a highly quizzical manner. A couple had definitely fallen asleep – there are only so many lies you can absorb, I suppose. Nobody was making notes about this guff.

The judges may find a way not to condemn Israel, but could not be expected to go along with this extraordinary nonsense. Sender continued that the scope and intensity of the fighting was now decreasing as the operation entered a new phase.

Perhaps noting that nobody believed him, Sender stated that the court could not institute provisional measures but rather was obliged to accept the word of Israel on its good intentions because of the Law of the Unilateral Declarations of States.

Now I have to confess that was a bit of international law I did not know existed. But it does, specifically in relation to ICJ proceedings. On first reading, it makes a unilateral declaration of intent to the ICJ binding on the state that makes it.

I cannot see that it forces the ICJ to accept it as sufficient or to believe in its sincerity. It seems rather a reach, and I wondered if Israel was running out of things to say.

That appeared to be true, because the next speaker, Christopher Straker, now took the floor and just ran through all the same Hamas stuff yet again, only with added theatrical indignation. Straker is the lawyer I suspect would happily have appeared for either side, because he was plainly just acting anyway. And not very well.

Straker said that it was astounding this case could be brought. It was intended to stop Israel from defending itself while Israel would still be subject to Hamas attacks. Hamas has said it will continue attacks.

If you look at the operation as a whole including relief efforts, it was plain there was no genocidal intent. Israel was in incredible danger. The proposed provisional measures were out of proportion to their effect.

Can you imagine if in the Second World War, a court had ordered the Allies to stop fighting because of civilian deaths, and allowed the Axis powers to keep on killing?

The final speaker was Gilad Noam, Israel’s deputy attorney-general. He said that the bulk of the proposed provisional measures should be refused because they exposed Israel to further Hamas attack. Three more should be refused because they referred to Palestine outside Gaza.

There was no genocidal intent in Israel. Ministerial and official statements made in the heat of the moment were rather examples of the tradition of democracy and freedom of speech. Prosecutions for incitement to genocide were under consideration.

The court must not conflate genocide and self-defence. The South African case devalues genocide and encourages terrorism. The Holocaust illustrated why Israel was always under existential threat. It was Hamas who were committing genocide.

And that was it. Israel had in the end not been allowed to show its contentious atrocity video, and it felt like their presentation had become repetitive and was padded to fill the time.

It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.

In the U.K., the BBC and Sky both ran almost all the Israeli case live, having not run any of the South African case live. I believe something similar was true in the USA, Australia and Germany too.

While the court was in session, Germany has announced it will intervene in the substantial case to support Israel. They argue explicitly that, as the world’s greatest perpetrator of genocide, they are uniquely placed to judge. It is in effect a copyright claim. They are protecting Germany’s intellectual property in the art of genocide. Perhaps they might in future license genocide, or allow Israel to continue genocide on a franchise basis.

I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…

What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for the president of the court, the American Joan Donoghue already.

I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in The Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights.

I still believe action by the court could cause the U.S. and U.K. to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

[reasoningdaily]

As the world braced for the verdict of the Chauvin trial, in Columbus, Ohio, there was another fatal shooting of 16-year-old Black girl named Ma’Khia Bryant. Many who watched the graphic and gut-wrenching bodycam video have decried the officer who deemed it necessary to use lethal force to defuse a physical altercation involving the Black teenager.

When juxtaposing what feels like a never-ending pattern of police brutality against Black people with the treatment of white perpetrators, there is an obvious disparity that highlights the pervasive nature of systemic racism. White gunmen who commit heinous crimes are often treated differently, with police being able to apprehend white suspects and bring them safely into custody.

Three recent examples of this: 21-year-old Dylann Roof, who was safely arrested after entering Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina and killing nine people in 2015. What’s even more disturbing is reports that police brought Roof Burger King following his arrest. In 2020, during protests of the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a 17-year-old gunman, Kyle Rittenhouse, used an AR-15 assault rifle to kill two people and injured a third. Law enforcement apparently offered Rittenhouse and a group of militia members water at some point before the shooting took place.

In March 2021, after a gunman shot and killed eight people, with six of them being Asian, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office Director of Communications remarked that the shooter was having a “really bad day.” These comments drew public outrage at the humanization of the mass shooter. Black youth aren’t given the opportunity to be humanized, with a number of tragic stories illustrating this.

Over a decade ago, 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones was fatally shot by Detroit police who were looking for a murder suspect. In 2012, the world was gripped by the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was shot by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, who thought Martin looked suspicious. In 2014, a Black youth named Tamir Rice was shot by police. Rice, who was only 12 years old, was thought to be 20 years old. In 2015, a video of McKinney, Texas police officer Eric Casebolt went viral. Casebolt was filmed yelling at Black teenagers and threw one teenage girl to the ground while kneeling on her back. The video sparked rightful outrage at the excessive force used on the young girl.

Examining patterns of police treatment towards Black youth highlights a prominent issue: the adultification bias, which is the phenomenon where adults perceive Black youth as being older than they actually are. When the adultification bias was examined, one study found that Black girls as young as five years old were perceived as being less needing of protection and nurturing, compared to their white counterparts.  

Research indicates that Black boys are perceived as older and less innocent when compared to their white counterparts. “Black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent,” shared Phillip Atiba Goff, Ph.D., who authored a study examining this phenomenon in more detail. Black girls are treated disparately compared to their white counterparts and are more likely to be seen as older, while having to navigate the combined effects of racism and sexism.

The adultification bias contributes to the continued harm and abuse that Black youth face, not just at the hands of law enforcement, but also in the education system. When Black women and girls are mistreated, harmed and abused, it is less likely to be reported on. The Say Her Name campaign co-founded by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw was designed to bring greater awareness to this issue.

Disrupting the adultification bias must first begin with awareness that this problem even exists. Despite the wealth of evidence detailing the ways it manifests, greater understanding is necessary. Training about the adultification bias should be mandatory, especially for folks working with and around Black youth populations. Understanding the ways that the adultification bias manifests as well as how to mitigate this type of bias is imperative.

Although research indicates that those who are marginalized are likely to internalize some of the biases and stereotypes about their own identity group, it is likely that having more Black people working with Black youth populations would lessen the occurrence of the adultification bias. One can assume that having experience and exposure to Black youth may increase one’s understanding, and limit the adultification bias from taking place. Resources must be allocated to support education about the adultification bias and how it can be interrupted. Lastly, rather than resorting to punitive measures when dealing with Black youth, we must encourage the learning of de-escalation and conflict resolution strategies.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 18 November 1949, security forces massacred 21 striking miners and a bystander at the British government-owned coal mine at Enugu in Nigeria. Britain's Labour government was keen to maximise output in order to fund the rebuilding of infrastructure and repay debts to the US in the wake of World War II. The miners, many of whom were British Army veterans who served in south-east Asia, had occupied their mine demanding backpay for a period of time where they were paid according to a casual system called "rostering" which was later declared illegal. The British Colonial Office had dispatched union bureaucrats from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) all around the Empire in order to try to organise workers in ways that their discontent could be integrated into the system. A local TUC adviser tried to divide the mine workers up into five separate branches, which ran contrary to the local Igbo workers Jiffy culture of organising together in mass meetings, so they ignored him. Since striking was illegal at the time, workers began a wildcat go-slow, adopted from miners in Durham, England and known as "welu nwayo" in Igbo. The workers were sacked, so they then occupied the mine. Violence began when a British policeman, Captain F.S. Philip panicked when he saw some of the African miners dancing and chanting and shot a young miner called Sunday Anyasado, killing him. He then killed a machine worker, Livinus Okechukwuma, and when, hearing all the noise, Okafor Ageni emerged from the mine to ask “Anything wrong?” he was murdered. Shooting continued for several minutes, hitting dozens of workers, many in the back, and security forces left the wounded to die on the ground. In addition to 22 deaths, 51 people were wounded. The massacre fuelled rapid support for the anti-colonial movement. Pictured: a memorial to the massacre https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2138292163022589/?type=3

[bonyassfish]

Two things can be true. It is true that Israel was founded as a settler colonial state and its current existence is predicated on keeping a population balance within the state that has a higher amount of Jews than Palestinians. It is true that from its founding in 1948 up through to today, the Israeli state has committed mass atrocities and violence toward the Palestinians, and thousands of innocent people have been murdered, displaced, injured, traumatized, and forced to live in inhumane conditions in the name of Zionism.

It’s also true that a lot of Jews in Israel today quite literally have nowhere else to go. Most Israeli Jews do not have dual citizenship in other countries. Many israeli jews are descended from holocaust survivors. Many israeli jews are descended from mizrahi jews who were expelled from countries in the Middle East and North Africa. There’s also a fair amount of Israeli Jews whose families lived there prior to the establishment of the state of Israel.

“But they CHOSE to move there!” Ok, and my ancestors chose to move to other settler colonial nations, namely the US and Canada. Yet nobody has ever suggested me and my family leave the US or Canada.

The solution to settler colonialism has never been “just send people back!”. Send them where? Movements of land back and indigenous liberation aren’t based on indigenous people being the only ones allowed to exist in certain places. Obviously Palestinians are not a monolith, but from conversations with Palestinian friends and reading works by Palestinians, a Palestinian state probably wouldn’t be one where jews aren’t allowed to live. When apartheid ended in South Africa, were all the white people forced to leave? No, they just had to give up their power over black South Africans.

TL;DR, stop assuming that it’s a woke take to tell Israeli Jews to just leave, especially if you yourself are a settler living on stolen indigenous land.

[ausetkmt]

I first saw Bamboozled as a 15-year-old, in April 2001, at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton, south-west London, and it threw me for a loop. Written and directed by Spike Lee, the film is an intense satire about a frustrated African American TV executive, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), who creates a contemporary version of a minstrel show in order to purposefully get himself fired, and expose the commissioning network as a racist and retrograde outfit. However, the show, which features its black stars wearing blackface, becomes a huge hit, prompting Delacroix’s mental collapse, and an explosion of catastrophic violence, the effects of which are felt far and wide.

In a fraught contemporary climate where the mediation of the black image in American society is at a crucial juncture, Bamboozled’s trenchant commentary on the importance, complexity and lasting effects of media representation could hardly feel more urgent. Each time an unarmed black person is killed, then hurriedly repositioned in death as a thug, a brute, or a layabout by mainstream media outlets – as has happened recently to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Samuel DuBose and countless others – we are seeing the perpetuation of old anti-black stereotypes, forged in the crucible of mass American art, reconfigured for our time.

Lee’s film traces a grim continuum between stereotypes old and new, connected by knotty skeins of institutional racism. Many critics at the time of the film’s release suggested that Lee had needlessly reopened old wounds; that the dark days of minstrelsy were comfortably behind us, and that we should move on. Yet Lee’s vision was not only necessary, it proved remarkably prescient. During the course of writing this book, I rewatched episodes of garish reality TV shows like Flavor of Love (2006-8), starring the clock-wearing rapper-cum-jester Flavor Flav, and The Real Housewives of Atlanta (2008-). I had to concede that Bamboozled’s nightmarish New Millennium Minstrel Show didn’t look so far-fetched after all. I sat gape-mouthed in front of Lee Daniels and Danny Strong’s musical soap opera Empire (2014-) – a wildly entertaining but exceedingly dubious carnival of black pathologies – and couldn’t help but wonder if it was the type of show that would get Bamboozled’s master-wigger network boss Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport) hot under the collar at proposal stage.

When, in October 2014, I saw footage of freshly signed rapper Bobby Shmurda literally dancing on a table in front of a group of executives, exactly like performer Manray (Savion Glover) does in Bamboozled, I began to wonder whether Lee was in fact a secret soothsayer. Not even he, however, could have predicted the transcendentally weird tale of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP leader in Spokane, Washington, who was revealed to have been white, and posing as African American all along. At the time of the incident, many wags on social media suggested that Lee would be the ideal man to direct Bamboozled 2: The Rachel Dolezal Story.

Bamboozled’s shrewd commentary on the lack of behind-the-scenes diversity in mainstream entertainment is also especially relevant today. The presence of figures like Robin Thede – head writer on The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, and the first black woman to hold that position on a late-night network comedy show – and Shonda Rhimes, the powerful showrunner behind Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder, is heartening. Yet a report released in March 2015 by the Writer’s Guild of America West revealed that minority writers accounted for just 13.7% of employment: a dismal statistic. Moreover, Rhimes’s success didn’t insulate her from being disrespectfully branded as an “Angry Black Woman” – that most pernicious of stereotypes – in a rancid, supposedly flattering article by Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times

While most of us can cheer the incrementally increasing diversity on our film and television screens, Bamboozled forces us to question the quality and progressiveness of these roles. Ostensibly it’s great that talented actors such as Mo’Nique (Precious, 2009), Octavia Spencer (The Help, 2011) and Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave, 2013) are winning Oscars, but isn’t the shine taken off somewhat by the fact they were rewarded by the establishment for playing, respectively, a psychotic “welfare queen”, a neo-Mammy in a white savior period picture, and a chronically abused slave? Why don’t black women win Oscars for playing complex heroines or crotchety geniuses like their white male counterparts? Because old stereotypes die hard within an industry that prefers stasis over change. Perhaps even more disturbingly, there’s something inherently soothing about such stereotypes for mass audiences – a point particularly relevant to the wild popularity of Bamboozled’s own minstrel show.

And how far have we come, really? Ridley Scott cast a host of white actors (including a fake tan-enhanced Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton) in his Middle Eastern epic/flop Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), but his response to complaints was both flippant, and distressingly matter-of-fact: “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.” The best riposte to Scott and his film came from independent black film-maker Terence Nance, who wrote that “[l]ike The Birth of a Nation before it, [Exodus] traffics in absurd cultural appropriation and brown-faced minstrel casting/makeup techniques to rewrite African history as European history, and in so doing propagates the idea that European cultural centrality is more important than historical fact and the ever-evolving self-image of African-descended people as it is influenced by popular representations of people of color in Western media distributed worldwide.”

Nance, however, is just one talented black film-maker among many (Dee Rees, Tina Mabry, Haile Gerima, Julie Dash, Barry Jenkins et al) who have struggled to attract funding to tell artistic and personal stories outside of the monolithic, corporate world of mainstream entertainment which Bamboozled so acidly depicts (even if it is set in the world of TV rather than film.) Lee has long been vocal about the struggles he’s faced in raising funds to tell black-focused stories, and even he had to go cap in hand to fans on Kickstarter to crowd-fund his idiosyncratic, low-budget vampire movie Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014). Da Sweet Blood is his most excessive, least easily readable work since Bamboozled, but it can’t match his earlier film for sheer visceral impact.

Bamboozled, then, is a genuine one-off, but I can detect traces of its relentless, irritable, questioning approach in a variety of contemporary art. I see it in Justin Simien’s excellent college-set satire Dear White People (2014), which was inspired by horrific, real-life blackface parties at universities across America. I see it in the antic situational comedy of Key & Peele, whose best sketch, musical spoof “Negrotown”, compresses the madness, pathos and insight of Lee’s film into four-and-a-half harrowingly hilarious minutes. I see it in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins thrillingly audacious play An Octoroon (2013), which reconfigures blackface tropes in daring ways. Most of all I see it coursing through the veins of Paul Beatty’s scabrous satirical novel The Sellout (2015), about a shiftless young black Angeleno who hatches a plot to reintroduce racial segregation, and takes an elderly slave – a disturbed former “pickaninny” star of Little Rascals films – while he’s at it. Like Lee’s film, it plays as a shotgun blast to the face of formal convention, it’s stubbornly resistant to a single concrete interpretation, and it has a lot of very painful things to say about America today.

ABC’s enjoyably gentle sitcom Black-ish (2014-), meanwhile, simultaneously echoes Delacroix’s crisis – with its premise of a middle-class black ad executive (Anthony Anderson) jockeying for position in a white corporate space – and feels like the kind of show Delacroix, free of Dunwitty’s pressure, might have concocted himself.

Lastly, I couldn’t help but think of Bamboozled while poring over Ta-Nehisi Coates’s epic essay in the Atlantic, The Case for Reparations, which uncovers, in forensic detail, the institutional plunder of black Americans from slavery to redlining to mass incarceration and its destructive impact on families. Coates’s fury is more controlled than Lee’s, but it’s equally sincere, and his essay shares with Bamboozled the central imperative to look directly into the heart of past racial sins in order to plot a productive way forward.

It is time, then, to take a close look at Bamboozled, which deserves to be respected as much more than a mid-career oddity in Lee’s filmography. It is a vital work that’s equal parts crystal ball and cannonball: glittering and prophetic, heavy and dangerous.

[theinconvenientlifestyle]

The UK government and pro-Israel lobby groups are funding a UK-registered charity to indoctrinate schoolchildren against recognition of Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

‘Solutions not Sides’ (SNS) has received increasing amounts of cash to carry out literal ‘bothsidesing’ of the grossly asymmetrical situation in Palestine, treating Israel’s occupation, apartheid, oppression and now mass-murder of Palestinians as equivalent to Palestinian resistance.

The charity’s website claims to run a ‘non-partisan programme’ to ‘prepare students to make a positive, solutions-focused contribution to debates on Israel-Palestine’. However, its ‘Mission & Values’ page states that it opposes ‘advocacy’ and ‘partisan solidarity'(!) a value that rules out support for the Boycott Divestment and sanctions campaign, rejects ‘blame culture’ and believes that:

both sides bear responsibility for bringing about a resolution to the conflict.

Israel is currently engaged in mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians and is making plans for the deportation of Gazan Palestinians to Egypt, the Congo and other African destinations. It faces allegations brought before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa of what experts consider to be a ‘textbook case’ of genocide. The victims of war crimes clearly do not ‘bear responsibility’ for ending the crimes – and minimising Israel’s guilt for its illegal actions and Palestinian suffering while treating Palestinians’ acts of resistance as equivalent is inherently partisan. In this context, the group’s claim to be fighting Islamophobia as well as antisemitism looks like mere window dressing.

According to Palestine is still the issue and 5Pillars, SNS has its origins in – and receives around thirty percent of its funding from – ‘One Voice’, a billionaire-funded pro-Israel lobby group. SNS has been backed by pro-Israel groups, as well as figures well-known from their eager participation in smears of the left.

An attempt by Palestine Declassified to visit the SNS office to obtain comment on analysis of SNS’s activities found that no one was based at the charity’s registered address. It did not respond to the programme’s requests for comment.

Campaigners are asking teachers and parents to complain to schools urgently if this group is brought in.