RAJIV MEHROTRA IN CONVERSATION- H.E. AGA KHAN

VIDEO/Rajiv Mehrotra (1988 interview)/Youtube (India’s public TV Doordarshan Presentation)

Karim Aga Khan and His Life’s Work – a film by Veronika Hofer

His Higness the Aga Khan: Reminiscenes of over six decades

by DR. SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR

As we reflect on the life of His Highness the Aga Khan, we share this essay by the eminent Muslim scholar, Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, about their many decades of friendship.

His Highness the Aga Khan passed away on February 4th, 2025. This tribute by Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr on the occasion of the Aga Khan’s Diamond Jubilee originally appeared in Sacred Web 41, published in June 2018.

In the Name of God, The Most Merciful, The Most Compassionate

I am grateful to be given this opportunity to write a few words about reminiscences concerning His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan on the occasion of his Diamond Jubilee. 

I have known him personally for over six decades and have met him in places as far apart as Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the USA, Aiglemont, Gouvieux, in France, and Tehran in my home country of Iran. The trajectory of the meeting of the lines of his noble family and mine goes back to even before Prince Karim and I met in the mid-1950s at Harvard. When Pakistan became independent, my uncle, Seyyed Ali Nasr, became Iran’s first ambassador to the newly founded nation and soon became close friends with His Highness Sir Sultan Mohamed Shah, Aga Khan III, Prince Karim’s grandfather, to the extent that later when Sir Sultan Mohamed Shah and the Begum would come to Iran, they would visit the Nasr family home in Tehran.

When I went to Harvard in 1954, I founded the Harvard Islamic Society, the first Islamic Society to be established in an American University. Among its seven original members was the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, Prince Karim’s uncle with whom I became good friends. Shortly thereafter, when as a teaching fellow at Harvard I was giving a lecture on Islam, I met the young Prince Karim who was then a student in my class. We became close friends and he would occasionally even visit our home where my mother, who was then residing in the Boston area, would cook Persian food for him which he appreciated like most other things Persian.

It was in this period that during a university holiday he was called away to Europe to visit his grandfather, Sir Sultan Mohamed Shah, during his last illness, and on his passing on July 11, 1957, Prince Karim was, according to the hereditary customs of the Shi’a Imami Ismaili Muslims, appointed by the Last Will of the late Imam to succeed to the title of ‘Aga Khan’ and to be Imam and Pir of his community. He was 20 at the time. When the young Prince Karim, now Imam and Aga Khan IV, returned to Cambridge, we continued our discussions but on a deeper level about Islam, its art and philosophy, Twelver Shi‘ism and its relation to Ismailism and the whole question of im?mah or the Imamat in addition to many other related subjects. I would often speak to him about the fact that Ismailism was and remains a part of the totality of Shi‘ism and therefore of Islam, and I was very glad to see that soon he added the name Shi‘a to the official name of the branch of Ismailism of which he was now the ???ir Imam.

When I returned to Iran in 1958 my relation with His Highness continued. He wanted to have a new generation of Ismaili intellectual leaders trained and, to that end, he sent several very gifted Ismaili students to Tehran University where I was teaching and they completed their doctorate under my care. His keen interest in the Islamic intellectual tradition combined with devotion to Islamic art and architecture was and is unique among major Islamic leaders.

The early Sixties were the hey-day of Arab nationalism, both Nasserism and the Ba‘th movement, the latter led ideologically by Christian Arabs such as Michel Aflaq and Constantine Zurayk, who was a professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB), which was then the intellectual seat of Arab nationalism. It was at the AUB that such famous Jordanian and Palestinian nationalists as Nayef Hawatemah and Yasser Arafat as well as many Lebanese and Syrian political figures had studied, and where there was the attempt both to secularize Islam or to reduce it to a part of Arab nationalism. His Highness Prince Karim decided very wisely that it was there, precisely because of the AUB’s influential position, that he would seek to establish a Chair of Islamic Studies, and he indicated that he wanted me to apply for it and to go to the AUB in Beirut to found the Chair. At the time, I was very busy in Iran and did not want to leave my country for a whole year, but I obliged to follow His Highness’s suggestion and when the invitation came from AUB to apply for the Aga Khan Chair, I sent them my CV and publications, and soon afterwards I was informed that I had been chosen for the Chair. And so, I spent the whole academic year of 1964 – 1965 in Beirut as Aga Khan Professor, a year that was one of the most difficult and at the same time most fruitful of my life.

The opposition among many members of the faculty to Islam being taught by a Persian who was at the same time a Shi‘ite was more than I had imagined. It had been easier for me to teach Islamic subjects from a Muslim point of view at Harvard where I had been visiting professor just two years earlier than to teach such subjects in Beirut. But I had the full backing of His Highness and that support gave me strength in carrying out his wishes to sink the roots of Islamic studies in the soil of the intellectual heart of modern Arab nationalism and modernism. 

Sacred Web for more

Aga Khan Award for Architecture in Kazan, Russia, 2019

VIDEO/The Ismaili TV/Youtube

Argo Contemporary Art Museum and Cultural Centre | Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2022

VIDEO/Aga Khan Development Network/Youtube

The Silent Prince of Islam – Aga Khan Interviewed by Annette Allison

A better world through education: The Aga Khan Academies (with subtitles)

VIDEO/Aga Khan Academies/Youtube

India’s silence on Aga Khan IV’s passing is an insult to his memory and legacy

by MANI SHANKAR AIYAR

Prince Karim Aga Khan IV passed away in Lisbon on February 4 after having held the Imamate of the Nizari Ismaili community, as the 49th Mawlana Hazrat Imam, since 1957. As far as I know, the Narendra Modi government has issued no official condolence message. This is not only an insult to the memory of the prince, but also an insult to the 1.5 million-strong Indian Ismaili community he led for the last 68 years. It not only ignores the Padma Vibhushan awarded to the prince, but also neglects that it was in the Prime Minister’s home State of Gujarat that Aga Khan IV started and has until now sustained the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, the precursor to the worldwide Aga Khan Development Network which deals with healthcare, housing, education, and rural economic development.

The guiding principle of the Aga Khan’s life has been to recognise that his followers live among others of different ethnicities and religions. Therefore, he devotes a significant portion of his vast wealth to “improving the quality of life for individuals and communities across the world” as he wished to do so “irrespective of their religious affiliations or origins”.

I go for a walk whenever I can to Sunder Nursery in central New Delhi. It used to be an unkempt jungle until the Aga Khan Trust for Culture took charge of it. While preserving, conserving, restoring, and renovating the numerous Mughal-era monuments that dot the park, the Aga Khan Trust has converted the wilderness into an arresting Mughal Gardens with a profusion of flowers in full bloom as winter turns to spring. The greenery is enhanced by the numerous trees and the woods at its periphery, home to many birds and small animals.

And because Sunder Nursery is close to Muslim residential areas, Muslim families and students, young men and women in wooing mode, and newly married Muslim couples holding hands wander at ease through its enchanted gardens and waterways, the way they do along the sea-face at Mumbai’s Marine Drive.

Aga Khan Trust’s contribution

It is one place in Modi’s India where our major minority community can have a sense of belonging, where their identity is unquestioned, their heritage (which is also ours) is lovingly celebrated. The open-air auditorium is a magnificent setting to display the composite civilisation that defines the Idea of India, especially in poetry, music, and dance—and true spirituality. Is that why the current Indian establishment shuns this UNESCO-recognised site, although it was Vice President Venkaiah Naidu, a former BJP activist, who inaugurated the park?

Right next to Sunder Nursery is Humayun’s Tomb. It was neglected and run-down till Prince Karim turned his attention to it. Today, it stands rejuvenated, its surrounding greens and lawns perfectly manicured and with a world-class museum that explains and celebrates that period of our history. A fitting tribute to Humayun whose father, the Mughal emperor Babur, left him a letter emphasising that if he wished to keep the empire he was inheriting, he must remember not to forcibly convert to Islam the inhabitants of the land. This injunction resulted in only a quarter of India’s population being Muslim after 666 years of Muslim sultans and badshahs ruling from the throne of Delhi (1192-1858). India was where Islam learned to co-exist with other religions. Elsewhere, Islam was either totally triumphant (from Afghanistan and Iran to West Asia and North Africa, Central Asia, and much of South-East Asia down to Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation in the world) or totally defeated (as at the Pyrenees that separate Spain from France and at the gates of Vienna).

Islamic contact with India may have started with invasions and bigotry but very quickly turned to mutual respect and cultural synthesis. Right opposite Sunder Nursery is a large sign proclaiming, “I LOVE NIZAMUDDIN”. The reference is not to the great Sufi spiritual leader, Nizamuddin Auliya, but to the upscale post-Partition residential colony named in an earlier more tolerant and accommodating period of independent India. It was here, at what is now his dargah, that Nizamuddin Auliya, spiritual adviser to the Khiljis and the Tughlaqs, persuaded Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq that Alauddin’s resort to merciless armed conversions was not the way the sultan should adopt, leading to Ghiyasuddin’s imperial decree to leave non-Muslims free to believe in and practise their faith. It is here that lie the origins not only of modern India’s secularism but also its national language, Hindi. For it was here that Nizamuddin Auliya’s renowned disciple, Amir Khusrau, fused the vernacular Braj Bhasha with imported words, phrases, and expressions from Turkish, Persian, and Central Asian dialects into a language he called “Hindawi”, from which contemporary Hindi was derived.

This was also the locale of the Sufi movement that evolved in India parallel to the Bhakti movement and led to the intertwining of the spiritual ecstasy that is the essence of both Sufism and Bhakti. Where in its heyday the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya rested in expansive surroundings, it is now enclosed in a warren of narrow streets and dilapidated buildings. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture has made the renovation and upgrading of the Nizamuddin basti and its numerous imposing structures, as also that wondrous architectural masterpiece, the tomb of Abdur Rahim Khan-e-Khanan, another focus of its generous attention.

It is no surprise that non-Islamic, secular India is where Prince Karim Aga Khan IV concentrated his efforts. I only met him once—when he visited Karachi in 1981, where I was serving as India’s first-ever Consul General, to present his annual award for architecture to a highly talented Pakistani architect, Yasmeen Lari, who had brilliantly designed a hotel in India incorporating Islamic motifs with modern ones. Her fellow awardee was an Indian Christian named Charles Correa.

The chairman of the Aga Khan Trust, Rajeshwar Dayal, a former High Commissioner to Pakistan, was also present. Prince Karim was not concerned that a Hindu was heading his Trust. (One amusing but telling fallout of that visit was that the Jama’at-e-Islami Mayor of Karachi found himself being pushed down the reception line by higher-ups from Islamabad. Indignant, he rang me the next day to ask where the Mayor of Mumbai stood in the warrant of precedence. I was much taken by the fact that he did not think the position of the Lord Mayor of London, or the Mayor of New York, relevant. He instinctively understood that his case would be strengthened only by an Indian example. The Aga Khan was sensitive to the nuances of such a relationship between Pakistan and India!)

Champion of justice

His ecumenical (in the sense of all-embracing) and inclusive approach was also evident when Aga Khan IV took up the cause of Asians being expelled from East Africa, especially from Uganda under Idi Amin. Having himself been brought up as a boy in Kenya, Prince Karim championed his campaign of justice for all uprooted Asian communities, not only Ismailis, in those tense and difficult times, using his wide network in the West, particularly his friendship with Canadian premier Pierre Trudeau, to resettle thousands of refugee families in Canada.

It is surely churlish of the government of India to not issue a statement of condolence on the passing away of so noble an international Muslim leader with numerous followers in India and the recipient of India’s second highest civilian honour. But then the Modi-Amit Shah-Yogi Adityanath trio was preoccupied at the time of his passing with covering up the Mahakumbh stampede that killed uncounted numbers of Hindu pilgrims in the narrow alleys leading to the bathing ghats at Prayagraj, with those who escaped death being welcomed into mosques and madrasas that had thrown open their doors to offer hospitality and succour—although the triumvirate had let it be known that no Muslim would be allowed into the sangam (river confluence) during the Mahakumbh.

The irony of this is lost on no one.

Postscript: After the column was uploaded, I learned that the Prime Minister had in fact put out a condolence message on X (formerly Twitter). While apologising for not knowing this, I do wish to add that, given the stature and contribution of Khan, and India’s significant Indian Ismaili community, I believe more prominence should have been accorded to the sad event. 

Frontline for more

FULL EVENT VIDEO: His Highness the Aga Khan’s visit to Brown University to deliver the Ogden Lecture

Who are Ismaili Muslims and how do their beliefs relate to the Aga Khan’s work?

by SHARIK SIDDIQUE

Prince Karim Aga Khan, who died on Feb. 4, 2025, served as the religious leader of Ismaili Muslims around the world since being appointed as the 49th hereditary imam in 1957. He came to be known around the world for his enormous work on global development issues and other philanthropic work.

The Ismaili community considers the imam a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Ismaili Muslims are considered to be a branch of Shiite Islam. They constitute the second-largest community within the Shiite sect.

An estimated 15 million Ismaili Muslims live in 35 countries, across all parts of the world. In the U.S., with around 40,000 Ismailis, Texas has the largest concentration of the community.

As a scholar of Muslim philanthropy, I have long been impressed by the philanthropic and civic engagement of the Ismailis.

Ismaili religious beliefs

Following the death of the Prophet in A.D. 632, differences emerged over who should have both political and spiritual control over the Muslim community. A majority chose Abu Bakr, one of the Prophet’s closest companions, while a minority put their faith in his son-in-law and cousin, Ali. Those Muslims who put their faith in Abu Bakr came to be called Sunni, and those who believed in Ali came to be known as Shiite.

Like other Shiite sects, Ismailis believe that Ali should have been selected as the successor of the Prophet Muhammad. They also believe that he should have been followed by Ali’s two sons – the grandsons of Muhammad through his daughter Fatima.

The key difference among other Shiites and Ismailis lies in their lineage of imams. While they agree with the first six imams, Ismailis believe that Imam Ismail ibn Jafar was the rightful person to be the seventh imam, while the majority of Shiites, known as Twelvers, believe that Imam Musa al-Kazim, Ismail’s younger brother, was the true successor. They both agree that Ali was the first imam and on the next five imams, who are direct descendant of Ali and Fatima.

The Ismaili sect split into two branches in 1094. Aga Khan was the leader of the Nizari branch, which believes in a living imam or leader. The second branch – Musta’lian Tayyibi Ismailis – believes that its 21st imam went into “concealment”; in his physical absence, a vicegerent or “da’i mutlaq” acts as an authority on his behalf.

Like all Muslims, Ismailis believe that God sent his revelation to the Prophet Muhammad through Archangel Gabriel. However, they differ on other interpretations of the faith. According to the Ismailis, for example, the Quran conveys allegorical messages from God, and it is not the literal word of God. They also believe Muhammad to be the living embodiment of the Quran. Ismailis are strongly encouraged to pray three times a day, but it is not required.

Ismailis believe in metaphorical, rather than literal, fasting. Ismailis believe that the esoteric meaning of fasting involves a fasting of the soul, whereby they attempt to purify the soul simply by avoiding sinful acts and doing good deeds.

In terms of “Zakat,” or charity – the third pillar of Islam, which Muslims are required to follow – Ismailis differ in two ways. They give it to the leader of their faith, Aga Khan, and believe that they have to give 12.5% of their income versus 2.5%.

Pluralism and its embrace

Ismaili history has a strong connection to pluralism – part of their philosophy of embracing difference. The Fatimid Empire that ruled over parts of North Africa and the Middle East from 909 to 1171 is said to have been a “golden age of Ismaili thought.”

It was a pluralistic community, in which Shiite and Sunni Muslims, as well as Christian and Jewish communities, worked together for the success of the flourishing empire, under the rule of the Ismaili imams.

In the modern period, Ismailis have sought to further pluralism within their own communities by arguing that pluralism goes beyond tolerance and requires people to actively engage across differences and actively embrace difference as a strength. For example, Eboo Patel, an Ismaili American, has established the nonprofit Interfaith America as a way to further pluralism among faith communities.

The Aga Khan’s philanthropic work

The Conversation for more

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VIDEO/S Raheemani/Youtube

Inauguration of The Aga Khan University Hospital – 1985

VIDEO/Video Library/Youtube

Step inside the Aga Khan University, Karachi campus

VIDEO/Aga Khan University/Youtube

2005 03 AL AZHAR PARK Openning

Aga Khan Music Awards: Inaugural Awards Ceremony Lisbon, Portugal – 29 to 31 March 2019 – Part 1

Aga Khan Music Awards: Inaugural Awards Ceremony Lisbon, Portugal – 31 March 2019 – Part 2

(Thanks to a reader)

DEMOCRACY NOW

Acclaimed scholar and activist Tariq Ali joins us for a wide-ranging conversation. In Part 1, he responds to Trump’s support of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the U.S.’s capitulation to Israeli aggression in the Middle East and the rise in right-wing authoritarianism around the world. Ali says Donald Trump is “the most right-wing president in recent years” and exposes “in public what his predecessors used to say in private.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to renew Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip, saying the Israeli military will return to, quote, “intense fighting” unless Hamas agrees to release all remaining hostages by Saturday noon. This comes after President Trump said “all hell is going to break out” if the hostages aren’t freed. Hamas has accused Israel of repeatedly violating the ceasefire.

Meanwhile, Trump on Tuesday met with Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House, where Trump repeated his threat to take over Gaza and displace the entire Palestinian population. Reporters questioned Trump about his Gaza proposal.

REPORTER 1: Mr. President, you said before that the U.S. would buy Gaza, and today you just said we’re not going to buy Gaza.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’re not going to have to buy. We’re going to — we’re going to have Gaza. We don’t have to buy. There’s nothing to buy. We will have Gaza.

REPORTER 1: What does that mean?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There’s no reason to buy. There is nothing to buy. It’s Gaza. It’s a war-torn area. We’re going to take it. We’re going to hold it. We’re going to cherish it.

REPORTER 2: Mr. President, take it under what authority? It is sovereign territory.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Under the U.S. authority.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Trump, sitting next to a grimacing King Abdullah of Jordan, who later wrote that they will not accept the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And the president of Egypt, President Sisi, canceled his trip to the White House next week after these comments.

We’re joined now by Tariq Ali, Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker, editor of the New Left Review, author of over 50 books, including, just out, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us on this side of the pond. But I do have to ask you: Mick Jagger wrote that Rolling Stones song for you, “Street Fighting Man”?

TARIQ ALI: Yeah, he wrote it and sent it to me, a handwritten version, saying, “Could you put this in the paper? I just wrote this for you.” I edited a radical newspaper at the time. “And the BBC are refusing to play this song.” So, we did publish the song. And, of course, a few weeks later, the BBC did play it. I mean, that was a time when politics and culture, radical politics, radical culture, were very mixed up together, in a good sense.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go back to Gaza. You have President Trump doubling, doubling, tripling, quadrupling down, saying he doesn’t even have to buy Gaza, he’ll have it, he’ll take it. He’s also said, originally said, “The world’s people will be there, yes, including Palestinians,” now, “No, Palestinians have no right of return.” Your response to what’s going on there?

TARIQ ALI: It is so appalling, Amy, what is going on now. Trump said, says it in public, what his predecessors used to say in private, that, effectively, they are going to let Israel have its way, both in Gaza and, believe you me, in the West Bank. They will both be ethnically cleansed. That has been Israeli policy for decades, and now they feel they’ve had leaders in the United States. Trump is, of course, shameless and open about it. Biden did exactly the same thing. For six months, Hamas had agreed to the ceasefire plan. Netanyahu didn’t want a ceasefire, and Biden backed him.

So, one problem we have today, that the reason you have Trump is because the previous administration was so weak-willed and so weak-minded, incapable of doing anything, whereas in this very country we had Reagan, Bush, Truman calling Israel to heel when they exceeded what was considered to be decent, honorable, according to United States policies. When they refused to obey, they were called to heel. Neither Biden and now Trump calling these people, “Enough. The whole world has seen what you’re up to. Enough. We will not tolerate it.” Netanyahu threatening to break the ceasefire, and the response of the United States president is what? The response is nothing to do with the ceasefire, but “We’re going to take Gaza. We can.” The Israelis have got it for you by killing over 100,000 people. “And now we’ll do with it as we please.”

I mean, if this is the way the United States Empire is going to carry on functioning, there will be more and more — not immediately — there will be more and more resistance. If even the king of Jordan and Sisi in Egypt, who have so far backed the United States, are getting slightly scared, it’s not because they’ve changed greatly. It’s they are scared there will be an uprising in their countries. Jordan is three-quarters Palestinian anyway. And the Egyptian masses are seething. So, you have a really extremely serious situation building up in the Middle East, where they publicly, in front of everyone, want to expel the Palestinians. No cover-up. Netanyahu says, “We’re going to do it.” The U.S. president supports him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tariq, the famous Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said was a friend of yours. You’re write about him in your memoir. Said was prophetic in many ways in terms of his skepticism of the possibility of a two-state solution. What is your sense of how he would have responded to what’s happening today?

Democracy Now for more

by NISHA ZAHID

Scientists in China have successfully created and raised a mouse with two biological fathers, marking a breakthrough in genetic research that could enhance understanding of reproductive biology and genetic disorders.

The study, conducted by Zhi-kun Li of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, utilized advanced stem cell techniques to generate egg-like cells from male embryonic stem cells. These artificial eggs were subsequently fertilized with sperm from another male and implanted into a surrogate female.

In previous experiments, attempts to create offspring using male cells resulted in severe developmental defects. However, the new method has produced healthier mice that have survived into adulthood. Despite this progress, the mice remain sterile, and many embryos still fail to develop properly.

Overcoming a major reproductive barrier

Scientists have struggled to bypass the biological need for an egg in mammalian reproduction for decades. Unlike sperm, which are highly specialized and cannot divide into other cells, eggs contain essential nutrients and cellular mechanisms required for early development.

Efforts to create embryos using only male cells encountered a significant genetic challenge: imprinting abnormalities. Normally, when a sperm fertilizes an egg, specific genes from each parent are naturally activated or deactivated to ensure proper development.

Greek Reporter for more

by SEIJI YAMADA

In Water on the Moon, Frederick M. “Skip” Burkle, Jr., MD recounts his life from childhood up to 2024, when he was 83. Having been drafted during the Vietnam War, his first overseas assignment was as a combat physician on the frontlines. There he also treated Vietnamese civilians (dealing with bubonic plague) in the surrounding area as well as wounded North Vietnamese Army soldiers. While treating one such soldier, Marines entered the triage bunker and ordered him and the other medical personnel out. Burkle objected that under the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. military was obligated to treat the wounded who are out of combat. The Marines forced him out at gunpoint. When he re-entered the bunker, the Marines were waterboarding his patient. Burkle radioed base headquarters and objected to a commanding officer that torture was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. When he returned to the triage bunker, the Marines were gone, and his patient was dead.

Burkle’s account led me to think that I should remind myself of the what the Vietnam War was about. I finally read a couple of books that I had been planning to read for some time. Firstly, I read Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, a book-length recounting of the sustained, mechanized, industrial-scale, criminal assault on the Vietnamese people. I was struck by how the methods of killing in Vietnam were, in many ways, similar to those employed in the current genocidal assault on the Palestinian people. The dehumanization of the victims is the same. The torture is the same. The air assaults and search and destroy missions are the same. The weaponry has been upgraded, but the profiteering by the arms corporations is the same. The destruction of infrastructure and the environment by bulldozer is the same. In 1995, the Vietnamese government estimated that more than 3 million Vietnamese, including 2 million civilians were killed in what they call the American War.

Also, going backward in history, there are many parallels to the Philippine-American War: the same waterboarding, the same intent to turn the countryside into a “howling wilderness.”

In what way was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam not a genocide? The United Nation’s definition of genocide “means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1) Killing members of the group;

2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The U.S. architects of the Vietnam War cited the need to stop Communism or support democracy as the reasons for the war. Nonetheless, as Turse points out, the metric for success was the body count – supposedly the number of enemy combatants killed, but in reality, “anything that moves.” Perhaps the only way in which the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam was not a genocide was the success of its architects in portraying it as something else. The stated intent of the war was not the destruction of the Vietnamese people. So, let us call the Vietnam War a series of crimes against humanity. Generally, crimes against humanity are considered worse than mere war crimes, since they are systematic and large-scale.

But, getting back to Skip Burkle’s memoirs . . . in 2003, during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Burkle served as the Interim Health Minister. While Donald Rumsfeld declared that the U.S. had come as “liberators and not occupiers” – Burkle argued that Iraq was undergoing a “public health emergency,” with the implication that the U.S. needed to take responsibility for mitigating it. Burkle was quickly replaced.

How many Iraqis died during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq (2003-2011)? Over a million. (Of course, such estimates depend on the methodology, who is and who is not counted as a casualty, etc.)

Counterpunch for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

In his incisive 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell performs a brilliant autopsy on the art and craft of writing and communication. He focusses on how and what language manifests—or rather, fails to manifest—in political discourse. The master satirist, never one to mince words (though he’d be the first to appreciate the irony of that cliché), dissects the tendency of political language to change straightforward ideas into bloated, pretentious prose that obscures rather than enlightens.

Towards the end of this long essay lies a powerful statement: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”. Clearly, Orwell was talking about how politicians and other public figures twist words to hide ugly truths. When leaders want to justify terrible or unpleasant actions, they turn to a vague, fancy vocabulary. Instead of saying “we killed civilians”, they might say, “collateral damage occurred during military operations”. This kind of cloudy language makes it harder for people to understand what really happened or will happen.

Language shapes perception. It defines how we see the world and the forces that power it. In an ideal scenario, words like “development”, “reform”, and “progress” should inspire optimism, suggesting a march towards a better future. But in practice, these terms become euphemisms for destruction. Beneath their hopeful facades, they have hidden environmental devastation, the displacement of indigenous communities, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. If we strip away their idealistic veneer, we uncover a history of exploitation and loss—one that continues to this day.

Today, “development” conjures images of gleaming skyscrapers, bustling economies, and technological marvels. But its real cost is hidden or deliberately obscured. In the name of development, entire ecosystems have been decimated, indigenous lands have been seized, and the poorest have been driven into deeper destitution. Take the Amazon rainforest, dubbed the “lungs of the Earth”. Under Brazil’s uber-fast development policies, deforestation surged by 60 per cent in 2019 alone. That led to the loss of over 10,000 sq km of rainforest. Indigenous tribes, such as the Yanomami and Kayapó, have been violently displaced. Their unique cultures were destroyed, forever in most cases, in the rush for economic gain.

Take “reform”. It implies improvement. Yet, economic and political reforms worsen the problems they claim to solve. In the 1990s, structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and World Bank promised prosperity for developing nations. We all know what happened next. They gutted social welfare, privatised essential services, and deepened inequality. In sub-Saharan Africa, these “reforms” led to cuts in healthcare spending, resulting in the resurgence of diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.

Now, progress. We all know it’s meant to signify advancement, yet it is used as a justification for social and environmental harm. The first and perhaps most important example is the Industrial Revolution. Many hailed it as a milestone of human progress., but it was built on the backs of child labourers, coal miners suffering from black lung disease, and urban slums teeming with poverty. Today, Silicon Valley promises a “new era of progress” through artificial intelligence and automation, but there is increasing evidence to show that this vision excludes millions whose jobs are being replaced by machines and algorithms.

Climate change, the defining crisis of our time, is another byproduct of unchecked “progress”. The top 1 per cent of the world’s wealthiest individuals are reportedly responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 50 per cent combined. Yet, who bears the brunt of climate change? The poor and those least responsible for it—coastal communities, subsistence farmers, and indigenous groups. Greta Thunberg bluntly stated this truth when she said: “Our house is on fire.” Yet we continue to throw fuel on the flames in the name of economic growth.

In India, dear reader, the language of power and policy follows the same pattern Orwell condemned. It hides unpleasant truths behind a smokescreen of grand rhetoric. Successive governments threw up into the air “development”, “reforms”, and “progress” to justify sweeping changes. And history has taught us that these changes ended up benefiting a few at the expense of the many.

“Economic liberalisation” is arguably the funniest of them all. Since the landmark 1991 economic reforms, India has seen “growth”. Our GDP surged from $266 billion in 1991 to $3.73 trillion in 2023. This spike made the country the fifth largest economy in the world. But these figures also tell a story that not many want to be told. Of the staggering inequality that liberalisation has powered. According to Oxfam India’s 2023 report, the top 1 per cent of Indians own more than 40.5 per cent of the country’s total wealth, while the bottom 50 per cent own a mere 3 per cent. When our politicians and business leaders tout the country’s “economic miracle”, they rarely mention that millions remain trapped in precarious informal jobs with no social security, earning less than Rs.100 a day.

Arundhati Roy’s Capitalism: A Ghost Story told us how economic reforms in India have powered and propelled corporate interests while displacing the marginalised. She chronicled how vast swathes of land were seized for “industrialisation”, which forced Adivasi communities—who make up more than 8 per cent of the country’s population—into destitution.

As a student, this writer was a small part of the movement that exposed the dangers behind the famed Narmada Valley project. It was a chilling case in point. Marketed by many, including the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, as a “developmental success”, it submerged entire villages, displacing, by conservative estimates, over 320,000 people, most of them indigenous. [Ironically, this was a project where Modi agreed with the development vision of his bête noire Jawaharlal Nehru—that of dams being the temples of modern India.]

Similarly, the language of “urban renewal” has been deployed to justify the forced eviction of slum dwellers in major cities. Mumbai’s Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, sits on prime real estate. Successive governments have used terms like “redevelopment” to push for its demolition. They argued it would improve living conditions. Yet, studies by many, including researchers from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, showed that the relocated families end up in distant places, in poorly maintained housing projects with no access to livelihood opportunities. The rhetoric of “better living standards” conceals the brutal reality of dispossession.

If “development” has been, to use a term that’s become popular in the social media age, “weaponised” to mask displacement, “reform” has become the go-to euphemism for policies that disproportionately burden the vulnerable. The 2020 farm laws, which the Modi government termed “historic agricultural reforms”, triggered massive protests by farmers who feared corporate exploitation. The government claimed these laws would “empower” farmers, yet many studies, reports, and analyses by Frontline’s own reporters found that small farmers, who constitute 86 per cent of our agrarian sector, were at risk of losing price protections and bargaining power.

P. Sainath in Everybody Loves a Good Drought reminded me of another linguistic trick—the way bureaucratic jargon renders suffering invisible. He exposed how official reports use phrases like “distress migration” to describe desperate movements of people fleeing drought and poverty. By making it sound like an economic choice rather than a forced survival strategy, the state absolves itself of responsibility.

India’s super-fast industrial expansion has led to devastating impacts. Our mineral-rich tribal belts are prime targets. The destruction of forests in Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Jharkhand for mining projects is defended as “balancing development with conservation”. But statistics, even from the Forest Survey of India, show that between 2015 and 2023, the country lost over 9,00,000 hectares of forest cover. When activists protest, they are labelled “anti-development”.

Orwell was on point.

Frontline for more

SOUTHHALL BLACK SISTERS

Dear Members of the Women and Equalities Committee,

Re: Session on Gendered Islamophobia

Please see below a written submission that we would like the Committee to consider as part of the session on ‘gendered Islamophobia’ on Wednesday 15th January 2025. Please note that this was written within a short time frame and we would appreciate the opportunity to address the Committee on these concerns. In our submission, partly due to the constraints of time and partly in the knowledge that our perspective on this issue will be underrepresented, we have chosen to focus on the ways in which the framing of anti-Muslim racism as Islamophobia closes down legitimate critiques of religion which impacts on women and LGBT rights and freethought and expression. We also point to the overlapping ways in which racism affects both Muslim women and other Black and minoritised women to conclude that an exclusive focus on Muslim women does not do justice to either group.

About us
Southall Black Sisters was formed in 1979, at the height of the anti-racist struggle against fascist marches across the UK and the everyday reality of racist attacks. We continue to challenge racist violence and immigration controls and other state policies that question our right to live in the UK. We set up a not-for-profit, secular and inclusive organisation to meet the
needs of Black (Asian and African-Caribbean) women to highlight and challenge all forms of gender-related violence against women, empower them to gain more control over their lives; live without fear of violence and assert their human rights to justice, equality and freedom. We have supported women to challenge all aspects of the intersection of racism, sexism and poverty.

In 2024, Southall Black Sisters expanded its support services, providing critical support to 5,472 callers through our national helpline and over 800 women through direct funded projects. Our dedicated team has worked tirelessly to offer legal advice, counselling, and emergency accommodation, ensuring that each woman receives the holistic wraparound support she needs to rebuild her life.

One Law for All was launched on 10 December 2008, International Human Rights Day, to call on the UK Government to recognise that Sharia and religious courts are arbitrary and discriminatory against women and children in particular and that citizenship and human rights are non-negotiable. The Campaign aimed to end Sharia and all religious courts on the basis that they work against, and not for, equality and human rights. One Law for All promotes secularism and the separation of religion from the state, education, law and public policy as a minimum precondition for the respect of women’s rights.

The international and local context

Developments in the UK in relation to the term ‘Islamophobia’ cannot be fully understood without reference to the international context. The coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran marks the moment of the rise of pan-Islamism, forces which have been privileged, funded and promoted by the US, a foreign policy which has been described as McJihad (Mitchell, 2017)1 in its attempt to contain the perceived threat of communism as we have seen in Afghanistan and across the Middle-East. This unleashed Islamic fundamentalism which sought to establish an ‘anti-imperialist’ hegemony in the name of religion through acts of terrorism around the world, mainly in Muslim majority countries but also in the West (e.g. 9/11 and 7/7).

This severely and adversely impacted the Muslim communities in countries where the brutal War on Terror launched by Western governments, has provided an additional justification and fillip to racist and anti-immigrant sentiments and narratives, the context of all non-white
communities in post-colonial Britain.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism globally, in particular, (although all religions have been heading towards fundamentalism) and a growing hostility towards migrants, has provided domestic far-right and racist groups the pretext to sharpen their rhetoric and attacks on Muslims and specifically in terms of their religion. Patterns of violence against Sikhs wearing turbans, however, have shown that fascists on the street are rarely able to distinguish between Muslims and other minorities that wear head coverings.

The experience of heightened racism and sophisticated fundamentalist mobilisations lies behind the increased assertion of religious identities, a response that has in turn benefited the growth of religious fundamentalism. We have felt the impact of these locally as minoritised communities have turned to the Right, pushing out important histories of secularism and ushering in new waves of religious conservatism and fundamentalism that seek to police women and children and subject them to greater mechanisms of control. In this encounter between the far-right and besieged Muslim communities, valid critiques of religion (as crushing women’s rights and the rights of sexual minorities) have been sidelined and dismissed as another manifestation of ‘Islamophobia’

Southhall Black Sisters for more

by KIT KLARENBERG

Newly leaked documents expose Washington’s ongoing, covert push for regime change in Iran. With millions funneled into secretive initiatives, the US aims to infiltrate civil society, manipulate political participation, and engineer unrest, all while keeping its Iranian beneficiaries in the shadows.

A bombshell leak reviewed by The Cradle exposes the depths of Washington’s long-running campaign to destabilize the Islamic Republic. 

For years, the US State Department’s Near East Regional Democracy fund (NERD) has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into covert operations aimed at toppling Tehran’s government – without success. Details on where this money goes and who benefits are typically concealed. However, this leak provides a rare glimpse into NERD’s latest regime-change blueprint.

Covert funding for Iran’s opposition

The document in question is a classified US State Department invitation for bids from private contractors and intelligence-linked entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID. 

Circulated discreetly in August 2023, it solicited proposals to “support Iranian civil society, civic advocates, and all Iranian people in exercising their civil and political rights during and beyond” the next year’s electoral period, “in order to increase viable avenues for democratic participation.”

NERD summoned applicants to “propose activities” that would “strengthen civil society’s efforts to organize around issues of importance to the Iranian people during the election period and hold elected and unelected leaders accountable to citizen demands.” 

The State Department also wished to educate citizens on purported “flaws of Iranian electoral processes.” Submissions were to “pay special attention to developing strategies and activities that increase women’s participation in civil society, advocacy, rule of law, and good governance efforts.”

The document is filled with lofty, euphemistic language. NERD claims to champion “participatory governance, economic reform, and educational advancement,” aiming to cultivate “a more responsive and responsible Iranian government that is internally stable and externally a peaceful and productive member of the community of nations.” In other words, another compliant western client state that serves imperial interests in West Asia rather than challenging them.

NERD envisaged successful applicants coordinating with “governments, civil society organizations, community leaders, youth and women activists, and private sector groups” in these grand plans. 

State Department financing would produce “increased diversity of uncensored media” in Iran, while expanding “access to digital media through the use of secure communications infrastructure, tools, and techniques.” This would, it was forecast, improve the “ability of civil society to organize and advocate for citizens’ interests.”

‘Human subjects’

NERD viewed Iran’s 2024 election cycle and the campaigning period as “opportunities” for civil society infiltration. The plan envisioned a network of “civic actors” engaged in electoral strategies ranging from “electoral participation” to “electoral non-participation” – in other words, either mobilizing voters or undermining turnout. 

Meanwhile, “technical support and training” would be offered to aspiring female, youth, and ethnic minority leaders at all levels of governance – though no “currently serving” Iranian government official was eligible for assistance.

Once in place, this network of Iranian regime change operatives would, it was hoped, organize “mock national referendums” and other “unofficial” political action outside the Islamic Republic’s formal structures to highlight the alleged disparity between government action and public will. 

Iranians would also be assisted in drafting “manifestos” on the local population’s “unmet needs and priorities.” Reference to how crippling US and EU-imposed sanctions contribute significantly to public discontent in Tehran was predictably absent. Instead, it stated:

The Cradle for more

by SIMON MAKIN

Breakthroughs in synthetic biology could create mirror versions of natural molecules, with devastating consequences for life on Earth

A category of synthetic organisms dubbed “mirror life,” whose component molecules are mirror images of their natural counterpart, could pose unprecedented risks to human life and ecosystems, according to a perspective article by leading experts, including Nobel Prize winners. The article, published in Science on December 12, is accompanied by a lengthy report detailing their concerns.

Mirror life has to do with the ubiquitous phenomenon in the natural world in which a molecule or another object cannot simply be superimposed on another. For example, your left hand can’t simply be turned over to match your right hand. This handedness is encountered throughout the natural world.

Groups of molecules of the same type tend to have the same handedness. The nucleotides that make up DNA are nearly always right-handed, for instance, while proteins are composed of left-handed amino acids.

Handedness, more formally known as chirality, is hugely important in biology because interactions between biomolecules rely on them having the expected form. For example, if a protein’s handedness is reversed, it cannot interact with partner molecules, such as receptors on cells. “Think of it like hands in gloves,” says Katarzyna Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the article and the accompanying technical report, which is almost 300 pages long. “My left glove won’t fit my right hand.”

The authors are worried about mirror bacteria, the simplest life-form their concerns apply to. The capability to create mirror bacteria does not yet exist and is “at least a decade away,” they write, but progress is underway. Researchers can already synthesize mirror biomolecules, such as DNA and proteins. At the same time, progress has been made toward creating synthetic cells from nonmirrored components. In 2010 researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in California installed synthetic DNA into a cell to create the first cell with a fully synthetic genome.

Further breakthroughs would be required to create mirror life, but they are achievable with substantial investment and effort. “We’re not relying on scientific breakthroughs that might never happen. I can draw you a list of things that need to happen to build a mirror cell,” Adamala says. “It’s not science fiction anymore.” Adamala previously worked toward creating mirror cells, but she now fears that if mirror bacteria are created, the consequences could include irreversible ecological damage and loss of life. The article’s authors, who include experts in immunology, synthetic biology, plant pathology, evolutionary biology, and ecology, as well as two Nobel laureates, are calling for researchers, policymakers, regulators and society at large to start discussing the best path forward to better understand and mitigate the risks the authors identify. Unless evidence emerges that mirror life would not pose extraordinary dangers, they recommend that research aimed at creating mirror bacteria should not be conducted.

Scientific American for more

by DEAN BAKER

Elon Musk has been running wild with his DOGE team, on the one hand pretending shock over facts that were always public information, and on the other hand getting into our tax, banking, and medical records where he has no business being. However, the unifying theme of his quest is supposedly to shut down the deep state, and by some accounts, dismantle the federal government.

Many liberal types are all too willing to accept the latter claim. The idea is that Musk and his crew somehow want a world without government. This is self-serving crap that no one who is not on his team should ever accept.

These self-imagined libertarians want government for all sorts of things. The small grain of truth to the story is that they don’t want government social programs that help people who are not rich. Musk’s view is that the government should only be there to make him and his fellow billionaires richer.

Starting with my favorite, government-granted patent and copyright monopolies come from the government. I know the beneficiaries want us to believe that they came from God, but those of us who have not taken a vow of stupidity know better.

And these government-granted monopolies are hugely important in determining the distribution of income. In the case of pharmaceutical products alone, patents increase what we pay to those in a position to benefit from this monopoly by close to $500 billion a year. That’s roughly half of what we pay out each year in Social Security benefits.

And that’s just the beginning, we pay big bucks for medical equipment, iPhones, computers, software and many other products because of patent and copyright monopolies. If we add all of these together, we are almost certainly talking about well over $1 trillion a year, close to half of all after-tax corporate profits.

Does Elon Musk and his band of anti-government libertarians want to get rid of these government-granted monopolies? To be clear, these monopolies serve a purpose in promoting innovation and creative work. But they are not the only way to provide this incentive, and more importantly for the question at hand, this does not change the fact that these monopolies are government.

Next let’s ask our billionaire libertarians in finance if they want to get rid of government deposit insurance for banks and other financial institutions. There don’t seem to be lots of libertarians pushing for that.

And when banks manage to blow themselves up through their greed and incompetence, as happened in a big way with the housing bubble and its collapse in 2008-09, and more recently with the Silicon Valley Bank panic in 2023, the libertarian billionaires are first in line demanding the government come to their rescue.

This is only part of the story of how the government makes money for finance. As Musk showed us this week, it can create markets for the industry by not providing more efficient competition, as he sought to shut down the I.R.S.’s free direct file system. There is a much bigger story here with Medicare. We could have a much more efficient insurance system if we had Medicare for All, but that would wipe out the private insurance industry. Instead, we are going the other way and whittling down traditional Medicare and increasing costs by pushing people back to private insurers with Medicare advantage.

Elon Musk wants to get rid of all government regulation. That’s cool, so everyone can use whatever broadcast frequency they want whenever they want. That will be great news for radio and television networks. I gather Musk wants to get rid of the federal air traffic control system that determines flight patterns and take off and landing paths at airports. Oh, I guess Musk probably doesn’t mean those regulations.

This list can be extended at length. Section 230 protection for Elon Musk’s social media platform didn’t come from God. Labor laws in the U.S. that prohibit secondary boycotts (which shut down Tesla’s operation in Sweden) are also not God-given.

Even “regulations” that limit greenhouse gas emissions can be seen as simply a form of property rights. People don’t have a right to dump their sewage on their neighbor’s lawns. In the same way, they don’t have the right to dump greenhouse gases into our atmosphere that destroy the planet.

And yeah, the corporate structure itself is created by the government. We can all form partnerships with our buddies where we act collectively in forming a business. But then our names are associated with all our business dealings, and we are personally liable for all the partnerships liabilities. How many people would be throwing their money at Elon Musk and Tesla if they could be personally sued for whatever idiocy Musk got himself into?

The point here should be clear to anyone not totally blinded by ideology; government regulations structure the market. A modern economy cannot exist without government regulation. When Elon Musk or anyone else says they want to get rid of government regulation they are lying. It’s that simple.

It is absurd that people on the left have allowed the Musk billionaire libertarians of the world to pretend they are anti-government. They just want a government that only serves their interest rather than society as a whole.

CEPR for more

by JONATHAN COOK

During Netanyahu’s visit, Trump dropped Washington’s sugar coating of Israel’s 15-month genocidal destruction of Gaza. This was always about ethnic cleansing

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House this week tore the mask off 16 months of gaslighting by western leaders and by the entirety of the western establishment media.

United States President Donald Trump finally dropped Washington’s sugar coating of Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.

This was always, he told us, a slaughter made in the US. In his words, Washington will now “take over” Gaza and be the one to develop it.

And the goal of the slaughter was always ethnic cleansing.

Palestinians, he said, would be “settled” in a place where they would not have to be “worried about dying every day” – that is, being murdered by Israel using US-supplied bombs.

Gaza, meanwhile, would become the “Riviera of the Middle East”, with the “world’s people” – he meant rich white people like himself – living in luxury beachfront properties in their stead.

If the US “owns” Gaza, as Trump insists, it will also own Gaza’s territorial waters, where there just happen to be fabulous quantities of untapped gas to enrich the enclave’s new “owner”. Palestinians have, of course, never been allowed to develop their gas fields.

Trump may even have let slip inadvertently the true death toll inflicted by Israel’s rampage. He referred to “all of them – there’s 1.7 million or maybe 1.8 million people” being forced out of Gaza.

The population count before 7 October 2023 was between 2.2 and 2.3 million. Where are the other half a million Palestinians? Under the rubble? In unmarked graves? Eaten by feral dogs? Vaporised by 2,000lb US bombs?

Wrecking spree

Trump presented his ethnic cleansing plan as if he had the best interests of the Palestinians at heart. As if he was saving them from a disaster-prone earthquake zone, not from a genocidal neighbour he counts as Washington’s closest ally.

His comments were greeted with shock and horror in western and Arab capitals. Everyone is distancing themselves from his blatant backing for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population.

But these are the same leaders who kept silent through 15 months of Israel’s levelling of Gaza’s homes, hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries.

Then, they spoke of Israel’s right to “defend itself” even as Israel caused so much damage the United Nations warned it would take up to 80 years to rebuild the territory – that is, four generations.

What did they think would happen at the end of the wrecking spree they armed and fully supported? Did they imagine the people of Gaza could survive for years without homes, or hospitals, or schools, or water systems, or electricity?

They knew this was the outcome: destitute Palestinians would either risk death in the ruins or be forced to move out.

And western politicians not only let it happen, they told us it was “proportionate”, it was necessary. They smeared anyone who dissented, anyone who called for a ceasefire, anyone who went on a protest march as an antisemite and a Jew hater.

In the US and elsewhere, students – many of them Jewish – staged mass protests on their campuses. In response, university administrations sent in the riot police, beating them. Afterwards, the universities expelled the student organisers and denied them their degrees.

And yet western politicians and media outlets think now is the time to express shock at Trump’s statements?

Still dying

Trump’s appalling, savage honesty simply highlights the depths of mendacity over the preceding 16 months. After all, who did not understand that the three-phase Gaza ceasefire, which came into effect on 19 January, was a lie too.

It was a lie even before the ink dried on the page.

It was a lie because the ceasefire was officially intended not just to create a pause in the bloodshed. It was also supposed to allow for the mitigation of harm to the civilian population, bring the hostilities to an end, and lead to the reconstruction of Gaza.

None of that will happen – at least not for the Palestinians, as Trump has made clear.

Despite its claims, Israel has clearly not ceased firing munitions into Gaza. It has continued killing and maiming Palestinians, including children, even if the carpet bombing has ended for the time being.

In media coverage, these deaths and injuries are never referred to as what they are: violations of the ceasefire.

Israeli snipers may no longer be shooting Palestinian children in the head, as happenedroutinely for 15 months. But the young are still dying.

Without homes, without access to properly functioning hospitals and with only limited access to food and water, Gaza’s children are perishing – mostly out of view, mostly uncounted – from the cold, from disease, from starvation.

Even Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, says it will likely take 10-15 years to rebuild Gaza.

But the people of Gaza don’t have that much time.

This month Israel instituted a ban on the activities of the United Nation’s aid agency, Unrwa, in all of the Palestinian territories it occupies illegally.

Unrwa is the only agency capable of alleviating the worst excesses of the hellscape Israel has created in Gaza. Without it, the recovery process will be further hampered – and more of Gaza’s people will die waiting for help.

A blind eye

But in truth, Netanyahu has no intention of maintaining the “ceasefire” beyond the first stage, the exchange of hostages. Afterwards, he has all but promised to restart the slaughter.

Dissident Voice for more