Google Translate has become among the handiest apps for a good reason. It discards the cliché about the meaning getting lost in translation and helps strangers to connect in a naturally multilingual world.
Many Indians who love Urdu poetry can do so because it was translated
into English or reset in the Devanagari script. Same with Persian and
Latin classics, not to speak of Russian literary treasures. The way some
Indians talk knowledgeably about Helen of Troy often sounds as though
she was kidnapped by an island king in the neighbourhood.
I asked Graham Earnshaw, my news agency’s Asia editor in the 1990s,
to let me cover the raging Islamist insurgency in Tajikistan, but he
tossed me a disarming question. “Do you speak Russian or Tajik?” As I
could speak neither of the amazing languages, how was I hoping to
report, say, an assault on the women of a minority community in a remote
Tajik village?
There’s always another way of seeing the problem, though. Most
foreign journalists assigned to South Asia, for example, speak little or
no local language. Graham’s question, therefore, was a non-sequitur.
Besides, there was a larger point at stake. The editor seemed surprised
when he learnt that I used translators anyway, even to cover a story in
Delhi’s neighbourhoods — not the stories journalists pick up along the
highways, where dhabas and paanwallahs deal with assorted clients via a
handy mishmash of connecting phrases and languages.
One could argue that an exceptionally erudite scholar of Hindi would
perhaps feel challenged traversing India’s sprawling ‘Hindi heartland’,
also called the ‘cow belt’. Try to connect conversations from, say, the
areas bordering Pakistan in western Rajasthan to the eastern flank of
Maithili-speaking Bihar, both notionally Hindi-speaking states, and come
back with a cogent narrative.
Prof Higgins would struggle. It’s difficult to imagine a ‘Hindi
heartland’ in which a Brij-speaker from a Mathura village in UP can
communicate her story to an Awadhi-speaking village belle in Ayodhya,
also in UP. It’s a tricky proposition at the very least.
Women writers in South Asia are legion. They write in myriad languages but are read in many more.
And this is what makes the award of the Booker Prize last week to
Banu Mushtaq so important. Her collection of short stories was written
in Kannada, a South Indian language with a dazzling cultural pedigree.
It was crucial that the 12 stories selected from a corpus stretching
over three decades of writing were published as Heart Lamp in English,
the translation done by a scholar of Kannada and English.
(rom left to right) Edward Said, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre IMAGE/ritical-theory.com/Duck Duck Go
Once
the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite
recently, almost faded from view. He was already being attacked for his
‘blindness’ about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and
even his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism,
voluntarism and sheer energetic reach. Sartre’s whole career was
offensive both to the so-called Nouveaux Philosophes, whose mediocre
attainments had only a fervid anti-Communism to attract any attention,
and to the post-structuralists and Post-Modernists who, with few
exceptions, had lapsed into a sullen technological narcissism deeply at
odds with Sartre’s populism and his heroic public politics. The immense
sprawl of Sartre’s work as novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer,
philosopher, political intellectual, engaged activist, seemed to repel
more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs,
he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the
least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were
forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy
appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in
Paris, as well as his extraordinary range and literary distinction (for
which he both won, and rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature). He
had become a maligned ex-celebrity, except in the Anglo-American world,
where he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always
read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and
memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, not quite as chic and
compelling as (the far less talented) Camus.
Then,
as with many things French, the fashion began to change back, or so it
seemed at a distance. Several books about him appeared, and once again
he has (perhaps only for a moment) become the subject of talk, if not
exactly of study or reflection. For my generation he has always been one
of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th
century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service
of nearly every progressive cause of our time. Yet he seemed neither
infallible nor prophetic. On the contrary, one admired Sartre for the
efforts he made to understand situations and, when necessary, to offer
solidarity to political causes. He was never condescending or evasive,
even if he was given to error and overstatement. Nearly everything he
wrote is interesting for its sheer audacity, its freedom (even its
freedom to be verbose) and its generosity of spirit.
There
is one obvious exception, which I’d like to describe here. I’m prompted
to do so by two fascinating, if dispiriting discussions of his visit to
Egypt in early 1967 that appeared last month in Al-Ahram Weekly.
One was in a review of Bernard-Henry Lévy’s recent book on Sartre; the
other was a review of the late Lotfi al-Kholi’s account of that visit
(al-Kholi, a leading intellectual, was one of Sartre’s Egyptian hosts).
My own rather forlorn experience with Sartre was a very minor episode in
a very grand life, but it is worth recalling both for its ironies and
for its poignancy.
…
Foucault very quickly made it clear to me that he had nothing to contribute to the seminar and would be leaving directly for his daily bout of research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was pleased to see my book Beginnings on his bookshelves, which were brimming with a neatly arranged mass of materials, including papers and journals. Although we chatted together amiably it wasn’t until much later (in fact almost a decade after his death in 1984) that I got some idea why he had been so unwilling to say anything to me about Middle Eastern politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his horror at the ‘anti-semitic’ anti-Israel riots of the time, common in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague of his in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a different story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young students. I still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. ‘Very exciting, very strange, crazy,’ I recall him saying about those early days of the Islamic Revolution. I think (perhaps mistakenly) I heard him say that in Teheran he had disguised himself in a wig, although a short while after his articles appeared, he rapidly distanced himself from all things Iranian. Finally, in the late 1980s, I was told by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends, had fallen out over the question of Palestine, Foucault expressing support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians.
…
One further point. A few weeks ago I happened to catch part of Bouillon de culture, Bernard Pivot’s weekly discussion programme, screened on French television, and broadcast in the US
a short time later. The programme was about Sartre’s slow posthumous
rehabilitation in the face of continuing criticism of his political
sins. Bernard-Henry Lévy, than whom in quality of mind and political
courage there could scarcely be anyone more different from Sartre, was
there to flog his approving study of the older philosopher. (I confess
that I haven’t read it, and do not soon plan to.) He was not so bad
really, said the patronising B-HL; there were things about him, after all, that were consistently admirable and politically correct. B-HL
intended this to balance what he considered the well-founded criticism
of Sartre (made into a nauseating mantra by Paul Johnson) as having
always been wrong on Communism. ‘For example,’ B-HL intoned, ‘Sartre’s record on Israel was perfect: he never deviated and he remained a complete supporter of the Jewish state.’
For
reasons that we still cannot know for certain, Sartre did indeed remain
constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism. Whether that was because he
was afraid of seeming anti-semitic, or because he felt guilt about the
Holocaust, or because he allowed himself no deep appreciation of the
Palestinians as victims of and fighters against Israel’s injustice, or
for some other reason, I shall never know. All I do know is that as a
very old man he seemed pretty much the same as he had been when somewhat
younger: a bitter disappointment to every (non-Algerian) Arab who
admired him. Certainly Bertrand Russell was better than Sartre, and in
his last years (though led on and, some would say, totally manipulated
by my former Princeton classmate and one-time friend, Ralph Schoenman)
actually took positions critical of Israel’s policies towards the Arabs.
I guess we need to understand why great old men are liable to succumb
either to the wiles of younger ones, or to the grip of an unmodifiable
political belief. It’s a dispiriting thought, but it’s what happened to
Sartre. With the exception of Algeria, the justice of the Arab cause
simply could not make an impression on him, and whether it was entirely
because of Israel or because of a basic lack of sympathy – cultural or
perhaps religious – it’s impossible for me to say. In this he was quite
unlike his friend and idol Jean Genet, who celebrated his strange
passion for Palestinians in an extended sojourn with them and by writing
the extraordinary ‘Quatre Heures à Sabra et Chatila’ and Le Captif amoureux.
A year after our brief and disappointing Paris encounter Sartre died. I vividly remember how much I mourned his death.
Wikileaks exposes Israel and US: ‘Tulsi Gabbard [Director of National Intelligence (DNI)] confirmed weeks back that Iran is not building nuclear weapons’ IMAGE/Financial Express/Duck Duck Go
The expansion of the war from Palestine to Iran, which began on 13
June, signals an Israeli obsession persisting for four decades. As the
Trump administration was negotiating in bad faith with Iran over its
nuclear programme, the Israeli regime took advantage of an interval to
bomb Tehran, assassinating leading scientists, a senior general and
other officials, some of them engaged in the talks. After a few
unconvincing denials, Trump admitted that the US had been informed of
the attack ahead of time. Now the West is backing Israel’s latest
onslaught, despite what Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump-appointed Director of
National Intelligence, said as recently as 25 March: ‘The Intelligence
Community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon
and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons
programme he suspended in 2003.’
The IAEA inspectors know full well that there are no nuclear weapons.
They have simply been acting as willing spies for the US and Israel,
providing pen-portraits of the senior scientists who have now been
killed. Iran has belatedly realised that it was pointless letting them
into the country and a parliamentary bill has been drafted to throw them
out. The country’s leadership had nothing to gain from sacrificing this
part of their sovereignty, yet they clung to the lame half-hope,
half-belief that if they did as the Americans wanted, they might get the
sanctions lifted and a US-guaranteed peace.
Their own historical experience should have taught them otherwise.
Iran’s elected government was overthrown with covert Anglo-American aid
in 1953 and its secular opposition destroyed. After a quarter of a
century of Western-backed dictatorship, the Pahlavi dynasty was finally
overthrown. But a year after the 1979 Revolution, the West – as well as
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – funded Iraq to start a war against Iran and
topple the new regime. It lasted eight years and left half a million
people dead, mostly on the Iranian side. Hundreds of Iraqi missiles hit
Iranian cities and economic targets, especially the oil industry. In the
war’s final stages, the US destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in
the Gulf and, for good measure, shot down a civilian passenger plane.
Britain loyally helped in the cover-up.
Since then, the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy has always put the
regime’s survival at its centre. During the Iran–Iraq war, the clerics
had no hesitation in buying arms from their avowed enemies, Israel
included. Their solidarity with oppositional forces has been fragmentary
and opportunist, devoid of any consistent anti-imperialist strategy,
except in their lonely but crucial capacity as a defender of Palestinian
rights, in a region where every single Arab government has capitulated
to the hegemon. On 15 June, soon after the Israeli attack, there was a
remarkable procession of over fifty donkeys in Gaza, the animals
garlanded and covered with silk and satin robes; as they were led down
the street, children stroked them with genuine affection. Why?
‘Because’, explained the organiser, ‘they have been more help to us than
all the Arab states put together’.
Following the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranians
no doubt hoped that collaborating with Washington – clearing the path
for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar – would win them
some respite. In many respects, the ‘War on Terror’ was not a bad time
for the Islamic Republic. Its standing in the region soared together
with oil prices, its enemies in Baghdad and Kabul were brutally removed,
and the Shia groups it had been backing since 1979 were brought to
power in neighbouring Iraq. It’s difficult to imagine that neither the
Bush politburo (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice) nor its unofficial US-based Arab
advisors (Kanaan Makiya, Fouad Ajmi) could have foreseen this outcome,
but that appears to have been the case. The first non-Western foreigner
to visit the Green Zone as an honoured guest was President Ahmedinejad.
Both Sunni and Shia nationalists came together to oppose the
occupying forces, firing rockets and mortar at the US embassy. It was
Iranian state intervention that split this opposition, ensuring that a
united Iraqi resistance movement descended into a futile and destructive
civil war. Muqtada al-Sadr, a key Shia leader in Iraq, had been shocked
by the atrocities in Fallujah and led a series of popular uprisings
against the US coalition. At the height of the conflict, he was invited
to visit Iran and ended up staying – or being kept there? – for the next
four years. The subsequent entry of ISIS onto the battlefield
strengthened this tactical US–Iran alliance, with the Pentagon providing
air support to aid the assaults being carried out by the 60,000 strong
Shia militants on the ground.
Most of these forces were under the indirect command Qassem
Soleimani, who was in regular communication with General David Petraeus.
Soleimani was a gifted strategist, yet susceptible to flattery,
especially from the Great Satan. He was the main thinker behind the
expansionist tactics deployed by Tehran after 9/11, but his tendency to
boast to his US counterparts alienated some of them, especially when he
explained accurately how the Iranians had foreseen and exploited most US
mistakes in the region. Spencer Ackerman’s description rings true:
He was pragmatic enough to cooperate with Washington when it suited
Iranian interests, as destroying the Caliphate did, and was prepared to
clash with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as with
Soleimani’s backstopping of Syria’s Bashar el Assad or earlier with IED
modifications that killed hundreds of US troops and maimed more.
Soleimani’s impunity infuriated the Security State and the Right. His
success stung.
Yet even as Iran’s regional power increased, social tensions at home
were rising. The revolution had excited hopes at first, but the ensuing
war with Iraq was debilitating. Partly for this reason, Iran took a
tougher stance on the nuclear question, asserting its sovereign right to
enrich uranium. Domestically, this was seen as a means of reuniting the
population. Externally, it has a perfectly logical defensive purpose:
the country was in a vulnerable position, encircled by atomic states
(India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel) as well as a string of American
bases with potential or actual nuclear stockpiles in Qatar, Iraq,
Turkey, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Nuclear-armed US aircraft carriers
and submarines patrolled the waters off its southern coast.
Totally forgotten in the West is the fact that the nuclear programme
was an initiative first taken by the Shah in the 1970s with US support.
One of the companies involved was a fiefdom of Dick Cheney, Bush’s
sleazy Vice President. Khomeini halted the project when he came to
power, considering it un-Islamic. But he later relented and operations
restarted. As the programme ramped up in the mid-2000s, Iran and its
supreme leader found that their attempts to placate Washington had come
to nothing. They were still in the West’s crosshairs. The Bush White
House gave the impression that either a direct US strike against Iran,
or an attack via its tried-and-tested regional relay, Israel, might soon
be on the cards. The Israelis, for their part, were virulently opposed
to anyone challenging their nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Iran’s
leader was described by the Israeli government and its loyal media
networks as a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘new Hitler’. It was a hurriedly
manufactured crisis, of the sort in which the West has become a
specialist. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. The US had nuclear weapons,
as did the UK, France and Israel; yet Iran’s search for the technology
required for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence provoked moral
panic.
In the scramble by European powers to enhance their standing with
Washington following the invasion of Iraq, France, Germany and Britain
were keen to prove their mettle by forcing Tehran to accept stringent
limits on its nuclear activity. The Khatami regime immediately
capitulated, imagining it was really being invited in from the cold. In
December 2003, they signed the ‘Additional Protocol’ demanded by the
EU3, agreeing to a ‘voluntary suspension’ of the right to enrichment
guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Again, it made no
difference. Within months, the IAEA condemned them for having failed to
ratify it and Israel was boasting of its intention to ‘destroy Natanz’.
In the summer of 2004, a large bipartisan majority in the US Congress
passed a resolution for ‘all appropriate measures’ to prevent an Iranian
weapons programme and there was speculation about an ‘October surprise’
in the runup to that year’s election.
At the time, I argued inthe Guardian that ‘to face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires an intelligent and far-sighted strategy – not the current rag-bag of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests of the clerics’. A number of liberal and socialist Iranian intellectuals wrote back from Tehran to express strong agreement, especially with my conclusion:
Top Israeli lawmakers have accused their government of laundering massive sums through a shadowy network of US humanitarian and mercenary orgs. The weaponized aid initiative is the linchpin of Israel’s plan to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by forcing the starving population into concentration camp-like hubs.
Israel’s scheme to commandeer aid
distribution in Gaza ended in chaos on May 27, with Israeli soldiers
reportedly opening fire on stampeding crowds of hungry Palestinians
after just 8000 boxes of rations were handed out by an opaque
organization calling itself the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Thousands of starved Gazans stormed the dystopian Israeli-American aid complex in west Rafah after being forced to stand in endless queues under the scorching sun inside a fenced camp, subjected to biometric surveillance.
Founded this February in Switzerland
under a cloud of mystery, GHF serves as an umbrella for a network of
private mercenary firms which Israel is using to supplant the role of
the United Nations in feeding Palestinians after bringing them to the
brink of starvation.
At the moment, the public has no idea who is funding the opaque aid boondoggle. A GHF spokesman told the Washington Post “the foundation has already secured $100 million from an undisclosed donor.”
Right-wing Israeli opposition figure
and Member of Knesset Avigdor Lieberman proclaimed that GHF’s mysterious
financial angel was, in fact, the Israeli government. “The money for
humanitarian aid comes from the Mossad and the Ministry of Defense,”
Lieberman wrote on Twitter/X, complaining, “Hundreds of millions of dollars at the expense of Israeli citizens.”
Israeli opposition figure and former Deputy PM
Avigdor Lieberman says the Mossad and Israeli Defense Ministry are
covertly funding the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the aid boondoggle
founded in Switzerland and run by a former USAID administrator with
Trump admin political cover pic.twitter.com/tOWa8E6HzM
Yair Lapid, a Member of Knesset and de facto leader of Israel’s loyal opposition, has accused
the Israeli government of funding two “shell companies,” pointing to
GHF and the private mercenary firm, Safe Reach Solutions, which was
founded by former CIA field operative Phillip Reilly. Two former US
officials told the Qatari-owned outlet Middle East Eye that Reilly “had won the trust of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several Israeli businessmen close to him.”
If true, this would mean Israel’s
military-intelligence apparatus is effectively laundering massive sums
of money through a weaponized aid scheme that forms the linchpin of its
plan to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza. A leaked internal GHF document acknowledged that
the food distribution centers and residential compounds it was
constructing in Gaza could be perceived as “‘concentration camps’ with
biometrics.’”
The GHF model appears integral to
Israel’s stated plan to occupy 75% of the Gaza Strip, forcing starving
and homeless Palestinians into what its military has branded as “humanitarian islands”
designed to “divide and rule” the decimated enclave. It is also a clear
attempt at replacing UNRWA, the United Nations agency that has tended
to the needs of Gaza’s refugee population since 1949, and which the
Israeli Knesset designated as a terrorist organization in 2024.
Israel’s “humanitarian island” plan openly aims to “divide and rule” Gaza by preventing its population’s movement
GHF’s creation can be traced directly
to the Israeli government’s COGAT office, which presides over the siege
of Gaza, as well an Israeli entrepreneur named Liran Tancman, who was
described in one report
as “a reservist in the IDF’s 8200 signals intelligence unit, who called
for using biometric identification systems outside the distribution
hubs to vet Palestinian civilians.”
This is the opening stanza of “I, Too” by Langston Hughes, a
prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. As you can see, the poem
speaks powerfully about racial inequality, identity, exclusion, and, of
course, resistance.
Obviously, Hughes’ kitchen is more than a
room. It’s a metaphor for the spaces where societies have historically
banished those deemed different, dangerous, “disgusting” or simply
inconvenient. The act of sending someone to eat in the kitchen when
company comes is “othering” in its most domestic, mundane form. Yet this
simple gesture contains the entire infrastructure of exclusion.
The
term “othering” itself is relatively recent, coined in academic
circles, but the practice is as old as the first human who pointed at
their neighbour and said, “That one’s not like us”. It’s the
psychological and social process by which we create an “us” by defining a
“them”—turning human beings into simplified categories that justify
everything from mild social awkwardness to genocide.
Edward Said’s groundbreaking 1978 work Orientalism,
which we read mainly as a critique of Western scholarship, also told us
about how knowledge itself could become a weapon of othering. Said
showed how European scholars created an entire academic discipline
around the idea that the “East” was fundamentally different: exotic,
mysterious, backwards, and, crucially, in need of Western guidance. The
Orient became not a place but a projection, a screen onto which the West
could project its own fantasies and fears.
What made Said’s
analysis so devastating was how he showed that this prejudice was
dressed up as objective scholarship, complete with footnotes and
university chairs. The “Oriental” was constructed as eternally
different, trapped in time, unable to speak for themselves. It was
othering with a PhD.
The academic othering had real-world
consequences. As Said noted: “Every European, in what he could say about
the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost
totally ethnocentric.” The knowledge produced in European universities
justified colonial rule, military intervention, and economic
exploitation. The Orient needed to be managed, civilised, and
controlled. For its own good, of course.
Frantz Fanon, writing
from his experience as a Black psychiatrist in colonial Algeria,
understood othering from the inside out. In Black Skin, White Masks,
he described the psychological violence of being constantly seen as
Other. “When people like me, they like me ‘in spite of my colour’. When
they dislike me; they point out that it isn’t because of my colour.
Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.”
The Black
person, Fanon said, was forced to see themselves through white eyes, to
internalise the very gaze that diminished them. This created what Fanon
called a “sociogenic” trauma. In simple words, this is psychological
damage inflicted not by individual pathology but by social structure
itself.
This is why the kitchen where Hughes’ darker brother eats
alone becomes a state of mind, a way of understanding oneself as
fundamentally displaced from the main table of humanity.
New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani says New Yorkers “are ready for a new generation of leadership that puts working people first.”
There are over three thousand New Yorkers here this evening — and thousands more watching from home. New Yorkers who believe that living here shouldn’t be a daily grind of anxiety. New Yorkers who are ready to turn the page on years of corruption and incompetence. To reject the politics of distraction and fear, of big money and small vision, of cowardice and collaboration in the face of Trump’s authoritarianism. New Yorkers who are ready for a new generation of leadership that puts working people first.
My brothers and sisters, you are the beating heart of this
campaign. You have climbed six floor walkups and braved the pouring rain
to canvass our city, sharing our message with the very New Yorkers
you’ve lived alongside for years but never had the chance to meet. And
make no mistake, this campaign is reaching every corner of this city.
I see the work each of you do when New Yorkers wave excitedly from bus windows and shout “freeze the rent” from moving cars.
I see it when volunteers who have never participated in politics
before dedicate their every Sunday night to spreading our message. I see
it when thousands of New Yorkers post proud screenshots of their first
ever ballots. And I feel it when the aunties and uncles who have long
felt abandoned by a broken status quo pull me aside to tell me that
finally, they’re excited to believe again.
We stand on the verge of a victory that will resonate across the country and the world. Make no mistake: this victory will be historic, not just because of who I am — a Muslim immigrant and proud democratic socialist — but for what we will do: make this city affordable for everyone.
I think of a woman I met on the BX33 in the Bronx, who said to me: “I
used to love New York — but now it’s just where I live.” We’re going to
make this city one that working people can love once again.
That’s who I’m thinking about tonight: the New Yorkers who make this
city run. For after this rally, as many of us sleep, millions of our
neighbors will step out onto moon-lit streets across our city.
Nurses working the night shift will put on their scrubs and save
lives. City workers will clean subway stations and pick up our trash.
Office buildings will be made new again, as the midnight shift scrubs
and polishes in the dark.
Many of these New Yorkers are immigrants, who traveled to this city
from faraway countries with nothing in their pockets except a dream of a
better life. And even more of them will spend the entire night
tirelessly working, and return home carrying the burden that it still
isn’t enough. The sun rises, the bills continue to climb, and the stress
never seems to fade.
If New York truly is the city that never sleeps, we deserve a mayor
who fights for those of us who labor at every single hour of the day. I
will be that mayor.
When we launched this campaign on a cold October evening,
few thought we could win. Only a couple more could even pronounce my
name. Andrew Cuomo still can’t.
The so-called experts said we’d be lucky to break 5 percent. But I always knew that we would build a campaign like this.
So when a disgraced former governor questions whether or not we can
lead this city, I look at our campaign and I know the answer.
Over a million doors knocked. More than 40,000 volunteers. A movement
that the pundits and politicians had written off, now on the precipice
of toppling a political dynasty. And because of that, we will win a city
that we can afford.
But what does winning look like?
It looks like a rent-stabilized retiree who wakes up on the first of
every month, knowing the amount they’re going to pay hasn’t soared since
the month before.
Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the rent.
It looks like a single mom who can drop her kids off at school and know she won’t be late to work, because her bus will arrive on time and cost nothing at all.
Last week Microsoft admitted
providing large amounts of AI and cloud storage services to Israel
during its genocide of Gaza, but said an internal investigation found no
evidence the IDF “used these services to target or harm Palestinians.”
This is not a serious claim and no one should take it seriously.
Just
as Nazi Germany’s crimes could not have been committed without the
technology IBM provided to track, round-up and murder Jews, Romani
people and the disabled, Israel’s apartheid and genocide of the
Palestinians would not be possible without Microsoft.
This week it
was also revealed that Microsoft disabled the email account of the
International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan, impeding the
court’s work on executing the arrest warrant for Netanyahu and other
senior Israeli leaders.
This is no surprise.
The links
between Microsoft and Israel are so long, deep and extensive it can be
hard to see where Microsoft ends and the Israeli state begins.
Microsoft employs more than one thousand
ex-IDF soldiers and intelligence officers in its offices in Israel, and
dozens of ex-IDF in its global headquarters in Redmond, Seattle, and at
its offices in Miami, San Francisco, Boston and New York. My
investigation, drawing on an extensive list of names provided by a
source, has identified well over three hundred former Israeli
intelligence personnel who are currently working at Microsoft.
Current Microsoft employees in the US who had significant roles in the IDF include:
Jonathan Bar Or, a principal security researcher for Microsoft at its Redmond HQ. He spent six and half years in the IDF, leaving in 2015.
Eitan Shteinberg, a senior manager working on Microsoft’s cloud platform in its downtown Bellevue office. Shteinberg is a dedicated soldier for Israel, spending over a decade in the IDF across numerous stints. He also worked for Israeli arms company Elbit.
Roy Rubinstein, based in Boston and who leads Microsoft’s data analytics platform Fabric. He spent over nine years in the IDF ‘focused on state of the art technologies for autonomous vehicles and fast paced development for special units.’
The extensive collaboration between Microsoft and Israel, including its employment of at least one thousand Israelis, has been confirmed previously by Israel lobby groups. The full list of ex-IDF I’ve identified working for Microsoft in the US can be found here.
The
collaboration is long-standing and over the years Microsoft has been
intensely focused on expanding its links to Israel. This focus has
resulted in Microsoft buying seventeen Israeli
tech companies since the year 2000, all of which were founded by former
intelligence officers in the IDF’s spy unit. The company spent billions
on these acquisitions, and made the founders, all of whom are digital
architects of apartheid, extremely rich in the process. These
acquisitions also deliver billions to Israel in tax revenues, keeping an
economy reliant on the IDF-to-US-tech-giant pipeline, afloat.
Microsoft’s
most recent acquisition of an Israeli start-up was web tracking and
analytics company Oribi in 2022, whose founder, Iris Shoor, served in
Israeli intelligence from 1999 to 2001.
The full list of companies which, once again, were all founded by former IDF intelligence unit personnel, is below.
WebAppoint – 2000
Maximal – 2001
Peach – 2002
Pelican – 2003
Whale Communications – 2006
Gteko – 2007
3DV Systems – 2009
Aorato (Advanced Threat Analytics) – 2014
Adallom (Microsoft App Cloud Security) – 2015
Secure Island Technologies – 2015
Equivio – 2015
N-trig – 2015
Hexadite – 2017
Cloudyn – 2017
CyberX – 2020
Peer5 – 2021
Oribi – 2022
Also worth an honourable mention is Amdocs, founded in the 1980s by IDF veterans. In 2023 Amdocs signed an agreement
with Microsoft to build a new platform for the telecommunications
industry. Despite being a multi-billion dollar company, Amdocs is
secretive and its executives rarely give interviews. One reason is its
shady past. In the early 2000s the company was suspected to be spying on
White House and State Department communications, operating essentially
as a front for the Mossad. The suspicions were strong enough for US
counterintelligence to open an investigation, but they supposedly found no evidence
of spying. In any case, Amdocs will be at home working with Microsoft,
the collaboration bolstering the connections between Israelis and
Israeli-Americans who have served in the IDF.
Given the
vast number of former IDF and Israeli spies employed by Microsoft, and
given the way we know Israel has used AI and big data in both Gaza and
the West Bank, the claim that Microsoft’s services haven’t harmed a
single Palestinian is simply not credible.
It was recently reported that
the system used by the IDF to manage the population registry and
movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, called ‘Rolling
Stone,’ which is integral to apartheid, is maintained by Microsoft
Azure. Other reporting by +972 magazine, an independent outlet based in
Israel-Palestine, found that Microsoft employees work closely with units
in the Israeli army to develop products and systems, often embedding
themselves within the IDF for months at a time. The same outlet also
reported that Israel’s top information technology officer, Racheli
Dembinsky, when presenting at a conference in Tel Aviv, described AI as
providing Israel “very significant operational effectiveness” in Gaza as
the logo of Microsoft Azure appeared on a large screen behind her. We
also know that Israel relies on big data and AI to churn out lists of
names for assassination, and we know, from the daily videos of death and
destruction, and from UN bodies working in Gaza, that many of those
killed by Israel have been children.
Microsoft employs
large numbers of people who quite literally helped build the digital
infrastructure underpinning a genocidal apartheid state. Many of these
people continue their work to further the goal of ethnic cleansing and
Israeli domination of the region, only now as civilians for Microsoft
(although in some cases as de facto IDF, embedded in the Israel army).
Far from being harmless, these people are the architects of harm.
Microsoft
has helped enable some of the worst crimes against humanity we’ve ever
seen. Their claim they’ve exonerated themselves via an internal
investigation is laughable and smells of a company in panic mode as the
consequences begin to dawn on senior management.
Norman Finkelstein breaks down how Israel’s “humanitarian aid” to Gaza was a smokescreen for a massacre — a prediction he made on Piers Morgan. He explores global fallout, real left politics & AI.
In this explosive interview:
Why the Gaza aid drops were never humanitarian
How Israel’s actions are reshaping U.S., Europe & Arab world responses
Finkelstein critiques identity politics and warns the real left
Why ChatGPT is driving a wedge between him and his students
by ANTANASIJEVIC ANASTAZIJA GOVEDARICA, KRSTIC JANA
“Without us everything (the world) stops!” Women’s March, 8 March 2025IMAGE/Mašina
Members of the Centre for Girls from Niš believe that school philosophy must not remain trapped in canons that exclude women and other marginalised authors, and that it must become a living and engaged practice of critical thinking about the contemporary world. On 7 May, they submitted a proposal to the Institute for Education Improvement requesting the introduction of gender equality themes, feminist deconstruction, and intersectionality into philosophy teaching in Serbian secondary schools.
The project itself was initiated by women philosophers who never
received feminist education during their formal education. It represents
a response to centuries of neglect regarding women’s contributions to
philosophical thought, as well as the need to offer schools content that
reflects contemporary social issues—such as gender equality,
marginalisation, and the systemic invisibility of certain groups in the
philosophical canon.
The project is led by Jana Krsti?, a PhD student in philosophy whom
we interviewed. The team includes Jelena Joksimovi?, Assistant Professor
of Educational Psychology, Natalija Petrovi?, Master of Philosophy,
Saška Stankovi?, philosophy teacher, and Bojana Vuleti?, political
scientist.
Why is it important to introduce themes of gender equality,
feminist deconstruction, and intersectionality into Serbian school
curricula?
The crisis in Serbia’s educational system has been in the public eye
for some time. After the trajic shooting incident at the “Vladislav
Ribnikar” Primary School two years ago,[1] this crisis surfaced in daily
politics. Despite all the protests then, and today’s blockades and
strikes by education workers, there have been virtually no changes to
the education system. In fact, there have been no changes to the
education system for decades, although the world we live in has changed
dramatically.
Our education system needs serious reform. Research by KOMS shows
that nearly two-thirds of young people do not believe they have gained
relevant knowledge and skills that would prepare them for later life
after completing secondary school.
When we talk about philosophy as a subject, according to the current
curriculum (Official Gazette of RS 4/2020), the main goal is to develop
critical thinking. However, many of the topics on which students should
sharpen their critical minds are not current, leaving students
unprepared to critically observe reality. The oppression of certain
social groups, the history of marginalisation based on gender, class,
skin colour, sexuality, and the like, as well as gender roles that do
not leave much freedom for individuals in a patriarchal society, are
integral parts of our everyday life.
If we aim to develop critical thinking, we cannot and must not omit
all these interpretations of reality from the canon. The questions of
what it means to be a woman/man and how women/men should behave and what
they should do today are answered by parents, schools, media, the work
environment, peers… Thus, the entire society constructs our identity
by telling us what we are and what we are not, while the task of
philosophy is to teach us to critically examine all of this.
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.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
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?
TARIQ ALI:
Well, yeah, Edward was a very dear friend. We often discussed
Palestine. And he felt, as did many others, that the only serious
solution for that region was a one-state solution with equal rights for
all its citizens — male, female, Jews, non-Jews, etc. — that that was
the only way we could proceed, because a two-state solution had become a
joke. I mean, if you look what’s been happening in Gaza for a year — an
open genocide — if you see what they’re starting to do to the West Bank
now, a two-state solution is impossible. No one will believe in it.
In-Depth Interview with Tariq Ali on His New Book, “You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024”
DEMOCRACY NOW
We speak at length with Tariq Ali, Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker. He is an editor of the New Left Review and the author of over 50 books, including his latest, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980–2024.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We continue with Part 2 of our conversation with Tariq Ali, Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker, editor of the New Left Review, author of over 50 books, including, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024.
He has just come to the United States, did a big event at the Brooklyn
Public Library, interviewed by our own Nermeen Shaikh, who has known him
for decades.
I want to really focus on the book. I mean, your years of antiwar
activism, your writing, your involvement with the arts. First, start
with the title, You Can’t Please All.
TARIQ ALI:
Well, it’s our life as dissidents, Amy, you know, constantly going
against mainstream opinions of politics on a global and domestic scale.
And this is a plea to people who, you know, think, “Maybe we should
move. The world is not looking in our direction.” And it’s a message for
them and many others, saying, “You can’t please all. You have to say
what you want to say. Don’t try and please anyone. Just speak the
truth.”
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tariq,
this is a sprawling memoir, over 800 pages, but about a third of the
way into the book, you have a section on your family, which talks about
how you became engaged in politics in your home environment. Could you
talk about that a little bit?
TARIQ ALI:
Well, I was very lucky. My sort of extended family was an old feudal
family, pretty conservative in politics. None of them were religious
extremists in any sense, but they were conservatives. And what would
have happened had my parents not turned out different, I didn’t know,
because that shaped my biography considerably — is that in the late ’20s
and ’30s, when India was still occupied by the British, both my parents
became radicals, even though they belonged to the same family. And my
father joined the Communist Party in the ’30s, my mother later on. So
our house was filled with two types of people: one, those related to the
family, who could be chiefs of police, generals, leading politicians,
etc. — usually, one had to be polite to them, though I avoided mixing in
that company too much — and, secondly, trade union leaders, peasant
leaders, poets, Bohemians of every sort, who were great fun and didn’t
patronize us, even when we were children. And that was my parents’
milieu, politically speaking. And so I grew up in that. There was no big
rebellion, as far as I was concerned, against my parents, except in the
sense that they were orthodox CP members, and when I came to Oxford, I
became a Trotskyist, which I think irritated them, but they took it. So,
it had an effect on me.
My first meeting was attending a May Day rally in 1949 when I was
under 6 years of old, and the big chant at the rally was “The Chinese
are going to win.” China’s revolution was on the march, and everyone was
chanting, “China will win! Long live Mao Zedong!” And, of course,
sitting looking at China in 2025, it’s an obsession with the United
States now and the West, because this country has taken off in a huge
way and is seen now as the biggest economic rival to the United States.
So, one wonders whether a military solution will be attempted there. It
would be totally crazy and would lead to a world war, if some crazies
from here tried it. So let’s hope they don’t and they keep the
competition to an economic level. But that was my first big meeting
which I attended. And those chants of the people for China still echo in
my ears sometimes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m
wondering also, you spent so much of your life in the U.K. and the
— probably the greatest demographic change of the 20th and early 21st
century is the migration of people from the Global South to the
metropolises of the colonizer nations. To what degree has Indian and
Pakistani migration changed or transformed the United Kingdom?
TARIQ ALI:
To a considerable extent. For one thing, Juan, when I arrived in
Britain to study at university in ’63, the food was truly awful. It was
so bad that it was impossible to eat. I had to teach myself how to cook.
But one of the great contributions of migrants from all parts of the
world, especially South Asia, but also the Caribbean, has been that the
food culture of Britain has been totally transformed. I don’t think
future generations, whatever the color of their skin, will be able to
live without this food and revert to what was being eaten during the war
years and after.
