The journey from Islamabad to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, is a memorable one. Mine was made over 17 years ago when most folk were fixated on Al Qaeda, though Kashmiri militant group Ansar ur-Tawhid wal Jihad in Kashmir would later support Al Qaeda. As it happened, I was just as interested in the concept of Kashmir belonging to the Kashmiris—not to India, not to Pakistan. Something former Pakistan cricket captain Shahid Afridi also later argued for. Wishing a pear to fall from the ceiling is an old Kashmiri proverb. It means vain hope. Was it really in vain to believe in an independent Kashmir?
I remember winding through the hills of Murree. At Lower Topa, the
road becomes Bhurban Road, also called Khakan Abbasi Road, leading to
Kohala. From there, you trace the Jhelum River to Muzaffarabad. ‘Kashmir
has always been more than a mere place,’ wrote the wonderful
journalist, travel writer and historian Jan Morris. ‘It has the quality
of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.’ I recall
snowy glaciers. Surprisingly dense forests. A child walking with a
raised chair over its head to shelter from the rain. (I filmed this.)
Verdant meadows. A loya jirga. (I filmed that too.) Valleys. Gorgeous
gorges. Fluent rivers. It was all so beautiful. Lyrical. Not Led
Zeppelin lyrical—their song Kashmir was weak by comparison.
I had also wanted to visit Abbottabad south of Kashmir in the Orash
Valley but my Pakistani companion had said nothing ever happens there.
Of course, Abbottabad was about to become famous not just for its 1850s
founder James Abbott of the Bengal Army, who once blew all his money
elsewhere on a three-day party with local Hazaras, but as the oddly
public hideout of Osama bin Laden—until 14 years ago, almost to the day.
But let’s be clear: it was the British not Al Qaeda who carved out
the lines of conflict and violence that still bleed into Kashmir today.
Many Kashmiri Brits still tell us this. They also say that unless
properly acknowledged, even now, there can be no path to redress.
While India and Pakistan have been ‘trying’ not to nuke each other
these past few weeks, I’ve been scouring news on this. Even after the
ceasefire and return of villagers to their homes, journalist Yashraj
Sharma had noted continued violations by Indian forces along the famous
Line of Control (LoC). Pakistani drones were also reportedly abuzz above
Srinagar.
An aerial view of Houthi supporters demonstrating against Israel and US president Donald Trump on May 9, 2025, in Sana’a, Yemen. IMAGE/Mohammed Hamoud / Getty Images
A month after Israel began its brutal war on
Gaza, Yemen’s Houthis launched a blockade of shipping routes in the Red
Sea. The US-led attempt to restore safe navigation was a disaster that
has exposed deep fragilities in the global maritime trading system.
On May 12, a New York Timesarticle
titled “Why Trump Suddenly Declared Victory Over the Houthi Militia”
inadvertently revealed the truth about the US-led coalition’s failure in
Yemen. The piece noted that while the United States was burning through
munitions, Yemen’s Houthis, or Ansar Allah, continued firing at ships
and shooting down drones with impunity.
In other words: Yemen, one of the poorest
countries in the world, successfully imposed a blockade on the Red Sea —
one of the most critical shipping lanes in the world — while the US and
its allies floundered, wasting billions in missile defense against an
opponent that outmaneuvered them at every turn.
US military operations in Yemen have resulted in significant civilian casualties, with starkly conflicting estimates. Airwars,
a UK-based conflict monitor, documents hundreds of Yemeni civilian
deaths across 181 US military actions since 2002. These figures stand in
dramatic contrast to Pentagon reports
acknowledging just thirteen civilian fatalities. The broader Yemeni
civil war, ongoing since 2014, has proven even more devastating.
Independent experts estimate the Saudi-led coalition’s US-backed bombing
campaign and blockade have contributed to over 150,000 deaths — part of
a conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni lives
overall.
How did it end? Three key factors explain the Houthis’ ability to
maintain a blockade despite Western opposition: their control of a vital
geographic choke point, their domestically produced missile and drone
arsenal, and the inherent vulnerabilities of a hyperconsolidated global
shipping industry.
The Blockade That Shook the World
On November 19, 2023, Houthi fighters boarded the Israeli-linked Galaxy Leader in
the Red Sea, marking the first naval blockade in history imposed by a
force without its own navy. From that moment, Yemen effectively corked
one of the world’s most vital trade routes, disrupting a third of global
container traffic and nearly a quarter of all maritime trade between
non-neighboring countries. The economic shock waves were immediate.
Shipping giants rerouted vessels around the Cape of Good Hope for the
first time in over 150 years, sending transit times, costs, and
insurance premiums soaring.
IT IS 200 miles from where I am in Cairo to the Rafah border crossing
into Gaza. Parked in the arid sands in the northern Sinai of Egypt are
2,000 trucks filled with sacks of flour, water tanks, canned food,
medical supplies, tarps and fuel. The trucks idle under the scorching
sun with temperatures climbing into the high 90s.
A few miles away in Gaza, dozens of men, women and children, living
in crude tents or damaged buildings amid the rubble, are being butchered
daily from bullets, bombs, missile strikes, tank shells, infectious
diseases and that most ancient weapon of siege warfare — starvation. One
in five people are facing starvation after nearly three months of
Israel’s blockade of food and humanitarian aid.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has launched a new
offensive that is killing upwards of 100 people a day, has declared that
nothing will impede this final assault, named Operation Gideon’s
Chariots.
There will be ‘no way,’ Israel will stop the war, he announced, even
if the remaining Israeli hostages are returned. Israel is ‘destroying
more and more houses’ in Gaza. The Palestinians ‘have nowhere to
return.’
‘[The] only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate
outside of the Gaza Strip,’ he told lawmakers at a leaked closed-door
meeting. ‘But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.’
The nine-mile border between Egypt and Gaza has become the dividing
line between the Global South and the Global North, the demarcation
between a world of savage industrial violence and the desperate struggle
by those cast aside by the wealthiest nations. It marks the end of a
world where humanitarian law, conventions that protect civilians or the
most basic and fundamental rights matter. It ushers in a Hobbesian
nightmare where the strong crucify the weak, where no atrocity,
including genocide, is precluded, where the white race in the Global
North reverts to the unrestrained, atavistic savagery and domination
that defines colonialism and our centuries long history of pillage and
exploitation. We are tumbling backwards in time to our origins, origins
that never left us, but origins that were masked by empty promises of
democracy, justice and human rights.
The Nazis are the convenient scapegoats for our shared European and
American heritage of mass slaughter, as if the genocides we carried out
in the Americas, Africa and India did not take place, unimportant
footnotes in our collective history.
As Israel unveils its final genocide push, and mass death from starvation looms in Gaza, western media and politicians are tentatively starting to speak up.
Who could have imagined 19 months ago that it would take more than a
year and a half of Israel slaughtering and starving Gaza’s children for
the first cracks to appear in what has been a rock-solid wall of support
for Israel from western establishments.
Finally, something looks like it may be about to give.
The British establishment’s financial daily, the Financial Times, was first to break ranks last week to condemn “the West’s shameful silence” in the face of Israel’s murderous assault on the tiny enclave.
In an editorial – effectively the paper’s voice – the FT accused the
United States and Europe of being increasingly “complicit” as Israel
made Gaza “uninhabitable”, an allusion to genocide, and noted that the
goal was to “drive Palestinians from their land”, an allusion to ethnic
cleansing.
Of course, both of these grave crimes by Israel have been evidently
true not only since Hamas’ violent, single-day breakout from Gaza on 7
October 2023, but for decades.
So parlous is the state of western reporting, from a media no less
complicit than the governments berated by the FT, that we need to seize
on any small signs of progress.
Next, the Economist chimed in, warning
that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers were
driven by a “dream of emptying Gaza and rebuilding Jewish settlements
there”.
At the weekend, the Independentdecided
the “deafening silence on Gaza” had to end. It was “time for the world
to wake up to what is happening and to demand an end to the suffering of
the Palestinians trapped in the enclave.”
Actually much of the world woke up many, many months ago. It has been
the western press corps and western politicians slumbering through the
past 19 months of genocide.
Then on Monday, the supposedly liberal Guardian voiced in
its own editorial a fear that Israel is committing “genocide”, though it
only dared do so by framing the accusation as a question.
Its roots
are deeply embedded in Myanmar’s society and political landscape.
Despite evidence suggesting their presence in the region for centuries,
the Rohingya have been systematically marginalised and denied
citizenship under Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law. This has rendered them ineligible for many basic rights, including access to formal education.
In the decades following the country’s independence in 1948,
successive governments severely restricted the Rohingya’s access to
education by limiting enrolment in public schools, segregating Rohingya
students, denying them the right to higher education and other policies.
The situation deteriorated further after the 2012 Rakhine State
riots, which led to the displacement of thousands and the segregation of
communities. Many Rohingya children were confined to internally
displaced persons camps, where educational facilities were either
non-existent or grossly inadequate.
The crisis escalated dramatically in August 2017 when a brutal military crackdown, described at the time by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights as
a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, forced more than 1 million
Rohingya to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh. This mass exodus had a
devastating impact. Children, who constitute a significant portion of
the refugee population, found themselves in overcrowded camps with
limited access to schooling.
In the immediate aftermath, humanitarian organisations scrambled to
establish learning centres within the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar,
Bangladesh. UNICEF reported that, by January 2019, more than 145,000 Rohingya children were attending these centres.
However, classes were often conducted in makeshift structures and
lacked trained teachers and standardised curricula. Moreover, some
centres taught in Burmese, others in English, and a few in the Rohingya
language, leading to inconsistencies in learning outcomes.
Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Indonesia
The ongoing educational crisis among Rohingya refugees is exacerbated
by the Bangladeshi government, which has imposed restrictions on formal
education within the camps, with the aim of preventing Rohingya
refugees from settling there permanently. In December 2021,authorities ordered the closure of home-based and community-led schools, affecting approximately 30,000 children. This decision was part of a broader policy to limit educational opportunities and discourage integration.
Vladimir Putin and Anwar Ibrahim have developed a diplomatic rapport. IMAGE/X Screengrab
Regional bloc eschews great power rivalry on principle but its surprise overture to Moscow marks a critical moment
It may seem paradoxical that the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) is now deepening its engagement with Russia after
publicly reaffirming its commitment to “sovereignty, political
independence and territorial integrity” in a communique soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Yet
ASEAN’s diplomatic posture should be viewed not through the lens of
moral idealism but rather strategic realism. For ASEAN and this year’s
chair, Malaysia, engagement is not endorsement.
Rather, it is a highly conscious effort to anchor Russia within an
evolving regional framework that prizes dialogue over confrontation and
sustains a long-standing tradition of hedging and strategic autonomy
amid major power rivalries.
ASEAN
was never meant to be a sanctions-driven alliance, nor an adjudicator
of great power misconduct. It is a convening architecture—ASEAN+1,
ASEAN+3, the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF)—that
emphasizes inclusion, consensus and continuous dialogue.
It was
designed precisely to accommodate rivals, outliers and even belligerents
on the assumption that talking is always better than total
disengagement. Thus, engaging Russia through ASEAN channels is not a
contradiction—it is the essence of ASEAN diplomacy.
On the 100th birthday of Malcolm X, we speak
with one of his daughters, Ilyasah Shabazz, and civil rights attorney
Ben Crump as they continue to press the U.S. government for answers
about his assassination. The iconic Black revolutionary was just 39
years old when he was gunned down on February 21, 1965, in Harlem’s
Audubon Ballroom. In 2023, the family of Malcolm X filed a $100 million
wrongful death lawsuit against various government bodies, including
the FBI, CIA and NYPD, for concealing evidence of their involvement in
the assassination. Now his family is calling for President Trump to
release more details about the assassination, just as he released
thousands of unredacted files related to the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy and vowed in an executive order to release files on the
assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“When I think of my father most, he was such a young man. He was in
his twenties when the world learned of him, 39 when he was
assassinated,” says Shabazz.
“We continue to fight for justice for Malcolm X, by any means
necessary,” says Crump. “We implore the federal government to release
all of the FBI papers on Malcolm X.”
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
A hundred years ago today, on May 19th, 1925, the man who would
become known as Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Malcolm X would
go on to become one of the most influential political leaders of the
20th century before he was assassinated at the age of 39 on February
21st, 1965, as he was standing at the podium before a crowd in Harlem’s
Audubon Ballroom. His wife, Dr. Betty Shabazz, pregnant with twins, and
sitting next to her four daughters, age 6, 4, 2, and 5 months, were in
the ballroom looking on.
In 2023, the family of Malcolm X filed a $100 million wrongful death
lawsuit against the FBI, the CIA, New York City and state, and the NYPD,
as well as the District Attorney’s Office, for concealing evidence of
their involvement in Malcolm X’s assassination. Now his family is
calling for President Trump to release more details about Malcolm X’s
assassination, just as he released thousands of unredacted files related
to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and vowed in an
executive order to release files on the assassination of Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.
The state of Nebraska officially designated May 19th as Malcolm X Day
in 2024. His daughter, Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, was recently there to
remember her father’s legacy, and joins us in our studio. But first, we
go to an interview in the 1960s, when Malcolm X briefly spoke about his
childhood. He was questioned by Chicago reporter Jim Hurlbut in a clip
featured in the PBS American Experience documentary Malcolm X: Make It Plain.
JIM HURLBUT: You were born in Omaha, is that right?
MALCOLM X: Yes, sir.
JIM HURLBUT: And you left — your family left Omaha when you were about 1 year old.
MALCOLM X: I imagine about a year old.
JIM HURLBUT: And why did they leave Omaha?
MALCOLM X: Well, to my understanding, the Ku Klux Klan burned down one of their homes in Omaha. They had a lot of Ku Klux Klan —
JIM HURLBUT: This made your family feel very unhappy, I’m sure.
MALCOLM X: Well, insecure, if not unhappy.
JIM HURLBUT: So you must have a somewhat prejudiced
point of view, a personally prejudiced point of view. In other words,
you cannot look at this in a broad academic sort of way, really, can
you?
MALCOLM X: I think that’s incorrect, because despite
the fact that that happened in Omaha, and then when we moved to
Lansing, Michigan, our home was burned down again — in fact, my father
was killed by the Ku Klux Klan. And despite all of that, no one was more
thoroughly integrated with whites than I. No one has lived more so in
the society of whites than I.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Malcolm X in the 1960s.
Today would have been his 100th birthday. And today, the National Action
Network will commemorate this birthday with Reverend Al Sharpton and
national civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who joins us now remotely, and
with members of his family, including Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, one of
Malcolm X’s six daughters, professor at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice here in New York City, a community organizer, an activist,
award-winning author of many books. Her memoir is titled Growing Up X. Her most recent book for young adults, co-written with Tiffany Jackson, is titled The Awakening of Malcolm X. Dr. Shabazz is the chairperson of the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Before we turn to Ben
Crump, Dr. Shabazz, it’s great to have you with us again. Your thoughts
as you watch your father talking about being born in Omaha, being forced
out by the white supremacists there, his legacy?
ILYASAH SHABAZZ: You know, and as I shared with
members in that community, that was a legacy — I’m sorry, that was the
foundation for my father. His parents instilled the specific values of
love, of care, compassion, environmentalist. It’s such a beautiful
place. And it is just so indicative of how this young boy would grow up
to be this iconic human rights figure.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to come back to that
legacy, but, Ben Crump, I know you have a court Zoom in a few minutes,
and I want to make sure we get in this lawsuit that you filed and the
demand that as President Trump releases most of the documents in the
case of the JFK assassination and says he’s going to do it in the case
of the King assassination, your and the family’s demand that they
release the Malcolm X assassination documents, what exactly you’re
calling for, and tell us about the lawsuit.
BENJAMIN CRUMP: Surely, Amy. First, I want to say
thank you to Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz and her family for keeping the legacy
of Malcolm X alive, 60 years later, on what would be his 100th birthday.
We can never say thank you enough.
As it relates to the court case and celebrating his enduring legacy,
we continue to fight for justice for Malcolm X, by any means necessary.
We are calling for truth and transparency to finally be the prevailing
factor in all of this legal minutiae. We know that the FBI files exist.
We know that they were surveilling every waking moment of Malcolm X’s
life. We know that they were aware of assassination attempts on Malcolm X
before he was fatally killed in the Audubon Ballroom. And so, in our
lawsuit that we filed for $100 million against those who conspired to
assassinate Malcolm X, one of the great thought leaders of the 20th
century, we continue to try to make absolute certain to everybody who’s
paying attention that this was an intentional effort at the behest of
the leaders of our government, that being New York Police Department,
the FBI, the CIA, all the way to the very top. And so, therefore,
finally, 60 years later, on what would have been his 100th birthday, we
implore the federal government to release all of the FBI papers on
Malcolm X.
When dense smoke was billowing from deadly firings across the Line of Control on Friday, smartly turned out military columns from 23 countries were paying homage at Moscow’s Red Square to the 27 million fallen men and women of the USSR who defeated Nazi Germany, captured Berlin and forced Hitler to shoot himself. Had the South Asian neighbours been more agreeably engaged than pursuing a destructive campaign against each other, the thought is too enticing to ignore that Indian and Pakistani troops would perhaps be marching in lockstep with Chinese, Russian, Uzbek, Egyptian and other comrades to pursue a new world order for equitable peace and sustainable prosperity. There are powerful antibodies stalking the possibility, however.
Mercifully, the fires have been doused in South Asia at least for now
even though they were doused by the world’s most incendiary nation that
ever wielded the firehose. For all their macho victory cries over
claims of damage they inflicted on each other amid a display of grief
and valour, India and Pakistan found themselves leaning on foreign shoulders
yet again to resolve an essentially bilateral issue, illustrating not
for the first time that they have not quite attained adulthood to
shepherd the destiny of over a billion souls. The brokered peace,
nevertheless, links the tragedy in Pahalgam with a world of power politics.
Be sanguine that the pointless flare-up wasn’t triggered by some four
mysterious hate-mongers who showed up to kill innocent men in Pahalgam
only to disappear without trace (as yet) in one of the world’s most
militarised and policed places. That the foursome called out their
victims’ religion turned into a tool to profit from with the time-tested
game of identity politics. Remember that in the 2002 communal carnage
in Gujarat, after a train fire tragedy in Godhra, it was Pakistan that
was first named as the accused; only later mobs were unleashed on
unsuspecting Muslims.
Religious politics in South Asia of the Hindu-Muslim variety was
nurtured into deep fault lines by colonialism as a protection against
another 1857 uprising. ‘Divide et impera’ they called it. Saadat Hasan
Manto captured religious frenzy in several short stories that
accompanied the violent creation of India and Pakistan. ‘Mistake’ was a
story about the murder of a wrong man, the error discovered when his
dead body was stripped and revealed he belonged to the killer’s
community. The popular Indian leader who plies identity politics to
fetch electoral windfalls was not around at the time. But he has spoken
of a simpler way whereby one could identify Muslims by their attire.
(And thereby also figure out the non-Muslims.) The monsters of Pahalgam
missed the trick or perhaps needed an audio track for their crime.
Moscow and Beijing have found growing numbers of applicants from
across the world keen to join the coalition against Western hegemony.
Step back from Pahalgam, and you might find a clearer action-reaction
pattern. Pahalgam spawned a third military stand-off to involve a BRICS
member. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Iran and Russia, key pillars
of the coming multipolar world, are in the crosshairs of the West.
Unlike the military crisis facing Iran, which has risen as a powerful
symbol for the Global South, or Russia, a founding leader of BRICS,
which sees itself as a pivot to a multipolar future and therefore is
sought to be ‘weakened’ by the West through a grinding proxy war, the
South Asian conflict disrupts BRICS more diabolically. India, a founder
member of BRICS, balks at the idea of its South Asian rival joining the
immensely powerful group. India is a leading member of BRICS but is
increasingly perceived as its weak link. Pakistan, on the other hand,
being an ardent supporter of BRICS, can become a full member only if
India doesn’t obstruct the path. The Pahalgam terror attack of April 22
therefore can be explored as a trigger to sow seeds of discord in the
ranks of the Global South and thereby of BRICS.
