Category: Uncategorized
Surreal reality: Global School Principal and his favorite Monitor
by B. R. GOWANI

The Principal of Global School had asked his favorite Monitor to keep an eye on other students in the Middle East class.
The Monitor’s family had given hefty donation to the Principal for running the school. In return, the Principal would overlook small or big mistakes, blunders, wrongs, of his favorite Monitor, and would do him great favors. For a very long time, the Monitor’s been mad and has been punishing some particular students. Since last two years, the Monitor went totally rogue; he beat the hell out of five students. One of those students, the first student, witnessed half his house burned down. The Principal, a peace loving person, avoids hassles and so didn’t say anything to the Monitor — and earned suggestions of his name for the Noble Peace Prize.
Then one day the Monitor beat up the sixth student. It was a humongous dilemma for the Principal: the sixth student had given big donation too, and had gifted a fast vehicle to the Principal. It is a universal fact that the Principal rarely says no to the Monitor. The Principal has a doctorate in The Art of the Deal; he found a way out. Although he permitted to strike the sixth one. After fifteen or so minutes he called the student to inform him. The sixth student was crying: the Monitor had already finished his job.
The Principal said: I called you the minute I knew. The Principal sensed the sixth one’s anger and decided to do something.
When, the Monitor went to the Principal’s office to report how the Middle East class was doing, the Principal handed him a piece of paper with a written apology which the Monitor was ordered to read out to the sixth student, on the phone. The Principal didn’t want to piss off one of his big donors.
The Monitor didn’t like it but then he thought: I control the whole Middle East class, I have so much power, unimaginable. After Principal, I am the only one with so much power — that power is due to money and fighting toys from the Principal’s family. I better say sorry, as it is small
inconvenience to continue the abundance being received.
The Monitor half-heartedly said sorry, but the humiliation he felt and the reluctance to apologize was clearly visible on his face. The sixth student just wanted to hear an apology to save his face. The Principal’s donations from that student are now secure.
The Principal wrote a personal letter assuring the sixth student that from now on any attack on him would be considered a “threat” to the Principal himself.
But it was the Monitor who got the last laugh. The Principal promised the first student that his half burnt house will be somewhat fixed and he’ll be permitted to reside there. But it is the Monitor at whose whim the repair will begin — it may be forever delayed or postponed.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
M. K. Gandhi on the Jews
By M. K. GANDHI

(The following article first appeared on November 26, 1938, in a weekly Harijan founded by M. K. Gandhi in 1933.)
Several letters have been received by me asking me to declare my views about the Arab-Jew question in Palestine and the persecution of the Jews in Germany. It is not without hesitation that I venture to offer my views on this very difficult question.
My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became lifelong companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age long persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them. Apart from the friendships, therefore, there is the more common universal reason for my sympathy for the Jews.
But my sympathy docs not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?
Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Pa-lestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.
The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The born in France arc French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.
But the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone. And he is doing it with religious zeal. For, he is propounding a new religion of exclusive and militant nationalism in the name of which any inhumanity becomes an act of humanity to be rewarded here and hereafter. The crime of an obviously mad but intrepid youth is being visited upon his whole race with unbelievable ferocity. If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is, therefore, outside my horizon or province.
But if there can be no war against Germany, even for such a crime as is being committed against the Jews, surely there can be no alliance with Germany. How can there be alliance between a nation which claims to stand for justice and democracy and one which is the declared enemy of both? Or is England drifting towards armed dictatorship and all it means?
Germany is showing to the world how efficiently violence can be worked when it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as humanitarianism.
It is also showing how hideous, terrible and terrifying it looks in its nakedness.
Can the Jews resist this organized and shameless persecution? Is there a way to preserve their self-respect and not to feel helpless, neglected and forlorn? I submit there is.
person who has faith in a living God need feel helpless or forlorn; Jehovah of the Jews is a God more personal and the God of the Christians, the Mussalmans or the Hindus, though as a matter of fact, in essence, He is common to all and one without a second and beyond description. But as the Jews attribute personality to God and believe that He rules every action of theirs, they ought not to feel helpless. If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim. Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German might, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanks-giving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the God fearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.
It is hardly necessary for me to point out that it is easier for the Jews than for the Czechs to follow my prescription. And they have in the Indian Satyagraha campaign in South Africa an exact parallel. There the Indians occupied precisely the same place that the Jews occupy in Germany. The persecution had also a religious tinge. President Kruger used to say that the white Christians were the chosen of God and Indians were inferior beings created to serve the whites. A fundamental clause in the Transvaal constitution was that there should be no equality between the whites and coloured races including Asiatics. There too the Indians were consigned to ghettos described as locations. The other disabilities were almost of the same type as those of the Jews in Germany. The Indians, a mere handful, resorted to Satyagraha without any backing from the world outside or the Indian Government. Indeed the British officials tried to dissuade the Satyagrahis from their contemplated step. World opinion and the Indian Government came to their aid after eight years of fighting. And that too was by way of diplomatic pressure, not of a threat of war.
M K Gandhi for more
Mouin Rabbani on X

Algeria was known as Algeria before it became an independent state. The same is true for Tunisia, Syria, and Iraq. I don’t know about Libya, you’d have to consult a historian of the country. Israel by contrast was not known as Israel prior to the establishment of the state in 1948.
If you for example take a minute and read the Balfour Declaration, you’ll learn that it refers to this territory as Palestine, not Israel.
The League of Nations Mandate for that territory was known as the Palestine Mandate, not the Israel Mandate.
The UN resolution that laid the basis for the establishment of Israel called for the partition of Palestine, not Israel.
The partition resolution never mentions Israel, because the future state’s rulers hadn’t yet decided on a name for their entity. In fact, they seriously considered calling it Palestine, not Israel.
Palestine’s rulers have in fact for several millennia referred to it as Palestine, or some variation of this term, or as a province of Syria, not Israel.
This was hardly a Muslim innovation. The Byzantines and before them the Romans and others did so as well.
As did everyone else, including Herodotus as early as 500 BCE.
An Israelite kingdom existed, briefly, in regions of Palestine. It was not the only kingdom that existed in Palestine during that time, nor were its inhabitants the only ones who lived in that kingdom.
More importantly, that was during the Iron Age. Perfectly irrelevant for the purposes of establishing rights and wrongs during the twenty-first century.
I have no clue when my ancestors came to Palestine, or what their names were, and I’m not silly enough to claim I know they were there during the Iron Age. I can however demonstrate that my ancestors were in Palestine before the beginnings of Zionist immigration.
Similarly, you cannot demonstrate your ancestors were in Palestine during the Iron Age or provide their names. But unlike me you are silly enough to claim this is an incontestable fact, and that it somehow matters.
And you additionally have the gall to claim that I am the one engaging in propaganda while you’re engaged in scholarship.
To claim that Israel was the only polity in that region would be like claiming Denmark is Europe.
As for what is known as the United Kingdom (of Israel and Judah), historians remain divided over its historicity. They are divided between those who believe the evidence for its existence is insufficient, and those who believe there is sufficient evidence for its existence.
It is, to the best of my knowledge, essentially a scholarly/academic rather than ideological debate.
Those who do believe the United Kingdom existed, believe it existed for only about a century.
Again, that was several thousand years ago. It is literally ancient history. For similar reasons, we speak of France rather than Gaul, and have done so for many centuries.
Mouin Rabbani for more
The Second Amendment was created to put down slave revolts
by THOM HARTMANN

The founders’ true intent behind the right to bear arms wasn’t liberty—it was control, oppression, and the preservation of slavery.
One mass shooting after another, one accidental child death after another tears through this country on an almost daily basis. Once again, lawmakers hide behind “thoughts and prayers,” while clinging to an amendment that has been twisted beyond recognition. But to understand why the Second Amendment exists at all, we must strip away the myths and confront a brutal truth: it was not written to safeguard freedom, but to preserve slavery.
The militias it enshrined were never about defending homes from tyrants abroad but about keeping human beings in chains at home. Until America reckons with this history, we will remain shackled to its bloody legacy.
So, let’s clear a few things up.
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “state” instead of “country” (the framers knew the difference—see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave-patrol militias in the Southern states, an action necessary to get Virginia’s vote to ratify the Constitution.
It had nothing to do with making sure mass murderers could shoot up public venues and schools. Founders, including Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison, were totally clear on that, and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were called “slave patrols” and were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, “The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search ‘all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition’ and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.”
It’s the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill the whites?” It was a largely rhetorical question because every Southerner of the era knew the answer: Well-regulated militias kept enslaved people in chains.
Sally E. Hadden, in her brilliant and essential book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, “Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller.” There were exemptions so “men in critical professions,” like judges, legislators, and students, could stay at their work. Generally, though, she documents how most Southern men between ages 18 and 45—including physicians and ministers—had to serve on the slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.
And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.
Wiki Observatory for more
Yasser Abu Shabab: Israel’s agent of chaos in Gaza
by WILLIAM VAN WAGENEN

Tel Aviv promotes a warlord with a criminal past to impose its starvation and displacement agenda on Palestinians in Gaza under the guise of humanitarian governance.
In late July, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an op-ed attributed to Yasser Abu Shabab, a Palestinian warlord with a criminal past, portraying him and his militia as potential saviors of Gaza.
The piece, echoing Israeli talking points, suggested that US and Arab support for Abu Shabab could swiftly “transform” most of the strip “from a war zone into functioning communities,” ostensibly free from Israeli bombardment and flush with humanitarian aid.
But behind this carefully crafted
image lies an Israeli proxy – a man embedded in organized crime and
political subterfuge, now repurposed to advance Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to starve, displace, and ultimately ethnically
cleanse Palestinians in Gaza.
Who is Abu Shabab?
Abu Shabab, 35, hails from Rafah in southern Gaza and belongs to the Bedouin Tarabin tribe, which spans Gaza, Israel’s Naqab, and Egypt’s Sinai. Before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023, he was notorious for his involvement in smuggling weapons, drugs, and contraband through Gaza’s tunnels and border crossings. He was also believed to have ties to extremist groups in Sinai, including the local ISIS affiliate, formerly known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis.
Hamas authorities had imprisoned him for murder and drug trafficking, but he was released in October 2023 when Israeli air raids forced the movement to open its prisons.
Since then, Abu Shabab has rebranded himself as a “nationalist,” a “humanitarian,” and even a “liberator.”
But these claims are widely rejected by Palestinians, including members of his own tribe. A senior Tarabin elder publicly disowned him, labeling him a “looter and bandit” operating solely for personal gain. Aid officials echoed this assessment. One aid coordinator called him a “criminal, a fugitive … untrustworthy and mentally unstable.”
His own relatives have accused him of collaborating with the occupation military in targeted killings of Palestinians and have called for his “liquidation,” declaring his “blood is forfeit.”
Starving as warfare
After the 7 October resistance operation by Palestinian factions, then-defense minister Yoav Gallant – now a fugitive from international justice – announced a “complete siege” on Gaza, cutting off all access to food, water, fuel, and electricity. “We are fighting animals and are acting accordingly,” Gallant said in Hebrew.
Days later, a detailed proposal to forcibly expel all Palestinians from Gaza, under the pretext of protecting them, was prepared by Israel’s Ministry of Information.
Weeks later, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for both Gallant and Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare.
In response to mounting global scrutiny, Tel Aviv pivoted to a more insidious strategy: weaponizing hunger through sabotaging the existing UN aid distribution system.
In January 2024, Israel launched a smear campaign against the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main provider of aid to Gaza, falsely claiming it was infiltrated by Hamas operatives who took part in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The campaign was successful in pressuring western countries to cut the UN refugee agency’s funding.
Simultaneously, Israel slashed the number of aid trucks allowed into Gaza. By February, only 62 trucks entered daily – a fraction of the 500 required to prevent mass hunger.
Israel ensured even this amount of food would not reach those who needed it by carrying out a string of airstrikes against members of Gaza’s Hamas-run civilian police force. The attacks caused officers, who were protecting the convoys, to withdraw from the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom crossing.
According to the Washington Post, the amount of aid entering Gaza “collapsed,” as the convoys delivering it were then exposed to widespread looting by criminal gangs.
In May 2024, the occupation state further moved to sabotage the UN aid system by occupying and closing the Rafah crossing with Egypt, the route through which most aid had flowed, and redirecting it through the Kerem Shalom.
Tel Aviv’s looting agent
With the withdrawal of Hamas police, Abu Shabab and his gang established a base in southeast Gaza from which it could freely loot aid trucks entering the strip via Kerem Shalom, all while operating under Israel’s protection and watchful eye.
The Cradle for more
The demise of curiosity
by ZEENA BANY HAMDAN

In an era when AI delivers the answer before the question is even asked, the sanctity of wonder is slipping away, and soon the act of asking might vanish entirely.
As long as I can recall, I used to roam as a child with curiosity dripping from my mind; it used to be a thrill to unravel things as I slowly reached their core. Now, the world answers before the question has even bloomed. We are witnessing the gradual erosion of curiosity, and yet people remain inert in the face of this dire problem.
Nowadays, with the omnipresence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), people are constantly fed ready-made information, dissuading any need for independent thinking. The serendipity once found in plunging into books or clicking on obscure hyperlinks in Wikipedia pages or blogs is dissolving. This absence emerged after people stopped researching for their essays, school papers, or simple knowledge for mere convenience and time-saving, which causes a lack of nuance. While it is time-saving, researching something can also educate you on the topic and introduce you to new information about miscellaneous aspects—information you will not find by solely reading summaries or AI overviews. AI in search engines should be disregarded, as most of the information it generates is speculative at best and entirely erroneous at worst.
This dilemma is also evident in education, as students these days tend to care solely about their academic evaluation. Grades have outrivaled curiosity as thinkers are being raised to cease to think for the sake of wonder, only for the sake of passing. In the past, learning for university students was all about devouring knowledge, not just for exams, but also for the sake of curiosity and intellectual interest. Whereas the hunger for knowledge nowadays has dulled; students focus on searching quickly for keywords, underlining what will be in the exam, and ignoring what does not provide a grade.
A recent study conducted by the MIT Media Lab, covered by Time magazine, found that students who utilized AI to write their essays showed the lowest brain activity because they did not go through the meticulous process of thinking and questioning; they skipped over the effort and struggle that gradually constructs understanding. Those same students had more trouble retaining information from their essays and recalling it later. The idle process of copying and pasting without putting in real thought and engagement strips away the joyous uncertainty of wonder, which leads to a decrease in emotional investment when the answer is delivered before curiosity has even sprouted. In fact, this instant gratification is gradually prevailing over a multidimensional understanding of things; it reinforces the seeking of immediate interpretations and shallow thinking, rather than embracing ambiguity and complexity. As a result, students’ potential begins to freeze; they get used to avoiding thought, and over time, this reliance on AI will negatively impact their ability to question, reason, and analyze. If students stop using their cognitive abilities and neglect critical thinking, they risk becoming intellectually subservient.
Africa is a Country for more
White power
by MARGARET KIMBERLEY

The power structure in the U.S. can be boiled down to a system of might, and white, making right. Donald Trump has exposed its rotten foundations and the two-faced collaborators who keep it running.
Donald Trump and officials in his administration have dispensed with even the appearance of established niceties in their quest to realize a vision of making white people and his concept of power ascendant throughout this country and the world. White power and brute force are their priorities – and any other considerations and even common sense take a back seat. If farmers who voted for Trump can’t find workers because of his immigration crackdown, so be it. His animus towards undocumented people is so great that he shoved some of his supporters under the bus and into bankruptcy. Lest anyone forget, it was the very conservative Ronald Reagan who enacted an amnesty for undocumented people in order to ensure a plentiful labor force for agriculture and other industries that are dependent upon immigrant labor. Clearly Trump is no Reagan. He doesn’t care if workers are scarce and crops rot in the fields as long as he fulfills his goals of keeping Global South immigrants out of the U.S. His administration is the very personification of white power.
Trump and his team are true believers in U.S. white supremacy but they are not alone. Liberals who may not have voted for him are nonetheless going along with his program. That is to say that they are also dependent upon the white power structure and they will not bite the hand that feeds them. The liberal class has shown itself to be thoroughly compromised, a spent force that does little except climb up the ladder for access, positions and money.
One of the latest perpetrators is the University of California at Berkeley, one of many “prestigious” educational institutions, whose leaders have assisted in targeting their own students and staff at Trump’s behest. The administration at Berkeley handed the Department of Education a list of 160 students, faculty and staff who may have had “a potential connection to reports of antisemitism.” The university handed over the list to the Trump administration on August 18 and didn’t tell those whose names appeared until September 4. The charge of antisemitic activity has been made synonymous with Palestine solidarity protest but none of those targeted know how their names will be used or if they will face legal charges. They were given no warning, and no opportunity to defend themselves. It is true that the University of California system is being threatened with loss of funding like many other institutions. But this latest example of Trump administration bullying has gotten the desired result of bringing the country under the thumb of raw power meant to silence anyone in opposition, especially about support for zionism, the ultimate white supremacist project. The liberal colleges and law firms and even private sector corporations all do what Trump tells them to do and that is a large part of his success.
Black Agend Report for more
Our humanity not up for debate: Fascists don’t deserve space
by SONALI KOLHATKAR

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, centrist liberals have lionized the white supremacist, paving the way for a greater assault from authoritarian bullies.
“The proper way to respond” to white supremacist fascism “is to have a backbone,” says Tariq Khan, a historian and lecturer at Yale University, in an interview on September 17, a week after the assassination of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk.
As the author of The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression, Khan is more than qualified to speak on the matter.
But he is also personally qualified, having been on the receiving end of a racist and Islamophobic campaign of harassment and threats aimed at him and his family by members of Kirk’s organization.
Khan’s life was turned upside down during President Donald Trump’s first term in late 2017 when TPUSA members attended a political speech he gave at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and heckled him. According to Khan, who at the time was a PhD student in history, “one of them made some threats against my children, which I’m like, why do they even know I have children?”
A verbal altercation followed, which TPUSA’s members twisted into a headline that Khan remembers being something to the effect of “Antifa Professor Assaults Conservative Students.”
Every single word in that headline was false—including “conservative.” TPUSA went on to prove that its real agenda was not merely conservatism but authoritarian extremism and the promotion of a dangerous white supremacist narrative built on dehumanizing people of color, immigrants, women, and LGBTGQ people, especially transgender people—anyone other than straight white men.
“Truth didn’t matter to Turning Point USA,” says Khan. “People in power, including President Donald Trump, were retweeting their false story about me. And the result was I was just being bombarded with threats, harassments.”
TPUSA members showed up to his wife’s office, drove past his house, threatened his children, and urged his history department to revoke his professorship—again, Khan was a PhD student, not a professor.
“Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk is behind the scenes, encouraging this the entire time. The right wing is rewarding them for this. So, they’re using these kinds of incidents to build their careers,” says Khan.
It was based on such campaigns of intimidation that Kirk made his name as a GOP political strategist—and made millions of dollars. According to Associated Press, “top Turning Point officials collected pricey salaries, enjoyed lavish perks and steered at least $15.2 million to companies that they, their friends and associates are affiliated with.”
LA Progrssive for more
US policy and pro-Israel lobbyists: Who actually runs the show?
by AMMIEL ALCALAY

Whether Democratic or Republican, all American administrations have worked overtime to shield Tel Aviv from accountability
The best retort to the question: “What about 7 October?” – still used by the media to silence and confuse people speaking from a Palestinian or human perspective, particularly in the US political context – might be: “What about 6 August?”
That’s when the first atomic bomb used in war was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. Three days later, on 9 August, the US detonated a second atomic bomb over Nagasaki. The attacks together are estimated to have killed close to 200,000 people.
This is not even to mention “Operation Meetinghouse”, better known as the firebombing of Tokyo, in March 1945, which killed tens of thousands of people and left more than one million homeless.
The politics of numbers, so familiar from the present genocide in Gaza, are chilling.
US General Curtis LeMay, who led the bombing campaign over Tokyo, was well aware of what his change in strategy – unleashing napalm on crowded Tokyo neighbourhoods – would mean. As he himself put it: “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
Nor did LeMay stop in Japan. In a 1984 interview, he said US bombs “killed off 20 percent of the population” of North Korea, and “targeted everything that moved”.
As historian Bruce Cummings told Newsweek: “Most Americans are completely unaware that we destroyed more cities in the North than we did in Japan or Germany during World War II … Every North Korean knows about this, it’s drilled into their minds. We never hear about it.”
Collective punishment
LeMay was stymied by former US President John F Kennedy when he advocated for the use of nuclear weapons against Cuba, but the general still believed fully in the doctrine of bombing people back “into the Stone Age” during the war against Indochina, when Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were decimated and defoliated by napalm from the air.
LeMay died before the Gulf War of 1991, but with the Afghanistan conflict, the war in Iraq, regime change in Libya, and so many other US-led imperial campaigns, his doctrine lives on.
The overpowering and cowardly reliance on mass terror from the air relegates native populations to the category of sub-human. Neither individuals nor civilians exist; all are presumed guilty and must be punished collectively, to force any resistance into full submission.
Does the US control its own foreign policy on Israel and Palestine, or is it dictated by pro-Israel lobbying groups?
Recent statements do not disappoint in this regard. Following the 8 September attack by two Palestinians at a bus stop in Jerusalem, in which six Israelis were killed, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee declared: “We stand with Israel against this savagery.”
Middle East Eye for more