by B. R. GOWANI

Azmi’s birth name was Sayyid Akhtar Hussein Rizvi but is known by his pen-name Kaifi Azmi (1919 -2002). He was one of the finest and most prominent poets of India, was a communist to the core. He was not a communist just in name but his lifestyle, principles, and actions aligned with this philosophy. It is strange but true that Azmi was sent by his Shia Muslim family to a religious seminary or madrassa Sultan-ul-Madaaris to study but by 1942 he quit and joined the CPI (Communist Party of India). He was a card-carrying member and carried the CPI card with him till his death.

Azmi was also influenced by Angaaray <1> or “Burning Coals,” a collection of nine short stories written by Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan, and Mahmood-uz-Zafar.

Once Kaifi Azmi said:

“I was born in a slave India, grew up in an independent India and would like to die in a socialist India.”

Today, most people in India feel like they are slaves of the capitalist class who control the economy and the government — run by the openly Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi who never misses a chance to denigrate Muslims and continues to accumulate as much power as he can to turn India into a Hindu Rashtra (nation) with him as the fascist leader.

In the mid 1940s, during one of the mushairas, a gathering of poetry reading by poets in front of an audience, Azmi read his epic poem Aurat or Woman.

“Arise, my love, for now you must march with me
Flames of war are ablaze in our world today
Time and fate have the same aspirations today
Our tears will flow like hot lava today
Beauty and love have one life and one soul today
You must burn in the fire of freedom with me
Arise, my love, for now you must march with me”

(See the full poem at kaifiazmi.com and rekhta.com)

Present in the audience was his future wife Shaukat Khanam. She told her friend:

“What kind of poet he is? The way he is beseeching, which woman will agree to go along with him.”

Before the poem ended, Shaukat had decided to end her engagement to another man. She married Azmi in 1947. The marriage and two children, Shabana Azmi, and Baba Azmi, compelled Azmi to write film songs. (Later, Shabana became an actress, a very good one, and Baba became a cinematographer.)

Azmi and Shaukat were also part of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and the Progressive Writers Association (IWA), which were the cultural platforms of the Communist Party of India.

She joined theater and later films as an actress. Azmi also wrote dialogues in verse form for the 1970 film Heer Raanjha. For another film Garam Hava
or Scorching Winds, based on Ismat Chughtai‘s short story, he joined Shama Zaidi to write story and screenplay. Azmi wrote the dialogues for that film. Extremely good film, Garam Hava depicted realistically the dilemma of a Muslim family whether to move to Pakistan or to stay in India.

In 1973, Azmi suffered a brain hemorrhage which disabled his left hand and leg. He left Bombay (now Mumbai) for Mijwan, where he was born, the tiny village in Azamgarh Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Mijwan, an unknown town, later became globally known due to Azmi’s efforts. There he founded Mijwan Welfare Society for the empowerment of women with a focus on girlchild.

Azmi saw the emergence of this bloody Hindutava when Modi’s BJP-led goons demolished the Babri Masjid. Azmi wrote The Second Exile. One of the couplet taunts Hindutva goons who talks about sanctity of life by not eating animals.

“Of those who came to burn my house
Your sword, my friend, is vegetarian“

(By the way, in 2023, India was the second largest beef exporter in the world.)

Azmi has written many heart wrenching film lyrics and this is also very emotional. The song was written for the movie Shola aur Shabnam (Flame and Dew). The song is picturized on Tarla Mehta and Dharmendra. One of Mohammed Rafi‘s greatest songs has music by Khayyam.

Original lyrics:

jAne kyA DhoonDhti rehti hai ye ANkheN

jAne kyA DhoonDhti rehti hai ye ANkheN mujh meiN
rAkh ke Dhair meiN sholA hai na chiNgAri hai

ab na vo pyAr na us pyAr ki yAdeiN bAki
Ag yuN dil meiN lagi kuchh na rahA kuchh na bachA
jiski tasveer nigAhoN meiN liye baiThi ho
meiN vo dildAr nahiN uski huN khAmosh chitA
jAne kyA DhoonDhti rehti hai ye ANkheN mujh meiN
rAkh ke Dhair meiN sholA hai na chiNgAri hai

zindagi haNs ke guzarti to bahut achchhAa thA
khair haNs ke na sahi ro ke guzar jAyegi
rAkh barbAd muhabbat ki bachA rakhi hai
bAr-bAr isko jo chheDA to bikhar jAyegi
jAne kyA DhoonDhti rehti hai ye ANkheN mujh meiN
rAkh ke Dhair meiN sholA hai na chiNgAri hai

Arzu jurm vafA jurm tamannA hai gunAh
ye wo duniyA hai jahAN pyAr nahiN ho saktA
kaise bAzAr kA dastoor tumheiN samjhAuN
bik gayA jo vo khareedAr nahiN ho saktA
jAne kyA DhoonDhti rehti hai ye ANkheN mujh meiN
rAkh ke Dhair meiN sholA hai na chiNgAri hai

Translation:

I dont know what those eyes keep searching in me

I don’t know what those eyes keep searching in me
in this heap of ash, neither the flame nor the spark remains

neither that love, nor the memories remain
the fire of separation engulfed the heart — and nothing is left
the picture you carry in your vision
I’m not that lover, just his silent corpse
I don’t know what those eyes keep searching in me
in this heap of ash, neither the flame nor the spark remains

it would’ve been nice if life had passed cheerfully
anyway, it will pass mournfully too
my ruined love’s ashes, I’ve saved
if disturbed frequently, it will get scattered
I don’t know what those eyes keep searching in me
in this heap of ash, neither the flame nor the spark remains

longing is a crime, loyalty is a crime, and desire a sin
in our world, its not possible to fall in love
how do I explain the rules of the market to you
the one who got sold can never be a buyer
I don’t know what those eyes keep searching in me
in this heap of ash, neither the flame nor the spark remains

Note

<1> The book Angaarey questioned Muslim practices, condition of Muslim women, inequality, and also criticized British imperial rule in India. Many Muslims burned the book and the British government banned it.

Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan, and Mahmood-uz-Zafar refused to apologize for their book Angaarey. Mahmood-uz-Zafar defended it in an article titled: “In Defence of Angarey:”

“The authors of this book do not wish to make any apology for it. They leave it to float or sink of itself. They are not afraid of the consequences of having launched it. They only wish to defend ‘the right of launching it and all other vessels like it’ … they stand for the right of free criticism and free expression in all matters of the highest importance to the human race in general and the Indian people in particular… Whatever happen to the book or to the authors, we hope that others will not be discouraged. Our practical proposal is the formation immediately of a League of Progressive Authors, which should bring forth similar collections from time to time both in English and the various vernaculars of our country. We appeal to all those who are interested in this idea to get in touch with us.”

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by REEBA MARIYAM

The 2025 Malayalam film Lokah: Chapter One – Chandra claims to reimagine Kerala’s infamous female spirit Kalliyankattu Neeli through a contemporary feminist lens. Promoted as India’s first female-centred superhero movie, Lokah has earned both commercial success and critical attention for subverting the traditional portrayal of the yakshi, the vengeful enchantress of Kerala folklore, and for crafting a new cinematic universe blending local myth with modern genres. In the film, Neeli (renamed Chandra) steps out of the pages of legend and into present-day Bengaluru, no longer as a demonic temptress but a vigilant protector. This transformation has been celebrated as a feminist intervention in a genre long dominated by male heroes and male gazes. However, a closer analysis through the intersecting lenses of caste and gender reveals that Lokah’s empowerment narrative, while interesting in some respects, remains constrained by certain blind spots, notably a dilution of Neeli’s caste critique and a lingering reliance on male saviour figures.

Kalliyankattu Neeli’s origins in Kerala folklore are deeply rooted in patriarchy and caste hierarchy. In the early 20th-century compendium Aithihyamala, Neeli appears as Alli, the daughter of a temple-bound devadasi (hereditary temple dancer-courtesan). Alli’s life was circumscribed by caste – forbidden from marrying upper-caste men – until a Brahmin priest named Nampi lured her into marriage, only to betray and murder her. The legend narrates her resurrection as a yakshi, a bloodthirsty female spirit, arising directly from this act of caste-and-gender oppression. Neeli’s “monstrosity” is explicitly inseparable from the caste order, she is punished for transgressing the boundaries of caste and for daring to desire outside her ascribed status. Folklorists note that nothing is liberating in these old tales, as they function primarily as cautionary fables that reinforce brahminical patriarchal boundaries rather than celebrate female agency. The yakshi’s beauty and fury serve as a warning that a woman who defies societal norms (too beautiful, too wilful, or reaching beyond her caste) will be demonised as a deadly threat. Thus, the early Neeli story encodes a double critique: as it exposes the violence of caste patriarchy, even as it ultimately reinforces that social order by portraying the avenging woman as a supernatural menace to be feared or subdued.

Maktoob Media for more

by JOAQUIN GARCIA MARTIN

Daniel Day-Lewis, Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears were almost unknown when they burst onto the scene with this low-budget English film

There are blockbusters that flop before reaching the screen. And then, there are independent gems that become huge, thanks only to word of mouth. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), now 40 years old, is an extreme example of this second category. At first, it didn’t even aspire to reach theaters, yet it became an international hit and a fixture on lists of the best British films, in addition to catapulting the careers of many of its creators. And it did all of this with a seemingly conflictive story, filled with social criticism, barbs at English classism, and queer themes.

My Beautiful Laundrette tells the story of Omar. The son of Pakistani immigrants in South London, he doesn’t want to end up like his father, a failed left-wing journalist, disillusioned by English society. Omar prefers to stay with his uncle Nasser, a successful businessman with a double life: at home, he acts like a classic patriarch, while outside, he maintains an English mistress and frequents dance halls.

One night, Omar reunites with Johnny, a white childhood friend who has become a skinhead. They both realize they’ve become the opposite of what they once were because of their society’s contradictions: one, racialized, has become a cynic who only believes in money, while the other — who hails from the working class — blames everything on immigrants. Acknowledging all this brings them closer together… and they resume the love they had for each other as teenagers. In the process, they agree to modernize and run a laundromat that Nasser uses to “launder” the money he earns from drug sales. Obviously, everything ends up shattering (including the laundry’s window) in an ending that’s as happy as it is cynical.

For the British Film Institute (BFI), it’s one of the 100 best British films of the 20th century. And it’s also on the BFI’s list of the 30 best films with LGBTQ+ themes. But the story of how it came to be filmed and how it reached movie theaters around the world is as fascinating as the fate of its creators and protagonist.

El Pais for more

by PETER LINEBAUGH

In 1958 the assistant headmaster did the Bible reading at the morning assembly of the Karachi Grammar School (Pakistan), founded in 1848 by the Church of England. The reading from Acts 17:23 concerned St. Paul’s declaration upon seeing the Athenian monument to an unknown God. “What you worship but do not know—this is what I now proclaim,” at which point I, 17 years old at the time, shouted the answer for all to hear: “Communism.”

As a child of both British and American empires I had come to this rebellious conclusion two years earlier at the Frankfurt Army High School. Based on study of The Communist Manifesto which I conducted in the library of the Officers Club at the I.G. Farben building, I was able to answer this ancient question posed in the Athenian agora by a man from Palestine.

I approach the wars in Palestine neither as an Arabic nor a Hebrew scholar or even as one knowledgeable to other forms of life in the region—olive, almond, fig, citrus fruits, sheep, cotton, or the grains like wheat. I come as a student, with a life-long admiration for the radical, abolitionist, and antinomian traditions: Jesus and the prophets, Karl Marx, Gerard Winstanley, Thomas Spence, Olaudah Equiano, the IWW, Frederick Douglass, Shunryu Suzuki, Elizabeth Poole, Ann Setter, Ivan Illich, Malcolm X, William Blake, Silvia Federici, E.P. Thompson, Robin Kelley, Manuel Yang, Michaela Brennan, Midnight Notes, Counterpunch, and Retort; and then I became an historian of all the above with particular interest in the commons. As Marcus Rediker and I said in the introduction to the Arabic translation of our Many-Headed Hydra, Herodotus, “the grandfather of history,” explained that Palestine lay between Phoenicia and Egypt.

Besides going to Athens, a home of philosophy (philia = love, Sophia = goddess of wisdom), Paul went to gatherings where they had “everything in common” (Acts 4:32). Jubilee was another Biblical thing I could cotton on to because I love its principles of land back, freedom now, no work, debt forgiveness, and rest for revered mother Earth. It all seems to me a beautiful combination of revolution and relaxation. Paul became a follower of Jesus who was thrown out of his hometown and almost killed for proclaiming jubilee right now. He called for rest and forgiveness. The only economic basis of such a thing is the commons. The struggle in Palestine helps us see this.

I believe that the musha’a (community-owned agricultural lands), like similar practices anywhere else in the world, can help us realize a world based on just conditions of mutuality, name it as is your wont: true communism, the cooperative commonwealth, the commons. The renewed thinking of the commons was born of struggles against the new enclosures of the neoliberal era and inspired by the commoning practices of autonomist Zapatista communes in Chiapas and its defense of the ejido. The commons is now understood as a key conceptual breakthrough in orienting visions and pathways to postcapitalist futures. The commons also marks the radical escape from the paralyzing misfires and legacies of modernist state socialisms (Ray 2024, see especially Federici 2019).

Monthly Review Online for more

by PHIL CHETWYND

It is getting harder every day to do the fundamental journalistic task of collecting facts and verifying information. It is also getting much more dangerous, writes Phil Chetwynd.

In the first half of 2025, the climate facing journalists darkened to levels not seen in decades, reflecting a coordinated escalation of violence, intimidation, and censorship.

The fabric of societies is being torn apart by what in many cases are deliberate and calculated campaigns to undermine facts, the bedrock of our shared reality.

There is no need to prove things are untrue; you only need to relentlessly smear, sow doubt and float conspiracies. Often social media algorithms will do the rest.

For Agence France-Presse, an international news agency with a reporting team spread across the globe, the figures are stark: we had 25 serious incidents involving journalists working for us in the first six months of this year. That is more than occurred in the whole of 2024.

But these incidents of assaults, arrests, expulsions or journalists fleeing for their lives only hint at the full scale of the global assault on the public’s right to information.

The geographical spread of violence and intimidation is widening. The situation is aggravated by the rise of authoritarian practices and populist rhetoric that openly targets the press.

Law enforcement’s growing impunity – emboldened by prevailing political messages – has made physical assaults on journalists commonplace.

This is not a phenomenon isolated to so-called unstable regimes; it is surfacing in established democracies and countries with long traditions of press freedom, pointing to a dangerous shift in global norms.

Journalists have traditionally identified themselves at protests and public events, believing this identity carried some form of protection and legitimacy.

But we increasingly see these identifiers as targets.

Over the past year journalists working for us have been targeted in different and violent ways at protests in countries as varied as Turkey, Argentina and the United States.

All of them were clearly identified as press. All of them are convinced they were targeted because they were journalists.

In significant swathes of the world, journalism is effectively disappearing. The intimidation and threats have become unmanageable. We have seen journalists working for us being forced to flee from across the Sahel area of West Africa and also in areas of Central America such as Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In parts of Eastern and Central Europe our fact-checkers face regular death threats and campaigns to intimidate and silence.

The message often comes from the top. The presidency in Argentina posted on social media last year: “We Do Not Hate Journalists Enough”. In total the Argentine Journalism Forum recorded 179 assaults on media workers in 2024.

And then there is Gaza.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says nearly 200 journalists in Gaza have been killed over the past two years.

It points to over 20 incidents where it believes individuals were deliberately targeted.

Some of the journalists who work for AFP in Gaza refuse to wear their protective flak jackets because they fear it will make them a target. They also say people are scared to be near them because they think journalists are targets.

And yet perhaps what is most notable is how few governments in the many countries that have thrived on press freedom are prepared to raise their heads above the parapet to stand up for facts, truth and press freedom.

Many brave and dedicated journalists feel horribly alone at this point.

This assault on journalism and campaign to undermine facts comes as the management of our digital lives is increasingly transferring to powerful Generative Artificial Intelligence tools.

We can all see the astonishing capacities these tools have for knowledge building and human advancement, but we are also already seeing how they can be used to pollute our information ecosystem with vast amounts of false and made-up content.

This feels like an inflection point.

People talk casually about living in a post-truth world. Journalism is imperfect, it will not always get it right. But the honest aspiration to gather information and seek the truth is fundamental to the healthy functioning of our societies.

Now, more than ever, we need to stand up for facts.

There can be no alternative.

WAN-IFRA for more

by KERI LEIGH MERRITT

Although nearly fifty-seven years have passed since Stanley Elkins’ provocative thesis on the effects of slavery rocked the historical community, scholars are still grappling with some of the basic premises he put forth. While the effects of slaveholders’ psychological terrorism still inspire intense debates, it should prove helpful for scholars to focus on how severely the enslaved were mentally tortured. Perhaps one of slave owners’ more innovatively cruel strategies concerned the ways they sought to completely emasculate enslaved boys and men—by denying them the right to wear pants. By forcing young African American boys and men to wear dress-like shirts, the owners of flesh attempted to feminize and humiliate enslaved males on a daily basis. According to scores of interviews with the formerly enslaved, denying black boys and young men the right to wear pants was a relatively widespread practice throughout the Deep South.¹

This custom certainly becomes even more interesting when slaveholders’ beliefs about slave breeding and the virility of young “bucks” is taken into consideration. Countless owners commented time and again in diaries and letters about the supposedly highly-sexualized nature of young black men, and the emasculation of the enslaved must have allowed slaveholders some type of psycho-sexual superiority complex. By feminizing African American males, slave owners likely reassured themselves that they were the most masculine men on the plantation, which could be demonstrated, of course, by the rape and sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls.

Aaihs for more

by WALDEN BELLO

 “Let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national” – this advice from Keynes remains just as relevant today as it was in the 1930s.

On Sept 23, 2025, the Foreign Policy Association and the Committee of 100 hosted a debate on the topic “Is Deglobalization Inevitable?,” with Walden Bello, co-chair of the Board of Focus on the Global South, and Edward Ashbee of the Copenhagen Business School, with Bello defending the affirmative side, after a fireside chat with Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.  The audience judged Bello’s position the more persuasive of the two sides.

In the 1990s, we were told that we were entering an era, known as globalization, that, owing to free trade and unobstructed capital flows in a borderless global economy, would lead to the best of all possible worlds. Most of the West’s economic, political, and intellectual elites bought into this vision. I still remember how the venerable Thomas Friedman of The New York Times lampooned those of us who resisted this vision as “flat-earthers,” or believers in a flat earth. I still recall the equally venerable Economist magazine singling me out as coining the word “deglobalization,” not with the aim of hailing me as a prophet but as a fool preaching a return to a Jurassic past.

Thirty years on, this flat-earther takes no pride in having forecast the mess we are in, to which unfettered globalization has been a central contributor: the highest rates of inequality in decades, growing poverty in both the Global North and the Global South, deindustrialization in the United States and many other countries, massive indebtedness of consumers in the Global North and whole countries in the Global South, financial crisis after financial crisis, the rise of the far right, uncontrolled climate change, and intensifying geopolitical conflict.

Globalization did not lead to a new world order but to the Brave New World.

Snapshots of a Dreary Era

Let me present three snapshots of that era of globalization that we are now leaving:

Snapshot No 1:  Apple was one of the main beneficiaries of globalization. Apple led the escape away from the confines of the national economy to create global supply chains propped up by cheap labor. Let me just quote The New York Times in this regard:

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

Apple, of course, was not alone in the drive to deindustrialize America. It was accompanied by fellow IT corporations Microsoft, Intel, and Invidia; automakers GM, Ford, and Tesla; pharmaceutical giants Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer; and other leaders in other industries and services, such as Procter and Gamble, Coca Cola, Walmart, and Amazon, to name just a few. The favorite destination was China, where wages were 3-5 percent of wages of workers in the United States. The “China Shock” is estimated, conservatively, to have led to the loss of 2.4 million U.S. jobs. Employment in manufacturing dropped to 11.7 million in October 2009, a loss of 5.5 million or 32 percent of all manufacturing jobs since October 2000. The last time fewer than 12 million people worked in the manufacturing sector was before World War II, in 1941.

Snapshot 2:  The removal of the barriers to the free flow of capital globally led to the Third World Debt Crisis in the early 1980s, which almost brought down the Citibank and other U.S. financial institutions, and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, which brought down the so-called Asian miracle economies. Removing global capital controls was accompanied by the deregulation of the U.S. financial system, which led to the creation of massive profit-making scams through the so-called magic of financial engineering like the frenzied trading in sub-prime mortgages. Not only were millions bankrupted and lost their homes when the subprime securities were exposed as rotten, but the whole global system stood on the brink of collapse in 2008, and it was saved only by the bailout of U.S. banks, with U.S. taxpayers money, to the tune of over $1 trillion.

Snapshot 3 is the famous French economist Thomas Piketty’s summing up of the U.S. economic tragedy of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

FPIF for more

by PHILIP BALL

Thirty years ago, nanotech was about to change everything. Let’s not get tricked again by Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

In 2000, Bill Joy, the co-founder and chief scientist of the computer company Sun Microsystems, sounded an alarm about technology. In an article in Wired titled ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’, Joy wrote that we should ‘limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.’ He feared a future in which our inventions casually wipe us from the face of the planet.

The concerns expressed in Joy’s article, which prompted accusations of Luddism from tech advocates, sound remarkably similar to those now being voiced by some leaders in Silicon Valley that artificial intelligence might soon surpass us in intelligence and decide we humans are expendable. However, while ‘sentient robots’ were a part of what had spooked Joy, his main worry was about another technology that he figured might make that prospect imminently possible. He was troubled by nanotechnology: the engineering of matter at the scale of nanometres, comparable to the size of molecules.

In fact, it would be more accurate to say Joy was troubled by the version of nanotechnology that he had read about in the book Engines of Creation (1986) by the engineer K Eric Drexler, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the close of the 20th century, it was nanotechnology, not AI (which didn’t seem to be getting very far), that loomed large as the enabler of utopias and dystopias. Drexler’s book described a vision of nanotech that could work wonders, promising, in Joy’s words, ‘incredibly low-cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold’ as well as ‘[low-cost] spaceflight … and restoration of extinct species.’

But Joy had learnt from the inventor Ray Kurzweil (now a scientific adviser to Google) that Drexler’s nanotech promised something yet more remarkable: the singularity, a point at which our accelerating technological prowess reaches escape velocity and literal marvels become possible – in particular, immortality through the merging of human and machine, so that we could upload our minds to computers and live forever in a digital nirvana.

‘[N]anotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information,’ Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near (2005). The technology ‘will provide tools to effectively combat poverty, clean up our environment, overcome disease, extend human longevity, and many other worthwhile pursuits.’

But, Joy learned, there was a downside to all this. Drexler’s nanotechnology could get out of hand, unleashing swarms of invisibly tiny nano-robots that blindly start pulling everything apart, atom by atom, until they have reduced the world to what Drexler called ‘grey goo’. In the late 1990s, the grey-goo problem was the golem that, like ‘superintelligent AI’ today, might bring about our hubristic downfall.

Aeon for more

by RAFIA ZAKARIA

BY the end of the day this past Thursday, Israeli forces had intercepted all the boats that were a part of the Global Sumud Flotilla. The 450 activists, which included Pakistanis, in the flotilla of over 40 boats were headed to the coast of Gaza to break the 18-year-long naval blockade of the occupied Strip.

They were bringing baby formula, humanitarian supplies and medicines to Gaza’s starving people of whom many are children. In a world which has stood by as new tribulations have been visited upon the hapless Palestinians at the hands of Israeli authorities, the flotilla hoped to bring the message that the international community had not forgotten them.

One of the people, who was detained by Israeli authorities, was Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, a vociferous advocate for the people of Gaza. In an interview before joining the flotilla, Greta said that her “mission should not have to exist” because it was the job of governments to follow international law and provide humanitarian aid. The flotilla mission obviously exists because governments have stood by and watched as over 65,000 civilians have been killed by Israeli forces while hundreds of thousands are being starved. Her statement brings into question the value of international law in a world where such suffering is allowed to exist.

Greta Thunberg is set to be deported. It is almost certain that she will continue her activism on behalf of the Palestinian people, forcing governments to accept accountability for their inaction.

Her work is worth recounting because it shows how the tremendous platform that comes with being an international celebrity can be used to push for transformational change in the world. A young white woman who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, Greta has no personal, ethnic or religious connection with the Palestinians. However, in empathising with their suffering she shows that humanity still exists and that a massive platform can be used to guide young people to the cause of truth and justice opening their eyes to Palestinian suffering.

Another young woman who also commands celebrity status on a mega scale is the youngest Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.

However, unlike Greta, her engagement with Gaza has been perfunctory. Yousafzai spent last year producing an Off-Broadway show with former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who has not only failed to call what has been taking place in Gaza a genocide but has also been a supporter of Zionism.

When young American college students took to protesting against Israel’s attacks on the hapless civilian population of Gaza, Hillary Clinton suggested they were uneducated and had been fed propaganda. To put it in simple words, there is no confusion about where Hillary Clinton, who has taken millions of dollars from Zionist donors in her political career, stands on Gaza.

Greta has shown that humanity still exists.

Malala and Hillary Clinton’s Off-Broadway project Suffs focused on the women of the American suffrage movement. She told AP that she “still had no idea about the US side of the story”. But she would be aware that South Asian women were fighting British colonialism and laying down their lives against European aggression long before the US-based suffrage movement which celebrates itself as one of the first examples of women’s political activism in the world.

Dawn for more