Crimes against humanity, past and present

by SEIJI YAMADA

US war against Vietnam IMAGE/Jacobin

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

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

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

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

1) Killing members of the group;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Counterpunch for more

Fooled by language

by JINOY JOSE P.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orwell was on point.

Frontline for more

One law for all

SOUTHHALL BLACK SISTERS

Dear Members of the Women and Equalities Committee,

Re: Session on Gendered Islamophobia

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


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

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

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

The international and local context

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

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

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

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

Southhall Black Sisters for more

Leaked documents expose US interference projects in Iran

by KIT KLARENBERG

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

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

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

Covert funding for Iran’s opposition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Human subjects’

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

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

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

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

The Cradle for more

Creating ‘mirror life’ could be disastrous, scientists warn

by SIMON MAKIN

IMAGE/Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientific American for more

It’s a lie to say Republicans want to get rid of the federal government

by DEAN BAKER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CEPR for more

The Gaza “war” was a lie, as is the ceasefire

by JONATHAN COOK

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

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

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

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

And the goal of the slaughter was always ethnic cleansing.

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

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

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

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

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

Wrecking spree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still dying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A blind eye

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

Dissident Voice for more

What is an AI agent? A computer scientist explains the next wave of AI tools

by BRIAN O’NEILL

The AI agents big tech companies are now developing possess the ability to take actions on your behalf.

Interacting with AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be fun and sometimes useful, but the next level of everyday AI goes beyond answering questions: AI agents carry out tasks for you.

Major technology companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce, have recently released or announced plans to develop and release AI agents. They claim these innovations will bring newfound efficiency to technical and administrative processes underlying systems used in health care, robotics, gaming, and other businesses.

Simple AI agents can be taught to reply to standard questions sent over email. More advanced ones can book airline and hotel tickets for transcontinental business trips. Google recently demonstrated Project Mariner to reporters, a browser extension for Chrome that can reason about the text and images on your screen.

In the demonstration, the agent helped plan a meal by adding items to a shopping cart on a grocery chain’s website, even finding substitutes when certain ingredients were not available. A person still needs to be involved to finalize the purchase, but the agent can be instructed to take all of the necessary steps up to that point.

In a sense, you are an agent. You take actions in your world every day in response to things that you see, hear, and feel. But what exactly is an AI agent? As a computer scientist, I offer this definition: AI agents are technological tools that can learn a lot about a given environment, and then—with a few simple prompts from a human—work to solve problems or perform specific tasks in that environment.

Rules and Goals

A smart thermostat is an example of a very simple agent. Its ability to perceive its environment is limited to a thermometer that tells it the temperature. When the temperature in a room dips below a certain level, the smart thermostat responds by turning up the heat.

A familiar predecessor to today’s AI agents is the Roomba. The robot vacuum cleaner learns the shape of a carpeted living room, for instance, and how much dirt is on the carpet. Then it takes action based on that information. After a few minutes, the carpet is clean.

The smart thermostat is an example of what AI researchers call a simple reflex agent. It makes decisions, but those decisions are simple and based only on what the agent perceives in that moment. The robot vacuum is a goal-based agent with a singular goal: clean all of the floor that it can access. The decisions it makes—when to turn, when to raise or lower brushes, when to return to its charging base—are all in service of that goal.

A goal-based agent is successful merely by achieving its goal through whatever means are required. Goals can be achieved in a variety of ways, however, some of which could be more or less desirable than others.

Many of today’s AI agents are utility based, meaning they give more consideration to how to achieve their goals. They weigh the risks and benefits of each possible approach before deciding how to proceed. They are also capable of considering goals that conflict with each other and deciding which one is more important to achieve. They go beyond goal-based agents by selecting actions that consider their users’ unique preferences.

Singularity Hub for more

In 2022, 151.3 million people across Arab states could not afford a healthy diet: UN

by MADHUMITA PAUL

IMAGE/iStock photo for representation

That is almost one-third of the Arab region’s population

In 2022, 2.8 billion people globally were unable to afford a healthy diet. Of these 151.3 million resided in the Arab States, representing 5.4 per cent of the global population.

The 151.3 million people constitute almost one-third of the Arab region’s population, according to a report by the United Nations.

The report, titled 2024 Near East and North Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition, was launched on December 18, 2024, by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).

The analysis covers 22 Arab states spread across West Asia, North and East Africa: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

The Arab region remains off-track to meet the food security and nutrition targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, the document warned.

Conflict is the main driver of food insecurity and malnutrition in the region, while economic challenges, high income disparities and severe climate impacts also play important roles in this matter, according to the report.

Regional food production is limited due to scarcity of fertile land and water, impacts of climate variability and the increased frequency of extreme weather events.

Shocking figures

The prevalence of undernourishment in Arab states reached a new level, as per the report. A shocking 66.1 million people, equivalent to about 14 per cent of the region’s population, faced hunger in 2023.

In 2023, moderate or severe food insecurity affected 39.4 per cent of the Arab population (186.5 million individuals), a 1.1 percentage point increase from the previous year, and 15.4 per cent of the population (72.7 million people) faced severe food insecurity in 2023.

The Arab region continues to struggle with a triple burden of malnutrition — undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies (anemia among women) and obesity.

In 2022, the prevalence of overweight among children under 5 years of age and among adults over 18 years was around double the world average. Egypt, Qatar, and Kuwait reported the highest country-specific obesity rates.

Down to earth for more