by HUSSEIN ASKARI

Washington has maintained control over Iraq’s oil revenues since its illegal 2003 invasion – a financial and economic subjugation that undermines Iraqi sovereignty and denies it access to its own national treasure.

In July, the Iraqi Central Bank halted all foreign transactions in Chinese Yuan, succumbing to intense pressure from the US Federal Reserve to do so. The shutdown followed a brief period during which Baghdad had allowed merchants to trade in Yuan, an initiative intended to mitigate excessive US restrictions on Iraq’s access to US dollars.

While this Yuan-based trade excluded Iraq’s oil exports, which remained in US dollars, Washington viewed it as a threat to its financial dominance over the Persian Gulf state. But how has the US managed to exert such total control over Iraqi financial policies?

The answer lies in 2003, with mechanisms established following the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq.

A legacy of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’

Since the signing of Executive Order 13303 (EO13303) by President George W Bush on 22 May 2003, all revenues from Iraq’s oil sales have been funneled directly into an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

EO13303, titled “Protection of the Development Fund for Iraq and Other Property in Which Iraq Has an Interest,” has been renewed annually by every US president, including Joe Biden in 2024. This executive order essentially places control over Iraq’s oil revenues under the discretion of the US President, leaving Baghdad with limited control over its resources and earnings.

The roots of Iraq’s financial dependence on the US stretch back to the 1990s. Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, UN Security Council Resolution 661 imposed severe economic sanctions to isolate Iraq from international trade. These sanctions, exacerbated by former president Saddam Hussein’s refusal to comply with withdrawal demands, crippled the Iraqi economy.

Control over Iraq’s finances

UNSC Resolution 687, passed in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War, extended these sanctions while introducing the controversial “Oil for Food” program. Although it allowed Iraq to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian goods like food and medicine, the sanctions resulted in immense human suffering, with over one million Iraqis, half of them children, dying during this period. Then-US secretary of state Madeleine Albright infamously defended the sanctions in a 1996 interview, stating that the deaths were “worth the price.”

Following the invasion of Iraq, the US occupation of the country became a reality after the collapse of Saddam’s government. Faced with a fait accompli, the UN Security Council had to accept the new status quo.

According to International Humanitarian Law, occupation forces – in this case, the US and UK – become responsible for the well-being of the populations they occupy. So, UNSC Resolution 1483 was issued on 22 May 2003 to establish the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) as Iraq’s administrator and create the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) to manage Iraqi oil revenues.

Note that Resolution 1483 did not mention the US Federal Reserve as the depositary of Iraqi funds, nor did it assign a location for the DFI headquarters or account. In fact, the resolution specifically states directed that the DFI should “be held by the Central Bank of Iraq.” It was the CPA, led by Paul Bremer, that decided unilaterally to house the account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

This decision allowed the US government to maintain tight control over Iraq’s oil revenues. From that point until today, the Iraqi Ministry of Finance has had to submit requests for funds to the US Treasury, which then approves or denies these requests based on its own criteria.

This monthly transfer of US dollars – which are literally flown into Baghdad in pallets of hard cash – determines Iraq and its 40-million-population’s ability to pay for basic needs like salaries, food, and medicine.

Blackmailing Iraq

Whenever Washington feels that Iraq is not compliant with US regional goals, these fund transfers can be delayed or reduced. In January 2020, for instance, after the Iraqi Parliament voted to expel US troops following the assassination of Iranian Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) Deputy Commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Trump administration threatened to freeze Iraq’s access to its oil revenues.

Today, Iraq’s financial situation remains dire. Despite having oil revenues piling up in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – estimated today at around $120 billion – Iraq is burdened with a growing debt that matches this amount.

The Cradle for more

by MUNA KHAN

The double standards exhibited in the Western media when it comes to reporting on Gaza have only widened the mistrust between it and the audience.

“You cannot continue to victimise someone else just because you yourself were a victim once — there has to be a limit.”

Edward Said wrote this nearly 50 years ago, but the limits he wrote about have long been crossed by Israel’s powerful propaganda machine, which has found plenty of allies in the Western media.

How else do you explain the continued circulation of the false story about the 40 beheaded babies — which emerged in Israel’s Kfar Aza Kibbutz following Hamas’ attack on Israel — one year ago? The story quickly made global headlines and received condemnation, including from US President Joe Biden, whose staff, it later emerged, had cautioned him from mentioning it.

Yet, those cautions fell on deaf ears when Biden said he had seen those images and then had to retract. When history reviews that moment, it will likely put Biden’s lies down to his old age and confused state of mind. However, to those of us long familiar with how “we” are reported on, we know “they” only see the worst of us.

As Said wrote in his book Orientalism in 1975: “In newsreels or news-photos, the Arab is always shown in large numbers. No individuality, no personal characteristics or experiences. Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures. Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or Arabs) will take over the world.”

The Palestinian Arab, thus, must be put in its place.

While US presidents, sitting and hopeful, are quick to believe Israel’s version, it is nonetheless shocking to see them defend the damage caused by Israel’s airstrike on Rafah in May which, to be precise, charred to death scores of children. This was days after the International Court of Justice had ordered Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah. Israel would describe it as a “tragic mistake.” Unlike the imaginary 40 beheaded Israeli babies, here we saw a father hold up a decapitated baby in Rafah, but it did not make the headlines. Only prominent diaspora writers, with links to the Arab or Muslim-majority countries, wrote about it on their Substacks or social media; perhaps there was an op-ed or two in left leaning papers like The Guardian.

Were it for not social media, and phones recording the horrors of the genocide in Gaza, we would be dependent on Israel’s manipulation of these falsehoods. They do this to garner support, to shape policy, to ensure that any sympathy toward Palestine is quickly turned into a “do you support Hamas?”. And they have mammoth support from Western media and scholars and influencers.

As law professor, Khaled Beydoun, wrote following the Rafah massacre: “On a landscape ravaged by unhinged Israeli militarism and unchecked American might, the lie of headless Israeli children means everything; while the truth of beheaded Palestinian children means nothing.”

Dawn for more

by NICK PEMBERTON

Matt Taibbi was surprised to get a confrontational interview from Briahna Joy Gray, who like him, is linked with the horseshoe theory of politics (left and right are the same). The occasion for the interview was that Taibbi has been revealing the Twitter files, the leaked documents from the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter.

Gray is a much more nuanced thinker than Taibbi and frustrates both the Trumpenleft (Paul Street’s genius term) and the Brandonleft (the part of the left that keeps being shocked by Joe Biden’s “betrayals”). See Joshua Frank’s aptly named piece recently in CounterPunch.

Now onto the interview of Taibbi by Gray. This is behind a paywall I normally don’t have access to. But Gray is one of the leftists worth supporting, just as Counterpunch is. She’s a fair, smart, and engaging interviewer. She asked what she said her fans wanted her to ask (myself included). She asked Taibbi not so much about what was in the Twitter files (suppression of the right-wing) but more so about what wasn’t (suppression of the left wing).

Gray’s line of questioning is informed by what we all have observed in Taibbi and much of the left these days. A clear drift towards the “populist” right which in reality is just the politics of the petit-bourgeois who perpetually see their privilege in decline. To be fair to Taibbi there is a structural problem going on which C. Derick Varn has addressed well. With a decline in the ability to do real journalism for a living, we see many journalists taking up what they can do from their coach, which is to engage in a certain kind of politics that can only be right-wing (more on this later).

The Twitter files are a mix of these things. Let’s face it. It’s Taibbi’s best work by far in years. There is something there. The intelligence agencies getting involved in Twitter censorship is important. The problem Gray had was the editorializing of Taibbi which framed the censorship to be mostly of the right-wing, not of the left wing.

However here again Gray’s astute reading of Taibbi’s agenda lately doesn’t cut all the way through. When Gray pressed Taibbi he said, and this is fair, that what he found on Twitter was mostly right-wing censorship but this was not the main discovery. The main discovery was the players involved.

Gray wondered if Taibbi was looking in the right places, and if Twitter’s new ultra-right CEO Elon Musk, was hiding things from Taibbi. Matt admitted he had a limited amount of Twitter’s files he could get at once and that he wasn’t really looking for left-wing censorship, rather he was following what he saw as the main story: collaboration between top-level executives and an intelligence agency to censor Twitter. It just so happened that the censorship was right-wing.

Gray was rightly skeptical of this but how could any of us know? Let’s assume Taibbi is telling us all he saw and while he can’t see everything let’s assume he is generally targeting the right people on Twitter. There’s a scenario in which Taibbi is completely right about Twitter and at the same time Gray is right to interrogate the ideology behind the project.

It’s clear why Taibbi was chosen by Elon Musk to do this project and why the Republicans want him to testify about it. But Taibbi argues, that as a journalist, the motivation of the source doesn’t matter, what matters is the information revealed. This is hard to argue with. And the same can be applied to Taibbi himself. Just because he may be doing the Twitter files to further a right-wing agenda doesn’t mean there isn’t important information along the way. In other words, facts are facts no matter if we like the messenger or not.

That being said Gray is looking in the wrong place if she wants to find the censorship of the left. It may be perfectly true that Twitter is censoring the right more than the left. Why is that? Because the left isn’t on Twitter. The left is on the streets. Getting murdered every day. Getting charged with domestic terrorism for peaceful protest. Getting their heads beaten in by cops. Getting fired from their jobs. This is where the left is. This is the kind of censorship that’s hard to cover in an age where journalism isn’t supported in a structural way.

Now there are other kinds of less dramatic things going on too. The algorithms that bury the left. The corruption works well with fascists like Trump and bad with social democrats like Sanders or AOC. Those trying to unionize get punished. Those defending their land getting moved out. There are ways. Some go easily. Some pay the ultimate price. But the censorship of the left is so obvious and so much more than speech it is clear that anyone who doesn’t see it just spends their days online and doesn’t see the working class at all, let alone the left.

It is possible that the right-wing spends more time whining on Twitter. Should we be against their censorship? Sure. But it would be nice if the left was put in the proper context. It’s unfortunate that Taibbi has to editorialize that the left is weak and cowardly and no threat to power while the bourgeois white nationalist right is the underdog.

Could Taibbi’s thesis be right when he’s looking on a liberal media space where no threat to power is happening anyways? Sure they might hate the Trumpsters. It’s not the biggest story but it’s the story that will be covered.

Gray continued to try and make a leftist intervention into Taibbi’s claim of acting without bias and just presenting the facts. Everyone has bias, especially those who say they don’t, but facts are helpful no matter what and hard to come by in the age of the editorial.

All I’ve been doing really is editorials and at some point, I ran into the same rut as many of the lefties who bash the left now has. They claim the left is dead. That’s merely an excuse to not engage. It comes from bourgeois guilt. We feel bad when we can or will not intervene to change society.

Counterpunch for more

by B. R. GOWANI

In today’s capitalist world, once a capitalist sees profit in an idea, it’s turned into a commodity whether there is demand for it or not. Demand is then created through advertisement.

The pharmaceutical companies’ ads on TV depict drugs with exotic looking names, shot in beautiful locales, in a friendly or familial atmosphere — without ever showing the true patients actual pain and push you to ask your doctor about their medicine. So the drug companies are forcing patients to pressurize doctors to prescibe the said medicine. Only the US and New Zealand permit such direct-to-consumer ads.

These ads are banned in Europe. One wonders where is the need for a doctor then, the companies should sell the medicine directly to the customer, through mail.

Then there is the business of plastic surgery: a big one, at that.

According to The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS), the year 2021 saw an overall increase of 19.3% in procedures performed by plastic surgeons. Globally, 12.8 million surgical and 17.5 million non-surgical, procedures were performed that year.

In 2023, the global cosmetic surgery market was valued at $57.67 billion. In rare cases, plastic surgeries are needed; others are simply, what are known as, “augmentation,” enhancement,” and so on of various anatomical parts. A huge number of cases go wrong in an unfixable manner — and end up victims of looking “beautiful,” forgetting the famous adage: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

This article is about a London based facelift surgeon named Dr Julian De Silva. Cosmetic Surgery Reviews has the following write-up about De Silva.

“Dr Julian De Silva is a renowned surgeon who specialises in only facial plastic surgery. With an international client base and use of pioneering regenerative medicine, he has built a reputation natural looking signature blepharoplasty, rhinoplasty, face and neck lift surgery. Voted internationally as one of the top 10 plastic surgeons in the world.”

This same website has listed him number 12 in its lists of 30 Best Facelift Surgeons in Western Europe 2023.

ClinicSpots website lists “15 Best Plastic Surgeons in the World” but De Silva’s name is not mentioned in that list, not that it matters much. Neither did The Luxe Insider include his name in its Top 10. In reality, any magazine or website can come up with their list of the “best.”

De Silva is a very savvy advertiser. He comes up with a list of the 10 most handsome men which he figures out by applying the Greek Golden Ratio. On his business website, he has this article: “Actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson – tipped to be the new James Bond – is the most handsome man in the world, according to science.” That science is “Greek Golden Ratio of Beauty Phi – which measures physical perfection.”

Looking at his website, the impression created is as if the article was published in The Clinic London on October 7, 2024. However, the link, when clicked, takes you back to De Silva’s site. De Silva or his staff may have written the article where De Silva is addressed in the third person.

Below is the 2024 list and the criteria applied by De Silva: the most attractive nose, eyes, eyebrows, chin, lips, forehead and face shape.

The most handsome men in the world – and their Golden Ratio scores

1. Aaron Taylor-Johnson  – 93.04%
2. Lucien Laviscount  – 92.41%
3. Paul Mescal – 92.38%
4. Robert Pattison  – 92.15%
5. Jack Lowden – 90.33%
6. George Clooney – 89.9%
7. Nicholas Hoult – 89.84%
8. Charles Melton – 88.46%
9. Idris Elba – 87.94%
10. Shah Rukh Khan – 86.76%

He has made this list before too, in 2017 with mostly different actors as he updates the list according to the times. In that year, he was advertising Jamie Foxx’s “handsome chin” and Brad Pitt’s “eyes.” Whoever is the in-thing is in the the new bunch list of “most handsome.”

The July 2017 Marie Claire (French international magazine) article titled “These are the most handsome men in the world” “(according to science)”listed the following actors

1. George Clooney — 91.86%
2. Bradley Cooper — 91.80%
3. Brad Pitt — 90.5%
4. Harry Styles — 89.63%
5. David Beckham — 88.96%
6. Will Smith — 88.88%
7. Idris Elba — 87.93%
8. Ryan Gosling — 87.48%
9. Zayn Malik — 86.50%
10. Jamie Fox — 85.46%

There are millions of beautiful people all over the world. Just in London, if De Silva visited different localities, he would come across many, many handsome people. But then, to attract clients, he relies on well known actors.

Golden Ratio

Now let’s check out what Golden ratio is and if this was widely applied by the Greeks. Spencer McDaniel on her website Tales of Times Forgotten explains what Golden Ratio is:

The so-called “Golden Ratio,” or ?, occurs when the ratio of the greater of two quantities to the lesser of two quantities is equivalent to the ratio of the sum of the two quantities to the greater of the two quantities. Expressed using incomprehensible math symbols, it looks like this:

Mario Livio, on his website +Plus explains the Golden Ratio like this:

In the Elements, the most influential mathematics textbook ever written, Euclid of Alexandria (ca. 300 BC) defines a proportion derived from a division of a line into what he calls its “extreme and mean ratio.” Euclid’s definition reads:

A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.

In other words, in the diagram below, point C divides the line in such a way that the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the ratio of AB to AC. Some elementary algebra shows that in this case the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the irrational number 1.618 (precisely half the sum of 1 and the square root of 5).

C divides the line segment AB according to the Golden Ratio.

Over a period of time, the honorifics “Divine Proportion” and “Golden Ratio” were bestowed on the theory and that got associated with aesthetics.

McDaniel points out that Greeks were not that much into the “Golden Ratio.”

Many people believe that the “Golden Ratio” is the pinnacle of aesthetic perfection and that, the closer something is to the Golden Ratio, the more beautiful it is automatically. Many people also believe that the ancient Greeks were obsessed with the Golden Ratio and that they incorporated it into all their buildings and works of art. Unfortunately for those who love a good math story, we have no good evidence to support either of these conclusions.

In fact, the Golden Ratio is not even mentioned in any Greek text until as late as the early third century BC. The Greeks were arguably fascinated with the idea of using mathematical proportions in art to a certain extent, but they were by no means obsessed with the Golden Ratio in particular. The story of how we came to believe that the Greeks were obsessed with the Golden Ratio, though, is as fascinating as it is bizarre. It involves a friend of Leonardo da Vinci, an eccentric nineteenth-century German psychologist, and Donald Duck.

Ancient Greece’s temple known as The Parthenon, also considered a symbol of Western Civilization and democracy, has, it has been claimed, to perfectly fit the Golden ratio. McDaniel disagees and illustrates the points in a couple of pictures of the Parthenon.

The argument McDaniel makes is that superimposing rectangles and spirals on images of artworks, buildings, or any other object, does not prove that it was constructed according to the Golden Ratio.

She herself superimposed spirals over the illustrated image of satan, over her own face, and over a dumpster (see above) and then sarcastically questions:

“Can you even begin to fathom how incredibly aesthetically appealing this dumpster is? Is it not the most beautiful dumpster you have ever seen?”

That is the gist of her argument: superimposing spirals and rectangles does not make the object beautiful — if it is aesthetically pleasing, then it is beautiful — irrespective of whether the Golden Ratio was applied or not.

Similarly, drawing some lines on a photo of human face and giving percentages to various facial parts does not make a person the “most handsome man in the world.” The claim itself shows how narrow the person’s outlook is equating to tunnel vision.

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Arguably, every being can be characterized as being striking, beautiful, appealing, attractive. One just needs to look at the creation deep emough. There is room for all things in our beautiful blue planet.

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

Acclaimed author and researcher Thomas Suárez, a former West-Bank resident and faculty member of Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music, appeared at UMass-Amherst on April 16 to talk about the historical roots of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the complicity of Western governments in manufacturing consent to the continuing horrors unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank, and what it will take to fundamentally transform Israel’s current apartheid policies and liberate the Palestinian people.

Suárez, who is also a professional concert violinist and world-renowned cartographer, is the author of four books based on exhaustive archival research into the history of Zionism, Zionist terror, and Israel’s formation.

Thomas Suárez’s most recent book is Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea, which Noam Chomsky called “a damning story, heavily documented … far too revealing to be tolerated.” His previous book, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, was praised by the eminent Israeli historian Ilan Pappe as “a tour de force that looks boldly at the impact of Zionism on Palestine and its people in the first part of the 20th century,” and “the first comprehensive and structured analysis of the violence and terror employed by the Zionist movement, and later the state of Israel, against the people of Palestine.”

Youtube

(Thanks to Razi Azmi)

by MUZHIRA AMIN & HAWWA FAZAL

Oct – Dec Jan – Mar Apr – Jun Jul – Sep

Around 3,500 young people had gathered in a dusty field outside the Re’im kibbutz — located hardly 3.3 miles (a four-minute and 12-second drive) from the wall that separates Gaza from southern Israel — on October 7 last year. The Tribe of Nova gathering was celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot when white flashes of rockets filled the horizon.

Within minutes, the dance field and several other neighbourhoods turned into a slaughterhouse as Hamas fighters breached the border fence — some descending in paragliders, others by road — killed over 1,100 Israelis and took dozens of hostages in what went on to become the worst civilian massacre in Israel’s history.

Tel Aviv immediately responded with massive retaliatory air strikes, killing scores of Palestinians in the crowded Gaza Strip, where 2.3 million people have been living under an Israel-imposed land, sea and air blockade for the past 16 years. “Our enemy will pay a price the type of which it has never known,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed in an address following the attack.

A year on, Israel has turned Gaza into a “death zone”, killing almost 42,000 people and injuring thousands more (these are conservative estimates and only account for the deaths of Palestinians whose identities have been ascertained — there may be thousands others under the rubble or simply incinerated by Israel’s munitions who are unaccounted for). Every one in five Palestinians, or about 96 per cent of the enclave’s population, is facing starvation. Over 60pc of Gaza’s farmland — known for producing strawberries, olives, dates, oranges and grapefruit — has been wiped out.

For Palestinians, the last 364 days can be described in three words: decimation, destruction and displacement. United Nations experts have even gone on to say that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide … has been met” during the Israeli offensive in Gaza. The International Court of Justice also hinted at the same in its landmark ruling on January 26.

Israel, the state which was born in the aftermath of a carnage that gave the world the word “genocide”, has now been accused of committing the same in Gaza.

Genocide, coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. The term was developed partly in response to Nazi policies of the Jewish people’s systemic murder during the Holocaust.

The UN General Assembly first recognised genocide as a crime under international law in 1946. It was later codified as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, also known as the Genocide Convention.

According to the Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:

• Killing members of the group
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

“The victims of genocide are deliberately targeted — not randomly — because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals,” the Convention says.

This piece is an attempt to document all the genocidal acts, which fall within the parameters set by the convention, committed by Israel against Palestinians during the last one year — from bombing hospitals and shelter camps to driving vulnerable Gazans out of their homeland.

A note of caution here: while we have tried to be as comprehensive as possible, this list may not cover all of Israel’s atrocities simply because of the information blockade imposed by the Israeli government on Gaza.

Click on the tabs above to scroll through the 365 days of genocide in Gaza.

Dawn for more

by YOAV LITVIN

From West Bank real estate ads to violent expulsions and ethnic cleansing, the theft of Palestinian land is key to the Zionist project, writes Yoav Litvin.

The marketing of ‘Anglo neighbourhoods’ in the occupied West Bank at real estate events in synagogues in Toronto, Los Angeles, New Jersey, and other locations wouldn’t be out of place 30 years ago in apartheid South Africa or Rhodesia. But perhaps that’s the point. 

Branded ‘Anglo Neighbourhoods’, the marketing of illegal settlement real estate in the Israeli-occupied West Bank primarily target Zionist Jews from the US, Canada and the rest of the English-speaking West.

Corporate real estate investment by companies both within and outside Israel have long been integral to settlement policies, with new developments reinforcing this trend. 

A Human Rights Watch report reveals how Israeli and international companies build, finance, service and market settlement communities. Settlement businesses thrive on Israel’s unlawful confiscation of Palestinian land and resources, supporting the growth and functioning of settlements.

These businesses, from real estate to construction, benefit from Israel’s discriminatory policies in planning, zoning, land allocation and access to natural resources, financial incentives, utilities and infrastructure.

These policies displace Palestinians and disadvantage them compared to settlers. Consequently, the Palestinian economy suffers, forcing many Palestinians to work in settlements; a dependency used to justify settlement businesses.

But the sale of real estate in stolen land, while outrageous, is not surprising. It is just a recent tactic in a longstanding systematic problem that is now escalating beyond the point of no-return.

The establishment and expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem are widely recognised as violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.

These initiatives accurately encapsulate the function of Zionism in Palestine as a settler colonialist, capitalist and white supremacist movement which opportunistically and antisemitically coopts Judaism to justify its criminal practices of apartheid and genocide against Indigenous Palestinians.

Its strategy, tactics, and goals focus on land grabs and demographic dominance, utilising both official state-sponsored and unofficial methods, such as corporate real estate.

Official colonisation of Palestine

Contrary to the Zionist movement’s duplicitous claims that Palestine was largely uninhabited, Zionist leaders have recognised the necessity of assuming control over Indigenous Palestinian land to realise their exclusivist goals.

For this purpose, they’ve applied a variety of tactics orchestrated by official and unofficial state actors, ranging from peaceful appropriation within questionable legal confines to genocidal aggression.

Numerous official acts of genocide have been executed through deliberate warfare. A defining genocidal episode in Israel’s establishment, during the Palestinian Nakba, was Plan Dalet, a military initiative orchestrated by the Haganah under David Ben-Gurion’s leadership.

Further genocidal bouts of “mowing the lawn,” have demonstrated the Zionist settler colonial dynamic since Israel’s establishment to this day. 

The current Israeli government has enhanced its military aggression and prioritised illegal settlement construction, bolstered by the presence of several far-right ministers residing in illegal West Bank settlements.

Indeed, since the departure of former Defense Minister Benny Gantz from Israel’s emergency war cabinet amid disagreements over the Gaza war strategy and the return of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, Netanyahu has increasingly leaned on far-right factions within his coalition government.

In April 2024, the government expanded its control over West Bank land, setting the stage for unprecedented levels of settlement construction. At present, Israel’s Supreme Planning Council is poised to discuss proposals for 6,016 new housing units in West Bank settlements, underscoring the ongoing expansionist policies of the Netanyahu administration. 

New Arab for more

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Beating up on neocons used to be a specialize sport without wide appeal. With all due false modesty I offer myself as an early practitioner.

Beating up on neocons used to be a specialize sport without wide appeal. With all due false modesty I offer myself as an early practitioner. Back in the mid-to-late-1970s, when I had a weekly column in the Village Voice, I used to have rich sport with that apex neocon, Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. I nicknamed him Norman the Frother and freighted him with so many gibes that he made the mistake of publicly denouncing me in his magazine, exclaiming that “Cockburn’s weekly pieces have set a new standard of gutter journalism in this country,” a testimonial I still proudly feature on the back of my books.

The neocons’ political hero in those days was Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, much venerated in Israel and the corporate offices of Boeing for his ardor and constancy in sluicing US taxpayers’ money into their treasuries. But instead they got Jimmy Carter, who, on a couple of occasions, was downright rude to Menachem Begin. So the neocons abandoned the Democrats and threw in their lot with Ronald Reagan.

Now here we are on the downslope of 2003 and George Bush is learning, way too late for his own good, that the neocons have been matchlessly wrong about everything. The neocons told Bush that eviction of Saddam would rearrange the chairs in the Middle East, to America’s advantage. Wrong. They (I’m talking about Wolfowitz’s team of mad Straussians at DoD) told him that there was irrefutable proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq. Wrong. They told him it would unlock the door to a peaceful settlement in Israel. Wrong. They told him that Ahmed Chalabi had street cred in Iraq. Wrong. They told him it would be easy to install a US regime in Baghdad and make the place hum quietly along, like Lebanon in the 1950s. Wrong.

And of course the neocons, who have never forgiven the UN for Resolutions 242 and 338 (bad for Israel), told Bush that he should tell the UN to take its charter and shove it. Bush, who appreciates simple words and simple thoughts, took their advice, and on Sunday night had it served up to him by his speechwriters as crow, which he methodically ate in his eighteen-minute speech, saying the UN has an important role in Iraq.

Now many are gloating at the neocons’ discomfiture and waiting for their downfall. Click go Madame Defarge’s knitting needles as she waits beside the guillotine. Here come the tumbrels, inching their way slowly through the rotting cabbages and vulgar ribaldry of Republican isolationists. Here’s a palefaced Douglas Feith. Up goes the fatal blade, and down it flashes. Behold, the head of a neocon! The next tumbrel carries a weightier cargo: Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams. Still not enough. Madame Defarge knits on, and her patience is soon rewarded. Here come Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, the latter defiantly jotting a coda to Rumsfeld’s Rules. They are swiftly dispatched and the crowd moves off to torch The Weekly Standard and string up its editor, Bill Kristol.

Maybe not all of them, but some neocon will surely pay the price for dropping Bush’s approval rating into the mid-50s. But will the basic neocon line, dominant for so long in Washington, suffer a dent? Not in any fundamental way. To appreciate this, one has only to look at the current posture of prominent Democrats. Are they glorying in Bush’s embarrassment and the humiliating and costly disaster for the United States consequent upon its attack on Iraq? Take Senator Joe Biden. His immediate reaction to Bush’s speech on Sunday was to insist that the President would need, and should get, more money than the $87 billion requested by the White House.

Then Biden gave the neocons a lesson in how to pay lip service to internationalism and “our allies”: “What we need isn’t the death of internationalism or the denial of our stark national interest. What I want to talk about today is a more enlightened nationalism that understands the value of international institutions but supports the use of military force–without apology or hesitation–when we must.”

Study the zigzag rhetoric of Howard Dean and you find the same essential approach, though Dean has just outraged the neocons by calling for an “evenhanded” US role in any resolution of the Palestinian issue (a posture he arrived at, please note, after taking fire from the left for being a whore for AIPAC). On February 20, Katha Pollitt’s antiwar candidate told Salon that “if the U.N. in the end chooses not to enforce its own resolutions, then the United States should give Saddam thirty to sixty days to disarm, and if he doesn’t, unilateral action is a regrettable, but unavoidable, choice.” The next day he said the UN had to do it. In June, at the Council on Foreign Relations, Dean said, “I would add at least 50,000 foreign troops to the force in Iraq. It is imperative that we bring the international community in to help stabilize Iraq. If I were President, I would reach out to NATO, to Arab and Islamic countries, to other friends to share the burden and the risks.” Dean has made trenchant criticisms of Bush’s rationale for the attack and of how it has been conducted, but he still proclaims, “Failure in Iraq is not an option.”

With the exception of Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun, no Democratic candidate is calling for anything other than that the United States “stay the course” in Iraq, with more money, more troops and, if possible, the political cover of the UN. Senator Kerry, who favored the US attack last spring, won’t commit himself to supporting the request for $87 billion but adds carefully, “I believe we must do what we need to do” to bring peace to Iraq. Edwards still justifies his support for Bush’s war. Don’t even ask about Lieberman. A few neocon heads may roll, but the policy won’t change. It’s fun to demonize the neocons and rejoice in their discomfiture, but don’t make the mistake of thinking US foreign policy was set by Norman Podhoretz or William Kristol. They’re the clowns capering about in front of the donkey and the elephant. The donkey says the UN should maybe clean up after them, and the elephant now says the donkey may have a point. Somebody has to come out with a dustpan and broom.

The Nation for more

by ELLEN O’REGAN

Sister universities VUB and ULB, as well as associated university hospital UZ Brussels, have strongly criticised comments about abortion made by Pope Francis on his flight home from Belgium on Sunday. They call on the Belgian government to ensure “consequences” for his statements.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo has summoned the Vatican’s ambassador to Belgium over the Pope’s comments, which De Croo has said were “unacceptable”.

During an in-flight press conference on Sunday as the Pope flew from Brussels back to Rome (after a four-day visit to Belgium), the head of the Catholic Church labelled doctors who perform abortions as “hitmen”.

“On this you cannot argue. You are killing a human life,” the pontiff said. He also called Belgium’s late King Baudouin a “saint” for refusing to sign legislation legalising abortion in 1990. This unprecedented refusal required Baudouin abdicate for a day rather than to carry out the monarch’s formal function.

During a mass in King Baudouin Stadium on Sunday, the Pontiff confirmed that he would begin the beatification process for Belgium’s fifth King, a preliminary step needed before a deceased person can be canonised as a saint.

Visiting King Baudouin’s tomb on Saturday, Pope Francis sparked anger among civil organisations in Belgium when he spoke of Baudouin’s “courage” in not signing a “murderous” abortion law.

In an open letter published in De Standaard this week, VUB, ULB and UZ Brussels said that the Pope’s comments cannot be allowed to go “without consequences”.

“Freedom of speech is sacred to us, and the Holy See may also make use of it. But whoever makes slanderous accusations is no longer exercising freedom of speech, but is guilty of spreading hatred,” the letter reads.

Brussels Times for more