by ALEX MACDONALD

An Israeli mayor has said “never again” applies to everyone at an event commemorating Yom HaShoah – Israel’s day of remembrance for the six million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany – warning that the destruction of Gaza will not lead to the return of captives.

Amir Kochavi, mayor of the central Israeli city of Hod Hasharon, told attendees that “Jewish morality” dictated that the lesson learned from the genocide against Jews should be that similar atrocities should be condemned regardless of who commits them.

“We must not remain silent in the face of atrocities committed against people of other nationalities in the world, even if they are committed in our name,” he said.

“Jewish morality dictates ‘never again’ not only to us, but to all peoples as a moral and ethical imperative of a just and healthy society… 59 brothers and sisters are still held hostage in Gaza, their ‘never again’ still continues.”

He added that “the lust for revenge, blood and destruction” had failed to return those held by Hamas, whether living or dead.

Sirens echoed across Israel on Thursday and activity ground to a halt in tribute to the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust during the Second World War.

Traffic halted and pedestrians stood still to mark Yom HaShoah, which is separate from International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on 27 January.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended a state event at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, which he used as an opportunity to pledge to continue the assault on the Gaza Strip, which has so far killed more than 51,000 people and left the enclave in ruins.

Middle East Eye for more

by TIM BAYNE

When we see the Earth as ‘a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ what do we learn about human significance?

On St Valentine’s Day 1990, NASA’s engineers directed the space-probe Voyager 1 – at the time, 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) from home – to take a photograph of Earth. Pale Blue Dot (as the image is known) represents our planet as a barely perceptible dot serendipitously highlighted by a ray of sunlight transecting the inky-black of space – a ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’, as Carl Sagan famously put it. But to find that mote of dust, you need to know where to look. Spotting its location is so difficult that many reproductions of the image provide viewers with a helpful arrow or hint (eg, ‘Earth is the blueish-white speck almost halfway up the rightmost band of light’). Even with the arrow and the hints, I had trouble locating Earth when I first saw Pale Blue Dot – it was obscured by the smallest of smudges on my laptop screen.

The striking thing, of course, is that Pale Blue Dot is, astronomically speaking, a close-up. Were a comparable image to be taken from any one of the other planetary systems in the Milky Way, itself one of between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the cosmos, then we wouldn’t have appeared even as a mote of dust – we wouldn’t have been captured by the image at all.

Pale Blue Dot inspires a range of feelings – wonderment, vulnerability, anxiety. But perhaps the dominant response it elicits is that of cosmic insignificance. The image seems to capture in concrete form the fact that we don’t really matter. Look at Pale Blue Dot for 30 seconds and consider the crowning achievements of humanity – the Taj Mahal, the navigational exploits of the early Polynesians, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Cantor’s theorem, the discovery of DNA, and on and on and on. Nothing we do – nothing we could ever do – seems to matter. Pale Blue Dot is to human endeavour what the Death Star’s laser was to Alderaan. What we seem to learn when we look in the cosmic mirror is that we are, ultimately, of no more significance than a mote of dust.

Contrast the feelings elicited by Pale Blue Dot with those elicited by Earthrise, the first image of Earth taken from space. Shot by the astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, Earthrise depicts the planet as a swirl of blue, white and brown, a fertile haven in contrast to the barren moonscape that dominates the foreground of the image. Inspiring awe, reverence and concern for the planet’s health, the photographer Galen Rowell described it as perhaps the ‘most influential environmental photograph ever taken’. Pale Blue Dot is a much more ambivalent image. It speaks not to Earth’s fecundity and life-supporting powers, but to its – and, by extension, our – insignificance in the vastness of space.

But what, exactly, should we make of Pale Blue Dot? Does it really teach us something profound about ourselves and our place in the cosmic order? Or are the feelings of insignificance that it engenders a kind of cognitive illusion – no more trustworthy than the brief shiver of fear you might feel on spotting a plastic snake? To answer that question, we need to ask why Pale Blue Dot generates feelings of cosmic insignificance.

Aeon for more

by PERRY ANDERSEN

How important is the role of ideas in the political upheavals that have marked great historical changes? Are they mere mental epiphenomena of much profounder material and social processes, or do they possess a decisive autonomous power as forces of political mobilization?footnote¹ Contrary to appearances, the answers given to this question do not sharply divide Left from Right. Many conservatives and liberals have, of course, exalted the transcendent significance of lofty ideals and moral values in history, denouncing, as base materialists, radicals who insist that economic contradictions are the motor of historical change. Famous modern exemplars of such idealism of the Right include figures like Friedrich Meinecke, Benedetto Croce or Karl Popper. For such thinkers, in Meinecke’s words: ‘Ideas, carried and transformed by living personalities, constitute the canvas of historical life.’ But we can find other major figures of the Right who attack rationalist delusions in the importance of artificial doctrines, upholding against them the far more enduring significance of traditional customs or biological instincts. Friedrich Nietzsche, Lewis Namier, Gary Becker were all—from differing standpoints—theorists of material interests, intent on sardonically deflating the claims of ethical or political values. Rational choice theory, hegemonic over wide areas of Anglo-Saxon social science, is the best-known contemporary paradigm of this kind.

1

The same bifurcation, however, can be found on the Left. If we look at great modern historians of the Left, we find complete indifference to the role of ideas in Fernand Braudel, contrasted with passionate attachment to them in R. H. Tawney. Among British Marxists themselves, no-one would confuse the positions of Edward Thompson, whose whole life’s work was a polemic against what he saw as economic reductionism, with those of Eric Hobsbawm, whose history of the twentieth century contains no separate sections devoted to ideas at all. If we look at political leaders, the same opposition repeats itself even more pointedly. ‘The movement is everything, the goal is nothing’, announced Bernstein. Could there be a more drastic devaluation of principles or ideas, in favour of sheer factual processes? Bernstein believed he was loyal to Marx when he pronounced this dictum. In the same period, Lenin declared—in an equally famous maxim, of exactly antithetical effect—as something every Marxist should know, that ‘without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement’. The contrast here was not just between the reformist and the revolutionary. In the ranks of the revolutionary Left itself, we find the same duality. For Luxemburg, as she put it, ‘in the beginning was the deed’—not any preconceived idea, but simply the spontaneous action of the masses, was the starting-point of major historical change. Anarchists never ceased to agree with her. For Gramsci, on the other hand, the labour movement could never gain durable victories unless it achieved an ideal ascendancy—what he called a cultural and political hegemony—over society as a whole, including its enemies. At the head of their respective states, Stalin entrusted the building of socialism to the material development of productive forces, Mao to a cultural revolution capable of transforming mentalities and mores.

2

How is this ancient opposition to be arbitrated? Ideas come in different shapes and sizes. Those which are relevant to major historical change have typically been systematic ideologies. Göran Therborn has offered a penetrating and elegant taxonomy of these, in a book whose very title—The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (1980)—offers us an agenda. He divides ideologies into existential and historical, inclusive and positional types.

New Left Review for more

by ROHAIT BHAGWANT

Dawn for more

by RAGIP SOYLU

Puntland’s President Said Abdullahi Deni turns Bosaso airport over to the United Arab Emirates without parliamentary approval

The United Arab Emirates deployed a military radar in Somalia’s Puntland earlier this year to defend Bosaso airport against potential Houthi attacks from Yemen, sources familiar with the matter told Middle East Eye.

Satellite imagery from early March reveals that the Israeli-made ELM-2084 3D Active Electronically Scanned Array Multi-Mission Radar was installed near the airport.

Publicly available air traffic data indicates that the UAE is increasingly using Bosaso airport to supply the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan.

The RSF has been engaged in a war with the Sudanese military for two years.

Earlier this year, the Sudanese government filed a lawsuit against the UAE at the International Court of Justice, accusing it of genocide due to its links with the RSF. The UAE denies it backs the RSF militarily.

“The UAE installed the radar shortly after the RSF lost control of most of Khartoum in early March,” a regional source told MEE. 

“The radar’s purpose is to detect and provide early warning against drone or missile threats, particularly those potentially launched by the Houthis, targeting Bosaso from outside.”

‘This is a secret deal, and even the highest levels of Puntland’s government, including the cabinet, are unaware of it’

– Somali source

Another regional source said the radar was deployed at the airport late last year. MEE was unable to independently verify this claim.

The second source said that the UAE has been using Bosaso airport daily to support the RSF, with large cargo planes regularly arriving to load weapons and ammunition – sometimes up to five major shipments at a time.

Middle East Eye for more

by EVAN BLAKE

On Tuesday, World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North took part in a timely and urgent discussion with Professor Emanuele Saccarelli of San Diego State University’s Political Science Department, titled “It’s happening here: Fascism in 1933 Germany and today.”

Throughout the interview, North addressed questions that clarified the Marxist understanding of fascism, the historical processes that led to the rise of Hitler, the role of the working class in the fight against fascism, and the relevance of these lessons for today amid the Trump administration’s deepening efforts to establish a fascist dictatorship in the United States.

He underscored that the discussion of fascism is no longer merely historical but has “acquired intense contemporary relevance,” as many now ask whether the United States is confronted with fascism and what must be done to stop its advance.

When asked by Saccarelli to define fascism for a new generation entering political life, North stressed the necessity of a scientific and historical understanding, tracing the origins of fascism to the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the wave of working class radicalization that followed the First World War. He emphasized that fascism arose as a mass movement mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie, demoralized workers and lumpen elements to smash the organizations of the working class, in the service of the big bourgeoisie.

North explained that Mussolini’s fascism in Italy and Hitler’s Nazism in Germany were direct responses to revolutionary threats from the working class. “The most distinctive element of Italian fascism was that it arose as a movement to suppress and beat back a radicalizing working class movement,” he said, noting that the failure of the socialist parties to lead the working class to power created the conditions for the rise of fascism. In Germany, the betrayal of the 1918-19 and 1923 revolutions by the Social Democratic and Communist parties gave the bourgeoisie time to regroup, paving the way for Hitler’s ascent.

Saccarelli asked North to address whether Hitler came to power through a putsch or democratic means and the implications for today. North responded: “As a matter of historical fact, Hitler did not come to power in a putsch. He had attempted a putsch in 1923—it was unsuccessful.” Rather, North explained, “German democracy was itself on its last legs,” with the government increasingly ruling by decree and the forms of parliamentary democracy hollowed out. Despite the Nazi Party becoming the largest in the Reichstag, Hitler never achieved a parliamentary majority; his rise was facilitated by the refusal of the two mass working class parties—the Social Democrats and Communists—to form a united front against fascism.

World Socialist Web Site for more

by DEEKSHA UDUPA

Nadine Strossen is a leading expert on constitutional law and civil liberties. She is the author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship and Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know. She was previously the President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. She is a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education (FIRE) and was named one of America’s “100 Most Influential Lawyers” by the National Law Journal. 

In this interview, Strossen shares her insight on the power of “more speech” and “counter speech” as potential alternatives to effectively countering hate speech while highlighting the limitations and inefficacy of legal approaches.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Deeksha Udupa: In your work, you examine and unpack the “hate speech vs. free speech” framework largely in the U.S. context. How do you think this framework translates to other parts of the world, where hate speech rapidly leads to on-the-ground violence against minorities? 

Nadine Strossen: The framework that the U.S. Supreme Court has crafted under the First Amendment of the Constitution has universal applicability because it is a framework that establishes general standards and principles. With that being said, the framework is extremely— and indeed completely— fact-specific and content-sensitive. I say this not as an imperialist American who thinks we know better than the rest of the world. I say this as someone who has studied various legal systems and talked to human rights activists around the world, and these activists also oppose censorship beyond the power that would exist under the U.S. First Amendment. They oppose this not because it is inconsistent with the laws of their own countries but because they believe that further censorship is ineffective in actually countering and changing hateful attitudes. 

The basic standard under the U.S. First Amendment is also very strongly echoed in the International Free Speech law under the UN treaties, which various international free speech experts have studied and written about. There are two basic principles: first, speech may never be solely suppressed because one disapproves or even loathes the idea, content, and message behind the speech. This holds true even if the message is despicable or hateful. The answer is not government censorship and suppression. The second basic principle goes beyond the content of the message: if the speech directly causes or imminently threatens specific communities, then it can and should be suppressed. 

I can think of many situations in less developed societies with more volatile social situations and less effective law enforcement where messages may satisfy the emergency standard in that context yet may not in the U.S. context. With that being said, the U.S. is a big place, and there are instances in the U.S. where hateful speech can and should be punished, like the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. These pro-racist, white supremacists came together and were chanting statements like “you will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.” These hateful statements alone could not be punished. Yet, considering these statements in the context of how they were marching towards a group of counter demonstrators—with lit tiki torches that they brought very close to [their] faces — that posed an immediate threat to the counter protesters which should’ve been punished.  

To summarize, when there is a direct causal connection between speech and imminent violence such that other measures such as law enforcement, education or information are not enough to prevent violence, that speech should be punished. I say this with the recognition that this standard will be satisfied more often in many other countries than it would in the United States. 

DU: Why do you think ‘hate speech’ laws have predominantly done more harm than good?

NS: My goal is to understand how we can resist hate. If I were convinced that more censorship effectively resisted hate, I would be in favor of it. One of my major international sources is called The Future of Free Speech, which is based at Vanderbilt University and founded by Jacob Mchangama. They have a very global perspective on free speech and have consistently shown that, at best, hate speech laws are ineffective in changing people’s perspectives and reducing discriminatory violence. At worst, they are counterproductive. The goal is to change people’s minds and perspectives: to enlighten them and broaden their understanding of other people. It is widely accepted that criminal law and a more punitive approach is ineffective in the U.S. 

We need to move towards a restorative justice approach, where we root our work on how to constructively integrate people into our society. As I’ve said earlier, if the words are punishable under the First Amendment, then punishment is appropriate. We must also bear in mind, however, that it may not be the most effective approach to sentence someone under a hate speech or hate crime law and send them to prisons, where they are likely to have their hate views further reinforced and deepened. I have extensively read about people who were formerly members or even leaders of hateful organizations. They’ve been able to redeem themselves with the help of others— not others who are seeking to punish or shame them, but others who are reaching out with compassion and empathy for them as people. 

Counterspeech, outreach, and empathy should not be reactive but proactive. It is too little too late if we wait until someone has actually committed an act of violence. That’s why I love the work that CSOH and other organizations are doing to take advantage of the powerful tool that is social media to do a lot of good. We are all aware of the great deal of harm that these platforms can do, but I also believe that they can do a lot of good. I am heartened by studies that show the positive effects of using tools like AI to proactively debunk disinformation, hate speech, and extreme content. 

DU: If laws are not the solution, what alternative mechanisms do you propose for holding perpetrators of hate speech accountable, especially when it causes real-world harm?

Center for the Study of Organized Hate for more

by BINOY KAMPMARK

Universities are in a bind. As institutions of learning and teaching, knowledge learnt and taught should, or at the very least could, be put into practice. How unfortunate for rich ideas to linger in cold storage or exist as the mummified status of esoterica. But universities in the United States have taken fright at pro-Palestinian protests since October 7, 2023, becoming battlegrounds for the propaganda emissaries of Israeli public relations and the pro-evangelical, Armageddon lobby that sees the end times taking place in the Holy Land. Higher learning institutions are spooked by notions of Israeli brutality, and they are taking measures.

These measures have tended to be heavy handed, taking issue with students and academic staff. The policy has reached another level in efforts by amphibian university managers to ban various protest groups who are seen as creating an environment of intimidation for other members of the university tribe. That these protesters merely wish to draw attention to the massacre of Palestinian civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, and the fact that the death toll, notably in the Gaza Strip, now towers at over 50,000, is a matter of inconvenient paperwork.

Even worse, the same institutions are willing to tolerate individuals who have celebrated their own unalloyed bigotry, lauded their own racial and religious ideology, and deemed various races worthy of extinguishment or expulsion. Such a man is Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who found himself permitted to visit Yale University at the behest of the Jewish society Shabtai, a body founded by Democratic senator and Yale alumnus Cory Booker, along with Rabbi Shmully Hecht.

Shabtai is acknowledged as having no official affiliation with Yale, though it is stacked with Yale students and faculty members who participate at its weekly dinners. Its beating heart was Hecht, who arrived in New Haven after finishing rabbinical school in Australia in 1996.

The members of Shabtai were hardly unanimous in approving Ben-Gvir’s invitation. David Vincent Kimel, former coach of the Yale debate team, was one of two to send an email to a Shabtai listserv to express brooding disgruntlement. “Shabtai was founded as a space for fearless, pluralistic Jewish discourse,” the email remarks. “But this event jeopardizes Shabtai’s reputation and every future.” In views expressed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Kimel elaborated: “I’m deeply concerned that we’re increasingly treating extreme rhetoric as just another viewpoint, rather than recognizing it as a distortion of constructive discourse.” The headstone for constructive discourse was chiselled sometime ago, though Kimel’s hopes are charming.

As a convinced, pro-settler fanatic, Ben-Gvir is a fabled-Torah basher who sees Palestinians as needless encumbrances on Israel’s righteous quest to acquire Gaza and the West Bank. Far from being alone, Ben-Gvir is also the member of a government that has endorsed starvation and the deprivation of necessities as laudable tools of conflict, to add to an adventurous interpretation of the laws of war that tolerates the destruction of health and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

After a dinner at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort (the bad will be fed), Ben-Gvir was flushed with confidence. He wrote on social media of how various lawmakers had “expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.” By any other standard, this was an admission to encouraging the commission of a war crime.

Dissident Voice for more

by PHAR KIM BENG

Family feud-fueled vote could herald Sara Duterte’s presidential rise and render Marcos Jr a lame duck with three years still in office

As the Philippines heads toward pivotal midterm elections on May 12, a dramatic political shift is underway.

Once considered the crown prince of dynastic restoration, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr is now floundering, with his public approval rating plummeting from 42% in February to 25% in March, according to a Pulse Asia Research poll.

Meanwhile, Vice President Sara Duterte, daughter of the now-detained former strongman leader Rodrigo Duterte, is rising in the electorate’s eye, up from 52% in February to 59% in March, the same poll showed.  

The arrest and extradition of Rodrigo Duterte to The Hague earlier this year on charges of crimes against humanity during his bloody war on drugs was a seismic moment in Philippine politics.

While many in the international community lauded the move as a step toward accountability for thousands of unpunished extrajudicial killings, its domestic reception has been mixed.

For many Filipinos, particularly in Mindanao and Duterte strongholds across the Visayas, the spectacle of a former president being tried abroad rather than at home has stirred nationalist resentment.

So far, it appears this Western international intervention, aided and abetted by Marcos Jr’s government, has bolstered, not weakened, Sara Duterte’s political standing.

She has deftly positioned herself as the inheritor of her father’s political mantle while avoiding his excesses. And the symbolism of her defending national sovereignty—by implication, if not explicitly—has endeared her to a Filipino public weary of foreign moralizing and elite Manila politics.

This puts the Marcos Jr administration in a bind. What was likely intended as a triumphant moment of legal reckoning has, in practice, sparked a backlash. In the eyes of many, the Hague trial is less about Rodrigo Duterte and more about a state that is increasingly perceived as unstable and externally manipulated.

The many reasons for Marcos Jr’s fading popularity are empirical and deeply felt on the ground. First, a cost-of-living crisis continues to batter ordinary Filipinos, with Rice, sugar, and basic utility prices all surging.  

Asia Times for more

by DIANA CARIBONI

Attacking those searching for missing loved ones is ‘particularly despicable’ politics, says activist Lisa Sánchez

More than 5,600 mass graves have been found in Mexico since 2007, and there are more than 72,000 unidentified bodies in the country’s morgues, while 127,000 people are reported missing. Yet the state denies that disappearance is a systematic and widespread crime and stigmatises those who denounce it, Mexican activist and security researcher Lisa Sánchez told openDemocracy.

Enforced disappearance is not new in Mexico. But it has been normalised in part by the violence triggered by the militarisation of the ‘war on drugs’ – formally launched under the government of the right-wing National Action Party’s (PAN) Felipe Calderón between 2006 and 2012, and intensified by his successors.

The crime now has an impunity rate of 99%, explained Sánchez, the director general of Mexico United Against Crime (MUCD), a civil society organisation working on citizen security, justice and drug policy, in an interview held as the national and international conversation around Mexico’s disappearances intensified.

In recent weeks, the media circus surrounding the discovery of an alleged cartel training and extermination site in the state of Jalisco has led to a campaign of attacks on the families searching for their loved ones, which Sánchez described as “particularly despicable”.

And on 5 April, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances decided for the first time to open a procedure for the case of Mexico and activate Article 34 of the International Convention against Enforced Disappearances. This involves requesting further information from the government “on the allegations received, which in no way prejudges the next steps in the proceedings” and, eventually, referring the matter to the General Assembly. For the committee’s experts, who have been studying the case for a decade, there are indications of a “systematic and widespread” practice.

Mexico’s Senate responded by rejecting the committee’s decision and asking the UN to sanction its president, Olivier De Frouville – a response approved by the country’s ruling left-wing party, the National Regeneration Movement (usually referred to as Morena).

“The Senate vote made me lose a lot of my morale,” Sánchez said. The following is an excerpt from our interview, which has been translated into English and edited for length, clarity and style.

openDemocracy: In Latin America, disappearance is identified as a state crime committed by authoritarian governments in previous decades. Why are there so many disappeared people in Mexico in the current context?

Lisa Sánchez: Mexico is an exception in Latin America because, although it had an authoritarian government [ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI, between 1929 and 2000], it was not the result of a coup d’état, and therefore there was no military dictatorship. The disappearances that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s were considered a state crime at a time of political persecution of socialist dissidents, whom the PRI, allied with the United States, pursued very vigorously because it considered them a threat to national security.

Although the Mexican left always rejected these disappearances and considered them a state crime, we never had a process of memory recovery as part of our national debate. Much less did we punish the perpetrators, although in recent years we have inaugurated a couple of truth commissions on the crimes of the ‘dirty war’. But in reality, the disappearances never faced collective, real, large-scale and organised rejection, as they did in South America.

Do you see a link between the failure to acknowledge this past and this new type of disappearance in the context of drug-related violence?

In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no, but I bring it up because the fact that we didn’t go through revisiting that painful reality during our transition to democracy allowed our governments to continue with the narrative that it was not a state policy. And that’s problematic because it is what we are seeing today.

Open Demoracy for more