by BARBARA RANSBY

Barbara Ransby charts the relationship between Black feminist organizing and the movement for a Free Palestine, and provides a poem in solidarity with the people of Gaza.  

The right-wing Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, has persisted unabated for nearly eight months in its military assault against the people of Gaza in clear violation of international law. The forced displacement of 1.7 million people out of a population of 2.2 million, the withholding of essential services, the continued bombing of hospitals, homes and mosques, the shooting of live ammunition at the limited food distribution sites in Gaza, rendering it unlivable.The conditions inside Gaza have grown more dire, desperate, and gut-wrenchingly surreal. Children are literally starving to death in Gaza as Israel blocks the passage of aid to those in need. One UN official referred to it as a “graveyard for children.” Israel’s war represents deliberate ethnic cleansing, and protracted genocide. There is nothing else to call it. And the world is watching it unfold before our eyes on social media. The images are horrendous. 

Genocide is defined by the United Nations in the following way in Article II of the Genocide Convention: “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: 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; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” 

What is happening in Gaza today fits much of this description. And while I don’t condone the actions of Hamas on October 7th, and mourn all loss of human life, this conflict did not begin on October 7th. The before and after are deeply relevant. After 76 years of occupation, repression, indignities of checkpoints and military incursions, Gaza and Palestine as a whole, were a ticking time bomb fueled by decades of anger, frustration and violence, and a sense of abandonment by the international community as Israel continues to violate UN resolutions and international law on many fronts.

As I write the assault on Gaza continues as do protests and humanitarian appeals for an end to the carnage. Black radical and progressive voices once again have been outspoken in standing with the people of Gaza in this moment of crisis. This stance is a part of a long tradition. Here is some of that history.

For many of us who were involved in the anti-Apartheid and Free South Africa solidarity movements in the 1980s and 90s, the struggle of the Palestinian people was introduced to us by our friends and comrades in the African National Congress who had strong ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization. And the relationship between the Black Freedom Movement and the struggle for freedom in Palestine goes back much further.

In 1948, in the immediate wake of the Holocaust, many Black progressives were sympathetic with the idea of a Jewish homeland as a bulwark against anti-semitism and a response to the devastating effects of Nazism and fascism. Celebrities like Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne did benefit concerts for the new Jewish State, and Black diplomat and intellectual, Ralph Bunche, won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for brokering the deal that led to the formation of Israel.

It should be noted that even in 1948 there was neither Black nor Jewish unanimity on the question of Palestine and Israel. Jewish communists and leftists rejected Zionism as a resistance strategy calling instead for a broad based united front against the Cold War, McCarthyism, imperialism and anti-Semitism. The majority of the Black Left shared this position. 

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by LENNARD J. DAVIS

Vance is no pauper — and there’s a bit of a shell game going on when it comes to his poverty credentials

JD Vance has climbed to his current position as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, in part, by selling himself as a hillbilly, calling on his Appalachian background to bolster his credentials to speak for the American working class.

“I grew up as a poor kid,” Vance said on Fox News in August 2024. “I think that’s a story that a lot of normal Americans can empathize with.”

Indeed, the book that brought him to public attention was his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” In that book, he claims his family carried an inheritance of “abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma.”

“Poor people,” he proclaimed in a 2016 interview with The American Conservative, are “my people.”

But there’s a bit of a shell game going on when it comes to Vance’s poverty credentials.

Vance did come from a troubled family. His mother was – like so many Americans, whether they’re poor, middle class or rich – addicted to painkillers. In the book, Vance searches for an explanation for his traumatic relationship with his mother, before hitting on the perfect explanation: His mother’s addiction was a consequence of the fact that her parents were “hillbillies.”

The reality – one that Vance only subtly acknowledges in his memoir – is that he is not poor. Nor is he a hillbilly. He grew up firmly in Ohio’s middle class.

In my forthcoming book, “Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those without It,” I detail how Vance’s work is actually part of a genre I call “poornography.” Created mainly by middle- and upper-class people for like-minded readers, this long line of novels, films and plays can end up spreading harmful stereotypes about poor people.

Though these works are sometimes crafted with good intentions, they tend to focus on violence, drugs, alcohol, crudeness and the supposed laziness of poor people.

Peering at all the poor people

When you think about novels and films about the poor, you come upon the great classics: Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” Emile Zola’s “Germinal,” James Agee and Walker Evans’ “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Jack London’s “The People of the Abyss” or John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Yet all these monuments to the suffering of the poor were written by authors who were not poor. Most of them had little to no knowledge of the lived experience of poor people. At best, they were reporters whose source material was meager. At worst, they simply made things up, recycling stereotypes about poverty.

For example, John Steinbeck had some contact with poor people as a reporter. But as he wrote about migrant camps for “The Grapes of Wrath,” he relied heavily on the notes of Sanora Babb – herself poor and formerly homeless – who traveled to migrant camps throughout California for the Farm Security Administration. Babb’s boss – a friend of Steinbeck’s – had secretly shown the author her notes, without her permission.

Babb would go on to also write a novel based on her experiences, which was bought by Random House. But the publishing house killed it after “Grapes of Wrath” came out, and it wasn’t published until 2004, when the author was 97 years old. That year, she told the Chicago Tribune – correctly, I might add – that Steinbeck’s work “isn’t as accurate as mine.”

Salon for more

by SHOAIB DANIYAL

Though most UK Indians do not endorse Hindutva, its supporters have successfully represented it as the sentiment of the Hindu community to policy makers.

“If you want the Hindu vote, it’s not cheap,” Shital Manga said with a determined smile. “For the first time, [British] Hindus have put out a manifesto.”

She added: “The Hindu vote is not for free.”

Manga was speaking to Scroll in a chai shop in Leicester – the first city in the UK to have a non-White majority. Dominated by South Asians, most of them Gujaratis, Leicester had seen communal disturbances in 2022 following an India-Pakistan cricket match. There were brawls and hostile gangs marching through neighbourhoods as well as an attack on a temple.

The incident had shaken up the United Kingdom. While violence based on race was a familiar part of its recent history, the UK was unused to what residents of the subcontinent would instantly recognise as a Hindu-Muslim riot.

Manga belonged to InsightUK, a shadowy, yet belligerentHindutva organisation in the UK. In the run-up to Thursday’s UK election, Insight had co-authored a “Hindu manifesto” urging British MP candidates to sign on to a charter of demands in order to attract Hindu voters. It also organised a “Hindu husting” in several constituencies across the UK, which featured debates between MP candidates on themes that matter to the Hindu community.

However, Insight’s role has not been restricted to electioneering. In Leicester, for example, it had played a key role presenting a Hindutva view on the violence, with its narratives being amplified by the controversial Indian Hindutva website, OpIndia.

The Hindutva ideology as promoted by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is not new to the UK. But people such as Manga and organisations such as InsightUK have taken it to new heights,openly pushing Hindutva into Britian’s politics with a new confidence.

The influence of these Hindutva organisations has allowed them to lobby politicians for policies that fit their ideology, from moving motions against “Hinduphobia” in British societyto blocking national anti-caste legislation. This success is all the more remarkable given the small population of British Hindus, with only 1.6% of the UK identifying with the faith.

The Hindu Manifesto

The Hindu manifesto, presented by a total of 66 communityorganisations, has a set of demands that prospective British MPs were urged to endorse. The programme has had some success: 24 candidates backed it. Some of the demands are banal, related to immigration of priests and healthcare for British Hindus.

However, it also wades into more controversial topics. The manifesto claims £117 million has been “provided to UK Muslims for protective security funding” and asks for a similar allocation for the “security and protection of temples”. As part of this, the manifesto highlights the 2022 Leicester riots in which a temple was attacked.

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by COLIN GREER & ERIC LAURSEN

The U.S. and many other societies are cycling into situations of toxic polarization today; discussion, let alone consensus, often appears impossible and the advantage goes to exclusionary social movements built on malignant rather than goodwill impulses. As Heritage Foundation president Keith Roberts stated in July 2024, “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

As recently as a decade ago, violent social movements were gaining ground primarily in countries and regions that were struggling economically as they integrated themselves into the neoliberal global economy: examples include Russia, Hungary, and other states of the former Eastern Bloc, Turkey, India, and Greece. More recently, however, toxic polarization has also threatened to engulf countries at the core of the liberal democratic political grouping, including France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the U.S.

In every case, the malignant social movement aims to overthrow a political order built—at least notionally—on principles of inclusion and goodwill, which the movement blames for its followers’ loss of economic and political status within their societies. What’s most striking, even counterintuitive, about this takeover is its seeming inexorability, due to the failure of parties of the center and left to offer coherent alternatives—and the resulting landscape in which extreme positions are steadily normalized.

The result is a crisis of democracy, stunting people’s faith in collective self-government owing to its inability to help address practical problems such as climate change, economic inequality, and mass migration. To reverse this trend, we must first understand the conditions that brought it about.

Nine Developments That Produce Toxic Polarization

Toxic polarization becomes possible, if not inevitable, when a convergence of political, economic, and social conditions activate three powerful forces:

Malignant bonding: An impulse to solidify communities built on resentment, bigotry, and a desire to exclude those who are “different”;

The scarcity mind: A psychological state that frames social life as a zero-sum game pitting oneself and one’s social affinity group against a racial, ethnic, or class-based other; and

Trans-historical trauma: The fears and compensating behaviors that accumulate over many centuries of physical and emotional violence and become encoded in our collective behavior.

When they converge, these conditions lay the groundwork for a conventional wisdom built on limited assumptions about what can be achieved by society. This in turn produces a deep sense of alienation from the existing order, especially among the dominant racial, ethnic, and class-based groups, which in turn generates new, exclusionary social movements. By alienation, we mean a feeling of isolation and disconnection from the larger society or from what that society is becoming. Alienation can quickly turn into a lack of sympathy and lead to open hostility toward the supposedly undeserving portion of the population.

The pivotal forces in this process are social movements, which are the incubators and carriers of the zeitgeist. Exclusionary social movements, which come to the fore in periods of toxic polarization, always either exist or are latent. So are inclusionary social movements, which aim to build on a very different set of impulses: empathy, goodwill, good-faith communication, mutual aid, and an openness to finding common ground in inclusive and widely beneficial change.

Traditionally, these two types of movements either clash or coexist, but neither seizes the upper hand for more than a limited period. Today, however, we are witnessing the convergence of nine key developments, some of them dating back decades, which favor the rise of powerful and possibly long-lasting exclusionary social movements:

Eurasia Review for more

by JOHN P. RUEHL

In August 2024, due to a $4 million budget shortfall, Idaho’s Caldwell School District terminated its $296,807 contract with the local police department, opting instead for armed guards from Eagle Eye Security. The new $280,000 contract is just a drop in the bucket of the roughly $50 billion U.S. private security industry and the $248 billion global market that is reshaping law enforcement worldwide.

While private military companies (PMCs) like Blackwater (now Academi) and Wagner have gained notoriety in war zones, private security companies (PSCs) are rapidly expanding in non-combat settings. Despite some overlap between the two, PSCs generally protect assets and individuals. Often collaborating with law enforcement, the effectiveness and ethical standards of PSCs vary widely, and armed guards are increasingly common. Security guards in the U.S. in 2021 outnumbered police by about 3:2.

Public policy is still playing catch up. Unlike police forces, PSCs operate under contract rather than direct taxpayer funding. They also don’t have the same level of regulation, oversight, or accountability. Criticisms of the police—such as excessive force and inadequate training—are frequently directed at private security officers as well. Many former police officers with controversial histories find employment in PSCs, where barriers to entry are low. Turnover, meanwhile, remains high, while wages are minimal. Yet the sector’s ongoing expansion appears inevitable.

Government forces and private security forces have been a part of society for millennia. Government forces mainly responded to unrest rather than preventing crime, often relying on volunteers. Private security options included hiring guards and bounty hunters, while communal efforts like the “hue and cry”—where villagers collectively chased down criminals— were also common ways of enforcing security. With increasing urbanization, though, traditional law enforcement methods became less effective, prompting the creation of the first modern police force, the London Metropolitan Police, in 1829. Distinct from the military, more accountable to city authorities and business interests, and focused on crime prevention, this model was adopted by Boston in 1838 and spread to nearly all U.S. cities by the 1880s.

The emergence of public police forces coincided with the birth of the modern private security industry. Founded in the U.S. in 1850, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, as it was eventually called, is considered the first modern PSC. With its nationwide reach, investigative expertise, and role in safeguarding companies, Pinkerton distinguished itself by protecting businesses from theft, vandalism, and sabotage. Its controversial role in events like the Homestead Strike of 1892, when the company “essentially went to war with thousands of striking workers,” led to greater regulatory scrutiny, but the company continued to drive industry growth.

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by MOHAMAD HASAN SWEIDAN

While West Asia’s Axis of Resistance seeks to weaken Israel’s military, economy, and security, a handful of Arab states and Turkiye are secretly striving to bolster Israel and supply its war on Gaza. This is the region’s new ’Axis of Normalization.’

Yemen stands as one of the few Arab states working to mount economic pressure on the occupation state by blocking the shipment of Israeli-bound goods from transiting the Red Sea and other regional waterways.

Yet, while Yemen advances its sea blockades, other Arab states continue to provide a lifeline to Israel’s war-driven economy. Data from this year shows that countries that have normalized with Tel Aviv, like the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco, are helping Israel overcome the blockade, providing critical trade routes that circumvent Yemeni efforts.

Meanwhile, Turkiye, whose president has ratcheted up his anti-Israeli rhetoric in public, has pursued a more deceptive approach, rerouting goods through Palestinian customs – and Greece – to disguise the extent of its direct trade with Israel.

Arab trade relations with Israel

The Cradle has previously reported on trade relations between Arab countries and Israel and how they are complicit in funding genocide. Despite expectations that these states would sever ties after Israel’s war of extermination on Gaza, the reality tells a different story.

While Yemen, under the Ansarallah-aligned government in Sanaa, has imposed a naval blockade on Israeli ports, many Arab governments have not taken similar actions. Instead, these countries engage in a double game, publicly condemning Israel while quietly maintaining economic ties, much like Colombia, which formally cut ties with Tel Aviv but continued discreet cooperation behind the scenes.

Trade figures for 2024 reveal a significant shift, particularly in relations between Bahrain and Israel. Israeli imports from Bahrain surged by an astonishing 1161.8 percent between January and July 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, despite Bahrain’s parliament issuing statements condemning Israel. In public, the two states played a very different game: Israel’s ambassador left Bahrain, and Manama recalled its envoy to Tel Aviv and suspended economic relations.

These actions were largely symbolic, aimed at appeasing a Bahraini public that overwhelmingly opposes normalization with Israel rather than reflecting genuine policy changes.

The UAE and Egypt: Pillars of economic support

The UAE, a key player in the US-brokered 2020 Abraham Accords, saw its Israeli imports rise by 14.2 percent in 2024. As the region’s spearhead for normalization with Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi continues to play a strategic role in the US–Israeli plans for Gaza in the post-war period.

“Secret meetings” in July between officials from Israel, the US, and the UAE aimed at quelling any resistance within Gaza, highlight Abu Dhabi’s critical role in supporting Israel’s future political projects.

It is important to note that the increase in imports from Bahrain and the UAE is primarily due to Israel’s growing reliance on their ports to transport goods from West Asia by land, through Saudi Arabia and Jordan, as a means of bypassing Yemeni strikes in the Red Sea. These parties deny the existence of this land route that The Cradleand other media outlets have long exposed.

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It speaks to the importance of discoveries in physics over the past few generations that even the disinterested layman has heard of the field’s central challenge. In brief, there exist two separate systems: general relativity, which describes the physics of space, time, and gravity, and quantum mechanics which describes the physics of fundamental particles like electrons and photons. Each being applicable only at its own scale, one would seem to be incompatible with the other. What the field needs to bring them together is kind of a “grand unified theory,” a concept that has long since worked its way into popular culture.

In the Big Think video above, physicist Michio Kaku explains this scientific quest for what he calls “the God equation” in about five minutes. Such an equation “should unify the basic concepts of physics.” But general relativity as conceived by Albert Einstein is “based on smooth surfaces,” while quantum mechanics is “based on chopping things up into particles.”

The challenge of bringing the two into concert has attracted “the greatest minds of the entire human race,” but to no definitive avail. At this point, Kaku says, only one conception “has survived every challenge: string theory, which is what I do for a living” — and which has attained a rather high level of public awareness, if not necessarily public understanding.

Kaku breaks it down as follows: “If you can peer into the heart of an electron, you would see that it’s a rubber band: a tiny, tiny vibrating string, very similar to a guitar string. There’s an infinite number of vibrations, and that is why we have subatomic particles,” each variety of which corresponds to a different vibration. “A simple idea that encapsulates the entire universe” — and, crucially, a mathematically consistent one — string theory has attracted astute proponents and detractors alike, the latter objecting to its untestabillity. But one day, technology may well advance sufficiently to falsify it or not, and if not, the door opens to the possibility of time machines, wormholes, parallel universes, “things out of The Twilight Zone.” A physicist can dream, can’t he?

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by HAN FEIZI

Reversing globalization would massively derate US assets, dislocating the professional class for re-industrialization that won’t work

All the things I could do

If I had a little money

It’s a rich man’s world

– ABBA

“Pay them off,” he said. Over two decades ago, that was the plan for globalization’s losers coughed up by a junior priest of the Washington Consensus then teaching at one of America’s august indoctrination asylums.

What he meant was that the gains from globalization would be immense – more than enough to compensate Ohio factory workers whose jobs would be outsourced to China.  

This junior priest founded a consulting company, rode the globalization wave to its peak, reversed course with perfect timing and now advises American companies and state organs as a China hawk, ascending to high priest status in the New Washington Consensus.

“Pay them off.” We all bought it then. So simple, so elegant, so logical, so easy. Democracy and capitalism would surely figure out a mechanism. It wasn’t our problem. Our problem was getting past round one of the Goldman Sachs interview.

Of course, we now know that there was not going to be a pay-them-off mechanism. The winners of globalization – those who passed rounds two and three – were going to fight tooth and nail for every last cent the Washington Consensus threw our way.

If we really sat down and thought about it, it should have been patently ridiculous from the get-go. Pay them off? Like with welfare checks and food stamps? Or teach them computers? Unfortunately, nobody actually sat down and thought these things through.

In the end, globalization’s losers in America were kept afloat – just barely – by debt and lower inflation for consumer products while the shock troops of the Washington Consensus hoarded vast sums of newly created lucre. And I mean vast.

So here we are. There is a New Washington Consensus and its tenets are just as well thought through as “pay them off.” You might not be interested in industrial policy, but industrial policy is interested in you.

This new catchphrase is meant to drive home the point that we all have to grow up – America especially. The era of industrial policy is now upon us.

Because China has been an enthusiastic practitioner of industrial policy, free trade puts open economies like the US at her mercy. Yes, Japan, Germany, Korea and Taiwan have practiced industrial policy for decades but given China’s scale and ambition, the economic distortions threaten to swamp the world, if they haven’t already.

That’s the story, anyway. While nobody’s hands are clean, let us, for argument’s sake, accept the gist of the story – China has been subsidizing manufacturers at the expense of households for decades, simultaneously suppressing consumption while juicing production – all of which ultimately results in China’s exports flooding global markets, deindustrializing America through recalcitrant trade deficits.

So far, American efforts to tame China’s exports while stimulating domestic manufacturing have yet to be effective. China’s exports have grown some 50% since the Trump tariffs of 2018. While vast sums are being spent on the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, early signs have not been promising.

Asia Times for more

Hezbollah leader Nasrallah defeated ISIS, protected Lebanon’s Christians, fought Israeli colonialism

VIDEO/Geopolitical Economy/Youtube

Syed Hassan Nasrallah (1960-2024)

by IQBAL JASSAT

Resistance Will Stand. Lebanon Will Persist. Israel Will Fall

“He led the Resistance, which will not bend but grow as his memory and example seed a new generation. He fought for his people despite the immense personal cost and was hated by his enemies because he defeated them.

“I saw him speak in Beirut in 2013, a most impressive man and a brilliant strategic thinker. His loss is a blow to Lebanon, but he has taught two generations how to succeed him.

He is drinking now from the fountain of Kawthar.”

The above recollection by Vijay Prashad of Syed Hassen Nasrallah, reminds me of the time my colleagues at MRN and I had to opportunity to meet the revered leader of Hezbollah in Beirut.

It was during 2003 when I had the privilege of being invited by Hezbollah to present a talk on my impressions on the Arab media’s coverage of Palestine at a conference hosted by the group.

The conference which had journalists and media professionals from the region and beyond, was officially opened by the Lebanese President General Emile Lahoud and the keynote address delivered by Nasrallah.

Spread over a number of days, the event culminated with a dinner hosted by Nasrallah, followed up with a visit to the site of the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla, and a trip to South Lebanon and the liberated Khiyam Detention Camp.

Israel’s murderous onslaught of Lebanon which began with its disastrous occupation that lasted for almost two decades, was finally uprooted through the valiant resistance by Hezbollah led by Nasrallah.

Though Israel suffered various defeats at the hands of Hezbollah since then, it is clear that the right-wing racist regime headed by extremist fascists, has failed to heed lessons.

The settler colonial regime’s current military assault on Beirut’s densely populated residential neighborhood of Dahiya, has resulted in horrific slaughter of countless civilians.

Since Friday’s massive air strikes using at least 15 X 5000lb buster bombs to assassinate Nasrallah,

emergency operations continue battling to rescue people trapped in the rubble of the entire block of eight residential buildings housing several hundred civilian families.

Addressing the media shortly after the horrendous bombings, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, not only failed to distance America from the strikes, but shamelessly sought to justify it by repeating the mantra of “Israel’s right to defend itself”.

Without batting an eye, Blinken’s remarks focused entirely on securing the interests of America’s proxy Israel. The language he used as well as the talking points he repeatedly made, come straight out of the Zionist regime’s playbook.

Like his boss Joe Biden, Blinken was unable to provide a rational response to questions about the so-called US/French “Ceasefire” initiative that was presented a week earlier as having been agreed upon by Israel.

Yet Netanyahu shot it down causing huge embarrassment in the state department, but Blinken remained aloof from Israel’s intransigent rebuttal. It confirms that the colonial entity is not only a renegade but a huge liability to its main ally.

As is well known, Israel’s dependence on American arms and ammunition including full political and diplomatic backing, is the main reason for the impunity whereby the Zionist regime behaves like a distempered dog.

While the Friday attack is being claimed by the Polish immigrant Mileikowsky/Netanyahu to have targeted Hizbullah’s operation center, most mainstream media fail to mention that without American arms and ammunition, its client-regime would not be able to reduce residential buildings to dust.

Earlier on Thursday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the US would continue to provide military aid to Israel, ignoring the idea of “red lines,” even as he warned that an all-out “conflict between Israel and Hezbollah” would be devastating.

Netanyahu and his criminal gang of warlords are fully aware that by being party to a joint US/French agreement and subsequently defying it by pressing ahead with devastating bombings that have killed hundreds in Lebanon, will have no consequences in the White House.

As far as the Biden admin and all previous American governments are concerned, “red lines” are applicable for others, not Israel.

BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen described Western impotency in the face of Israel’s war on Lebanon as “powerless”. And on Blinken’s remarks that there was room for negotiations, Bowen said his assertion is “hollow”.

As Netanyahu continues his  mayhem in Gaza, the Occupied West Bank, Syria and Lebanon, I join Prashad and million others who are thinking of their friends and comrades resisting Israel’s illegal attacks:

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Israel’s Nasrallah Assassination – More Horror Beckons w/. Palestinian Analyst Mouin Rabbani

by OWEN JONES

Israel’s cheerleaders are triumphalist about the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – which involved the mass slaughter of countless Lebanese civilians in Beirut. But what next? We’re joined by brilliant Palestinian-Dutch analyst Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya, on the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, the risk of regional conflagration, and the root of the current evil – the genocide against Gaza.

Israel’s assassinations can’t kill resistance

by BELEN FERNANDEZ

After assassinating Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah in a devastating air strike on Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighbourhood, the Israeli army took to the platform X to boast triumphantly that Nasrallah would “no longer be able to terrorize the world”.

Granted, the objective observer would be forgiven for failing to detect how it is that Nasrallah is supposedly responsible for terrestrial terror when he is not the one who has been presiding over genocide in the Gaza Strip for nearly a year. Nor, obviously, is he the one who just killed more than 700 people in Lebanon in less than a week.

Israel takes the credit for all of that, just as it takes the credit for pulverising numerous residential buildings and their inhabitants in the quest to kill Nasrallah – as good an example as any of “terrorising the world”.

And while Israel is marketing Nasrallah’s elimination as a decisive blow to the organisation, a brief glance at history reveals that such killings unsurprisingly do nothing to root out resistance and instead intensify it.

Case in point: Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s co-founder and second secretary-general, was assassinated in 1992 in southern Lebanon by Israeli helicopter gunships, which also killed his wife and five-year-old son. On this occasion, too, Israel was quick to congratulate itself on its bloody feat – yet the celebration was woefully premature. Following al-Musawi’s assassination, Nasrallah was elected secretary-general and went on to turn Hezbollah into a formidable force not just in Lebanon, but throughout the region.

Under his leadership, Hezbollah expelled Israel from Lebanese territory in 2000, thereby putting an end to a brutal 22-year occupation, and successfully fought back during the 34-day war on Lebanon in 2006, dealing the Israeli military humiliating blows.

Meanwhile, Israel’s continuing obsession with killing Hezbollah figures did little to weaken the group. The 2008 joint Mossad-CIA assassination in Syria of Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh, for example, simply propelled the man to ever more mythical status in the Hezbollah Hall of Fame.

Then, of course, there are the myriad assassinations of Palestinian leaders going back decades – none of which have deterred the Palestinians from wanting to, you know, exist.

The Associated Press notes that several leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) were killed in their Beirut apartments in 1973 by Israeli commandos “in a nighttime raid led by Ehud Barak, who later became Israel’s top army commander and prime minister”.

As per the AP report, Barak’s team “killed Kamal Adwan, who was in charge of PLO operations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank; Mohammed Youssef Najjar, a member of the PLO’s executive committee; and Kamal Nasser, a PLO spokesman and charismatic writer and poet”

Al Jazeera for more

Killing Hassan Nasrallah

by BINOY KAMPMARK

The Illusion of a Solution

The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern.  Ignore base causes.  Ignore context.  Target leaders, and target personnel.  See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot.  Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.

The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations.  The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe.  These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the nation state and plundering self-interest, leaving aside the complexities of ethnic belonging and tribal dispositions.  Tragically, such cartographic fictions tended to keep company with crime, dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing and enthusiastic hatreds.

Since October 7, when Hamas flipped the table on Israel’s heralded security apparatus to kill over 1,200 of its citizens and smuggle over 200 hostages into Gaza, historical realities became present with a nasty resonance.  While Israel falsely sported its credentials as a peaceful state with dry cleaned democratic credentials ravaged by Islamic barbarians, Hamas had tapped into a vein of history stretching back to 1948.  Dispossession, racial segregation, suppression, were all going to be addressed, if only for a moment of vanguardist and cruel violence.

To the north, where Lebanon and Israel share yet another nonsense of a border, October 7 presented a change.  Both the Israeli Defence Forces and Hezbollah took to every bloodier jousting.  It was a serious affair: 70,000 Israelis displaced to the south; tens of thousands of Lebanese likewise to the north. (The latter are almost never mentioned in the huffed commentaries of the West.)

The Israeli strategy in this latest phase was made all too apparent by the number of military commanders and high-ranking operatives in Hezbollah the IDF has targeted.  Added to this the pager-walkie talkie killings as a prelude to a likely ground invasion of Lebanon, it was clear that Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, figured as an exemplary target.

Hezbollah confirmed the death of its leader in a September 27 strike on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh and promised “to continue its jihad in confronting the enemy, supporting Gaza and Palestine, and defending Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people.”  Others killed included Ali Karki, commander of the organisation’s southern front, and various other commanders who had gathered.

Israeli officials have been prematurely thrilled.  Like deluded scientists obsessed with eliminating a symptom, they ignore the disease with habitual obsession.  “Most of the senior leaders of Hezbollah have been eliminated,” claimed a triumphant Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called the measure “the most significant strike since the founding of the State of Israel.”  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated with simplicity that killing Nasrallah was necessary to “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come” and enable displaced Israelis to return to their homes in the north.

Various reports swallowed the Israeli narrative.  Reuters, for instance, called the killing “a heavy blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.”  Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr opined that this “will be a major setback for the organisation.”  But the death of a being is never any guarantee for the death of an idea. The body merely offers a period of occupancy.  Ideas will be transferred, grow, and proliferate, taking residence in other organisations or entities. The assassinating missile is a poor substitute to addressing the reasons why such an idea came into being.

A dead or mutilated body merely offers assurance that power might have won the day for a moment, a situation offering only brief delight to military strategists and the journalists keeping tabs on the morgue’s latest additions.  It is easy, then, to ignore why Hezbollah became a haunting consequence of Israel’s bungling invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982.  Easy to also ignore the 1985 manifesto, with its reference to the organisation’s determination to combat Israel and those it backed, such as the Christian Phalangist allies in the Lebanese Civil War, and to remove the Israeli occupying force.

Dissident Voice for more

MERRIAM-WEBSTER

Was this all a joke?

You could be excused for thinking that much of English pronunciation was invented by a trickster god, one with a particularly cruel streak. After all, how else could we have come to a place where through doesn’t rhyme with though, enough doesn’t rhyme with lough, and cough doesn’t rhyme with hiccough? We’re happy to tell you that there was no trickster god involved: there are reasons for why things are the way they are. Read on, and we’ll explain one of the great mysteries of our language: why so many of the letters seem to be just sitting around doing no work.

mnemonic

Some letters are silent in English because they are part of sound combinations that are so uncommon that English speakers ultimately resist pronouncing them. Our language is a glutton, and it has taken words from an enormous number of other languages. Since we have words borrowed from languages that have different sound patterns, this results in English speakers pronouncing the words differently than in their languages of origin.

That’s why the m is silent in mnemonic, a word meaning “assisting memory” or “relating to memory.” Mnemonic came to English from Greek through Latin during the 1600s, when many words of Classical origin were introduced by scholarly writers.

It is documented that the m was pronounced before the n as recently as the late 1800s, and has since dropped away.

There are very few words in English that begin with ¬mn, and most of them are rare words that share the ultimate Greek root of the word meaning “to remember,” including mneme (pronounced /NEE-mee/), mnestic , mnemotechnical, and the name of the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne.

Merriam-Webster for more