Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland (middle) stands with her Peruvian counterpart Nestor Francisco Popolizio Bardales (front left) Argentina’s Jorge Marcelo Faurie (front right), British Minister Responsible for the Americas and Europe Alan Duncan (middle back left) and United States Ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft (middle back right) during the 10th ministerial meeting of the Lima Group in Ottawa on Monday, Feb. 4, 2019. IMAGE/ Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press/file photo.
The melodic Canadian national anthem
proclaims that its sons and daughters “stand on guard for thee.” Well,
now is the time as Canada faces insults, lies and threats from Trump.
The idea that the US would annex Canada and make it one of its states,
has provoked palpable indignation
among Canadian people, Indigenous and non-indigenous. Ironically,
Canada, which celebrates its “special relationship” with the USA, has
been thrust into the category of nations vilified by the US: the
long-standing animosity towards Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua remains,
but now Trump has added US allies Canada, Panama, Denmark (EU), and
Colombia. One can only wonder who will be next.
Canadian
spokespersons deny these outrages but at the same time add with a bit
of a whine: “but, but, we are your best friends!” To its detriment,
Canada has long ignored Henry Kissinger, well-known former US Secretary
of State, who declared that the US has no friends, only interests.
It
has been a rude awakening for all Canadians, especially its elites.
Suddenly, they are mentioning “Canadian sovereignty,” a concept that it
seemed only the Quebecois and indigenous peoples understood. Certainly,
sovereignty is a concept that Canadian governments have often willfully
ignored or belittled with respect to other countries such as Venezuela,
Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, among others.
Unlike his father Pierre who was a Canadian nationalist, in 2017 Trudeau the younger astonishingly expressed the view that Canada is a “post-national” country and that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”
This
would not have been acceptable to the working classes in towns, cities,
farms, factories, logging camps, fishing towns, throughout the country
where the Maple Leaf flag flies proudly, had Trudeau’s concept been
actually discussed in participation with the people of Canada. It was a
sheer urban elitist commentary. An example of how far the Canadian
political elites especially, have problems listening to their own
people. In fact, the real defense of Canada will lie as it always has
done, in the hands of its working and middle classes, and ironically,
with the indigenous peoples, and their pressure and votes upon the
political elites. Unlike in the US, there is in Canada a working
Parliament where, despite lobbyists, votes do count, and not vast
fortunes of the billionaires.
Trudeau
is an ideological product of the financial and commercial elites that
embraced globalization and the US empire, wanting to “play with the big
boys.” After World War II, Canadian political and cultural elites
basically decided to join US imperial capitalism. In the 1960s the
Canadian intellectual, George Grant, railed against this situation,
mourning what he felt was the end of Canada as an independent state as
the ruling class looked to the US for its final authority in politics
and culture (George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism,
1965). Through the years, the US has repeatedly attempted to dominate
Canada over lumber, water, fishing rights, and other trade issues.
Although
there have been almost constant US/Canada trade disagreements that
federal and provincial officials have had to contend with, at another
level, Canadian elites threw their hat and their county into the hands
of the US empire that was consolidating south of their borders. So, they
send their children to Ivy League universities, approve of mergers with
US corporations, and take vacations in Florida. Canadian media
increasingly relies on US outlets such as Associated Press for much of
its news, and most significantly, Canada backs the US in almost every
vote at the UN and backs US foreign policy, whether it be a sensible one
or an irresponsible regime change adventure. There were exceptions with
two Liberal Prime Ministers who withstood tremendous US pressure:
Pierre Trudeau who refused to break relations with China or Cuba during
the Cold War and Jean Chretien who refused to join the US invasion of
Iraq.
The US has, to a
certain extent, already “invaded” Canada in a back-handed, quiet, sort
of way. The symbol of US “takeover” is plainly visible in Ottawa, where
the enormous, ugly, US fortress-like embassy was planted in the middle
of the nation’s capital, like a giant carbuncle proclaiming: “we are a
permanent feature of your nation.”
It
is surprising especially to many of us in Canada of Latin American
origin, how unconcerned most Canadians have been about the encroaching
US influence in its political and cultural life. A great scandal was
whipped up when there were accusations of China influencing Canadian
politics, but when US ambassadors publicly weighed in with their opinions, nobody bats an eye.
Time gets a little strange as you approach the speed of light. IMAGE/FlashMovie/Shutterstock
The speed of light is important because it’s about way more than, well, the speed of light.
On one hand, the speed of light is just a number: 299,792,458 meters
per second. And on the other, it’s one of the most important constants
that appears in nature and defines the relationship of causality itself.
As far as we can measure, it is a constant. It is the same speed for
every observer in the entire universe. This constancy was first
established in the late 1800’s with the experiments of Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at Case Western Reserve University.
They attempted to measure changes in the speed of light as the Earth
orbited around the Sun. They found no such variation, and no experiment
ever since then has either.
Observations of the cosmic microwave background, the light released
when the universe was 380,000 years old, show that the speed of light
hasn’t measurably changed in over 13.8 billion years.
In fact, we now define the speed of light to be a constant,
with a precise speed of 299,792,458 meters per second. While it remains a
remote possibility in deeply theoretical physics that light may not be a
constant, for all known purposes it is a constant, so it’s better to
just define it and move on with life.
How was the speed of light first measured?
In 1676 the Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Romer made the first
quantitative measurement of how fast light travels. He carefully
observed the orbit of Io, the innermost moon of Jupiter. As the Earth
circles the Sun in its own orbit, sometimes it approaches Jupiter and
sometimes it recedes away from it. When the Earth is approaching
Jupiter, the path that light has to travel from Io is shorter than when
the Earth is receding away from Jupiter. By carefully measuring the
changes to Io’s orbital period, Romer calculated a speed of light of
around 220,000 kilometers per second.
Observations continued to improve until by the 19th
century astronomers and physicists had developed the sophistication to
get very close to the modern value. In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell made a
remarkable discovery. He was investigating the properties of electricity
and magnetism, which for decades had remained mysterious in unconnected
laboratory experiments around the world. Maxwell found that electricity
and magnetism were really two sides of the same coin, both
manifestations of a single electromagnetic force.
James O’Brien has excoriated the state of British politics, following Elon Musk’s inflammatory attacks on Labour ministers regarding historic child sexual abuse cases.
“What matters is that British politics has now been split apart in a way I can’t remember seeing, by this far right foreign conspiracy theorist who happens to be the richest man in the world,” O’Brien said.
“It has been split apart in a way I can’t quite conceive of.”
In a series of posts on Twitter in recent days, Musk has attacked Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Sir Keir Starmer over what he alleges — without evidence — they were “complicit” in failing to combat mass rapes of young women and girls.
Musk’s intervention has resurfaced the findings of a series of inquiries into child sexual abuse across England and Wales involving at least 1,400 victims.
Musk has also come under significant criticism for his attacks on Labour’s Jess Philipps, Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, claiming she was a “rape genocide apologist”.
While Musk’s comments have been roundly criticised in the UK and abroad, O’Brien told listeners that he expected more from the British opposition.
“I don’t understand what’s happened to the Conservative Party, when now is the time for national unity,” O’Brien said.
“British parliamentary sovereignty… demands that an attack by a foreign conspiracy theorist upon our politicians be condemned… And it hasn’t been.”
What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Odious Debt shows
how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of
indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how
Latin America’s forgotten history of contestation can shed new light on
seemingly intractable contemporary dilemmas.
With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire and modern Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, Odious Debt explores
how discussions about the morality of debt and default played a
structuring role in the construction and codification of national
constitutions, identities, and international legal norms in Latin
America. Ultimately, Corredera reveals how Latin American jurists
developed a powerful global critique of economics and international law
which, in rejecting the political violence promulgated in the name of
unjust debt, continues to generate pressing questions about debt,
bankruptcy, reparations, and the pursuit of a moral world economy.
Corredera is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for
Comparative Public Law and International Law and Lecturer in History at
Spain’s National Distance Education University.
Scott: Edward Jones Corredera, welcome to Money on the Left.
Edward Jones Corredera: Thanks, Scott. Big fan of the show. Thanks for having me.
Scott: We invited you to talk to us today about your recent book titled Odious Debt, Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America. To
start us off, we usually like to ask our guests to tell our audience a
little bit about themselves, whether personally or professionally, about
their background. In this case, how did your life history lead you to
start thinking about the history and politics of debt in Latin America?
Edward Jones Corredera: I was born and raised in Madrid, Spain. I’m
half Spanish and half English, and when the 2008 financial crisis hit
and really started to bite in 2010, I found myself studying politics at
the London School of Economics in London. I had always grown up with
seeing cultural misunderstandings about Britain and in Spain and in
Spain and Britain.
2008 really showed me that cultural ideas around economics really did
matter—it wasn’t just sort of day-to-day anecdotal stuff where people
from different countries travel and they don’t fully understand each
other’s cultures. In this case, I just watched stereotypes about the
country I’d grown up in turn into the basis for economic forecasting. It
might be useful to remember the use of the term “PIGS” to describe
Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain during this period. That feels like a
long time ago, but it happened. I also remember seeing weekly
assessments of Spain’s debt-to-GDP ratio. In Spain, this turned into a
sort of ritualistic health check on the nation’s future – it was studied
religiously, and it was a strange way of assessing the economic health
of a nation. My sense was that the history of economic ideas in the
Spanish speaking world was not well understood, and it was particularly
misunderstood in the anglophone world. I did a couple of jobs—I worked
in Shanghai for a year—but I went back to academia to do a Ph.D. at
Cambridge. The morning after I landed, I was jetlagged and woke up
around 6am right as the Brexit referendum results were being announced. I
was worried that Spain—which is to this day one of the most Europhile
countries in Europe—would lose faith in in the EU. If it happened in
Britain, could it happen in Spain? What if this support that you saw in
Spain for the EU was just superficial? What if that right-wing sentiment
redolent of Franco’s Spain could recover lost ground? So, this
background certainly informed my doctoral thesis. I set out to write a
history of the pursuit of a European federation in Spanish political
thought. It was through that that I got into ideas of how credit was
originally seen as a way to deliver peace in the Enlightenment.
The re-coronation of the lumpen-capitalist Donald Trump as US president
is a no-doubt consequential moment. Yet Trump has increasingly been
second banana to one of his many Rasputins, the far-right techie Elon
Musk. In an objective sense, however, the richest man in the world
giving what is inarguably a Nazi salute at the inauguration of the
president of the United States is an event of historical and
international significance. This gesture from Musk was a crystallization
of all that Trump is doing, and in particular, a prime form of the new
far right’s aestheticization of politics. The politics of the gesture,
the image, that crystalizes what in many ways is a redefinition and
narrowing of what constitutes what the American state sees as human. So of course,
the international benefactor of the far right is going to give a Nazi
salute. This is the same guy who within days of the salute, gave a
Nazi-esque speech to the Post-Nazi AFD in Germany, calling on Germans to
reject globalism and embrace their historic warrior-like ways, as
pointed out by Julius Caesar!
The question here is how its significance
is being downplayed, deliberately or not, in an official and unofficial
sense, from the pillars of American society, after being given the go
ahead by some figures in the Jewish establishment. Musk did not give a
Nazi salute, he made an “awkward gesture”. Broadcast journalists like
Erin Burnett are exemplars of this pattern. This has been echoed even by
Jewish conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro, not to mention some
reasonable-doubt-mongers at The Forward. Their raised eyebrows
and seemingly verbal scare-quotes when using this phrase reveal them not
to be dissenting in an aestheticized sense but rather showing their
resignation to the moment and their opportunism, their desire to
reproduce themselves and their socially and materially beneficial
existence. This goes of course, most shamefully to the Anti-Defamation
League which did not condemn Musk, indeed explicitly denied that his
gesture was a Nazi salute. The ADL are increasingly echoed in media
reports that at first simply didn’t report on it or just referred to it
elliptically.
Religion has profoundly influenced human society, providing both solace and controversy
Bill Tammeus (wtammeus@gmail.com), an American friend of mine, lives
in Kansas City, Missouri. He visited India with his father, an
agricultural expert, around 1957 and was my classmate at Boys High
School, Allahabad. After returning to the U.S., Bill became a
journalist.
Now retired, he engages in social work and serves as a preacher in his Presbyterian Church.
Bill also writes a blog called Bill’s Faith Matters Blog, where he regularly shares his thoughts. His latest post, titled “A Foundational Question: What the Heck Is the Purpose of Religion?”, explores his understanding of religion’s role.
As a believer in God, Bill has a perspective on religion that differs
from mine. I am an atheist and regard all religions as superstitions,
holding that truth lies in science—an ever-evolving discipline. While we
differ in our beliefs, we both seek to understand the purpose of
religion in human life.
Why Do People Believe in Religion?
For
instance, a businessman launching a new venture cannot be entirely
confident of its success. Economic downturns or unforeseen events may
cause losses, despite meticulous planning. Faced with such
uncertainties, even the affluent may turn to religion, hoping for divine
intervention.
As Shakespeare observed in King Lear:
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”
However, I believe that as science advances, humanity will
increasingly gain control over its destiny. Also, exploitation of man by
man will by then end. A century from now, science may evolve to such an
extent that religion will become obsolete, fading into irrelevance.
Despite being unscientific, religion remains integral to the lives of the vast majority of people worldwide. Why is this so?
The majority of the world’s population lives in poverty. Their lives
are so harsh and uncertain that they turn to religion for psychological
support. Without this emotional crutch, many might fall into despair,
even to the point of madness or suicide. For the poor, religion serves
as a mechanism to endure suffering and find meaning amidst chaos.
But why do relatively well-off individuals also cling to religion?
That is because we are still at a low level of development of science
(compared to what it will be, say, after 100 years hence ). In other
words, the chance factor is still very powerful in our lives.
We plan something, but something else happens. In other words, we
cannot control our lives. So we believe there are some supernatural
powers like God which control our lives, and which must be propitiated
to keep them benevolent and not turn malevolent.
Pause to survey the composition of Trump 2.0 cabinet, and a striking
pattern emerges. Alongside the regular staple of anti-immigrant hawks,
Wall Street libertarians and Christian nationalists, we find what seems
like a surprising degree of ethnic diversity. Until one takes a second,
closer look, to find that it is in fact a specific type of brown person
highly represented. From Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy
to Usha Vance, Jay Bhattacharya and Sriram Krishnan, the new
“multiracial” MAGA appears significantly dominated by the presence of so
many Indian – and Hindu – Americans.
This detail is no mere statistical oddity. The presence of so many
Hindu Americans on the far-right is not a coincidence; neither is it a
familiar story of a few elite pro-business conservatives that all
non-white communities contain. Rather, they are a mirror – a mirror into
a broader attempt to reposition where Hindu Americans fit into US
society. To understand this phenomenon, we must understand the role
played by the Hindu supremacist, or Hindutva movement, whose influence
threads together the trajectories of many of these nominees, and whose
Americanization – and Trumpification – is a critical part of this
puzzle.
Hindutva, which is distinct from the Hindu faith, is a century-old political movement inspired
by Nazism and Italian fascism, that aims to reshape India’s secular
democracy into a Hindu ethno-state. Like white Christian nationalism,
Hindutva has a history of targeting religious minorities, including through lynching. Over fifty years ago, the movement established
its first U.S.-based organization: the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America
(VHP-A). Across these five decades, the movement erected a vast network
of organizations on the backs of the financial success of the Indian
American community, building large charitable, cultural, religious, and
advocacy fronts, as well as a network of PACs.
One of these PACs, in fact, helped launch Gabbard’s political career with extensive donations,
raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for her first Congressional
races. The movement’s other champions were also Democrats, and its path
initially steered clear from the older stream of Indian American
Republicanism, exemplified by figures like Dinesh D’Souza or Bobby
Jindal, who had to eschew a public identification with Hinduism to
advance their political careers.
It is in fact in contrasting the new figures in the cabinet with this
older strain of Indian American conservatism that revealing details
emerge. Consider the profile of Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s pick to co-lead
a government spending department with Elon Musk. Ramaswamy, who has
consistently consorted with Hindutva groups as well, headlining two separate VHP-A galas, where he credited
a VHP-A leader with teaching him Hinduism, has not hid his Hinduism;
rather, he has sought to ground his very support for “Judeo-Christian
values” in his Hinduism, grounding it in caste pride and positioning it
as proximate to whiteness. His colleague, Kash Patel, who is slated to
run the FBI under Trump, has similarly defended the Hindutva movement’s
leadership and agenda in India, speaking conspiratorially of their being targeted by the media and the “Washington establishment.”
While these figures are the most visible signs of a convergence
between Hindu supremacy and MAGA, they are but outcomes of broader
changes within the far-right, and within the Indian American community.
The story, as Gabbard’s own trajectory points to, begins with a note
of devastating Democratic misjudgement and complacency. After all, for
decades, Hindu supremacist organizations were primarily welcomed,
like other immigrant communities, by liberal institutions and a
Democratic Party that largely failed to recognize their racist
underpinnings and that uncritically accepted its claims to represent a
minority group. In this phase, organizations like Hindu American Foundation sought
to present themselves as interfaith champions and civil rights
advocates, the group even joining the Leadership Conference on Civil and
Human Rights. It was in her earlier avatar as a progressive Democrat,
after all, that Gabbard became the movement’s first high-profile champion, for which she received at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations, what was a full quarter of her 2014 war-chest.
But the rise of Trump altered Hindutva strategy, helping the movement
shed its liberal mask. Hindutva’s alignment with white supremacy is
less paradoxical than it seems, given that its leaders have, across
their history, openly sought to emulate white supremacist movements,
from Jim Crow racism and Nazism’s treatment of Jews.
Hindutva’s view that Hindus are a majority oppressed in their own
country closely matches MAGA’s view that whites and Christians are
oppressed in the United States, and the two movements have a shared
hatred for Muslims, with VHP-A members having longstanding ties to prominent anti-Muslim figures in the MAGA movement, including Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Laura Loomer.
But the large-scale reorientation of the movement still took years,
and its final direction was perhaps only set in place when Steve Bannon joined
the Republican Hindu Coalition as honorary chairman in 2019, a moment
that signaled MAGA’s openness to non-white far-right movements.
Parody of the gleichschaltung process by Walter Wesinger.
There is a shadow of something
colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the
land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest
I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But
what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position.
Not only a new administration, but a new ideology has now taken up
residence at the White House: neofascism. It resembles in certain ways
the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but
with historically distinct features specific to the political economy
and culture of the United States in the opening decades of the
twenty-first century. This neofascism characterizes, in my assessment,
the president and his closest advisers, and some of the key figures in
his cabinet.2 From
a broader sociological perspective, it reflects the electoral bases,
class constituencies and alignments, and racist, xenophobic nationalism
that brought Donald Trump into office. Neofascist discourse and
political practice are now evident every day in virulent attacks on the
racially oppressed, immigrants, women, LBGTQ people, environmentalists,
and workers. These have been accompanied by a sustained campaign to
bring the judiciary, governmental employees, the military and
intelligence agencies, and the press into line with this new ideology
and political reality.
Who forms the social base of the neofascist phenomenon? As a Gallup
analysis and CNN exit polls have demonstrated, Trump’s electoral support
came mainly from the intermediate strata of the population, i.e., from
the lower middle class and privileged sections of the working class,
primarily those with annual household incomes above the median level of
around $56,000. Trump received a plurality of votes among those with
incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 a year, especially in the $50,000
to $99,999 range, and among those without college degrees. Of those who
reported that their financial situation was worse than four years
earlier, Trump won fully 77 percent of the vote.3 An
analysis by Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell of Gallup, updated
just days before the election, indicated that in contrast to standard
Republican voters, much of Trump’s strongest support came from
relatively privileged white male workers within “skilled blue collar
industries”—including “production, construction, installation,
maintenance, and repair, and transportation”—earning more than the
median income, and over the age of forty.4 In
the so-called Rust Belt 5 states (Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
and Wisconsin) that swung the election to Trump, the Republican vote
increased by over 300,000 among voters earning $50,000 or less, as
compared with 2012. Meanwhile, among the same demographic group,
Democrats lost more than three times as many voters as the number
Republicans gained.5 None
of this was enough to win Trump the national popular vote, which he
lost by almost 3 million, but it gave him the edge he needed in the
electoral college.
Nationally, Trump won the white vote and the male vote by decisive
margins, and had his strongest support among rural voters. Both
religious Protestants and Catholics favored the Republican presidential
candidate, but his greatest support of all (80 percent) came from white
evangelical Christians. Veterans also went disproportionately for Trump.
Among those who considered immigration the nation’s most pressing
issue, Trump, according to CNN exit polls, received 64 percent of the
vote; among those who ranked terrorism as the number-one issue, 57
percent.6 Much
of the election was dominated by both overt and indirect expressions of
racism, emanating not only from the Republican nominee but also from
his close associates and family (and hardly nonexistent among the
Democrats themselves). Donald Trump, Jr., in what was clearly a
political ploy, repeatedly tweeted Nazi-style white supremacist slogans
aimed at the far right. Trump’s only slightly more veiled statements
against Muslims and Mexicans, and his alliance with Breitbart, pointed
in the same direction.7
As the Gallup report pointedly observed:
In a study [Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler?]
of perhaps the most infamous [nationalist] party, the geography of
voting patterns reveal that the political supporters of Hitler’s
National Socialist party were disproportionately Protestants, if living
in a rural area, and those in lower-middle administrative occupations
and owners of small businesses, if living in an urban area. Thus,
neither the rich nor poor were especially inclined to support the Nazi
Party, and even among Christians, religious identity mattered greatly.8
The clear implication was that Trump’s supporters conformed to the
same general pattern. According to the Hamilton study, it is generally
believed that “the lower middle class (or petty bourgeoisie) provided
the decisive support for Hitler and his party.”9 Hitler
also drew on a minority of the working class, disproportionately
represented by more privileged blue-collar workers. But the great bulk
of his support came from the lower middle class or petty bourgeoisie,
representing a staunchly anti-working class, racist, and
anti-establishment outlook—which nevertheless aligned itself with
capital. Hitler also received backing from devout Protestants, rural
voters, disabled veterans, and older voters or pensioners.10
Iranian-French actress Golshifteh Farahani stars in the 2024 Israeli-produced film adaptation of Azar Naifisi’s 2003 novel, Reading Lolita in Tehran IMAGE/Eran Riklis
At a time when the entire world is aghast at Israel’s savagery in Gaza, the Zionist regime has decided to adapt an Iranian novel once promoted by American neoconservatives into a film
These days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes time from his busy schedule slaughtering Palestinian women, their children, and the rest of their families to send messages of love and solidarity to Iranian women.
The beleaguered war criminal kindly assures them how much he and his
entire settler colony support their struggles for liberation.
The messages sound surreal. But they are real.
The international fugitive charged with the crime of genocide –
wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity – has even learnt a
few words in Persian.
He sports the slogan of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom) to assure Iranian women he wishes for nothing more than to see them liberated from the yokes of their mandatory hijabs, wearing their jeans and t-shirts and waving the Israeli flag in Azadi square.
But why, at a time when, according
to Oxfam, “more women and children are killed in Gaza by Israeli
military than any other recent conflict in a single year”, should Israel
suddenly care about the fate of Iranian women?
As I write these words, outgoing US President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump are cockfighting over credit
for an alleged “ceasefire” they say they brokered between Israel and
Hamas, even as Israeli forces continue to slaughter more Palestinians
without pause.
Netanyahu, once again, appears to be collaborating with his American
allies to stage a false disagreement, using it as a cover for further
mass atrocities against innocent Palestinians. What “ceasefire” are they
talking about exactly?
And amid this ongoing carnage, Israelis are expressing concern about women’s rights in Iran?
The mere assumption is beyond absurd.
Why would a garrison state, a settler colony, a proxy military base advancing the American
and European imperial designs and war machine suddenly care about the
fate of Iranian women and whether or not they like to wear their
headscarves?
Bizarre – or is it?
‘Hasbara-modelled propaganda’
In his broadcast messages to Iranian women, the mass murdering
Israeli chieftain is now actively aided and abetted by the one and only
Azar Nafisi, the author of the fake and fictitious memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran.
In 2003, the book became a global sensation thanks to the concerted
efforts of her friend Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of defence
under President George W Bush and to whom the book was dedicated, and
other infamous neoconservative operatives.
Nafisi and her memoir became the Iranian version of the Nayirah testimony, which helped instigate the US invasion of Iraq
It was promoted as part of an active Iranophobic and Islamophobic propaganda campaign to demonise Iran and Iranians to justify all military operations against them.
This was the singular achievement of Nafisi: vilifying her own
country at a time that would have aided and abetted US and Israeli plots
against an entire nation.
She did against Iran what the Iraqi Kanan Makiya and the Lebanese Fouad Ajami did against Iraq and the entire Arab world put together.
Nafisi and her memoir became the Iranian version of the Nayirah testimony, the infamous case of Nayirah al-Sabah, the 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, who in October 1990 gave false testimony in US Congress to instigate the US war against Iraq.