by PEPE ESCOBAR

The much-awaited BRICS heads of state meeting in Russia’s Kazan did not disappoint. The multilateral institution has finally brought bite and substance to many of the global financial and political conundrums that have long-challenged a genuine reshaping of the global order.

The Russian presidency of BRICS 2024 could not have chosen a more multicultural and multi-nodal site to host a summit laden with enormous expectations by the Global Majority. The southwestern Russian city of Kazan, on the banks of the Volga and Kazanka rivers, is the capital of the semi-autonomous Republic of Tatarstan, renowned for its vibrant mix of Tatar and Russian cultures.

Even though the BRICS summit took place in the Kazan Expo – a sort of multi-level station connected to the airport and the aero-express link to the city – it was the Kazan Kremlin, a centuries-old fortified citadel and World Heritage Site, that imposed itself as the global image of BRICS 2024.

That spelled out, graphically, a continuity from the 10th century onwards through Bulgar culture, the Golden Horde, and the 15th–16th-century Khanate all the way to modern Tatarstan.

The Kazan Kremlin is the last Tatar fortress in Russia with remnants of its original town planning. The global Muslim Ummah did not fail to observe that this is the northwestern limit of the spread of Islam in Russia. The minarets of the Kul Sharif mosque in the Kremlin, in fact, acquired an iconic dimension – symbolizing a collective, trans-cultural, civilization-state effort to build a more equitable and just world.

It has been an extraordinary experience to follow throughout the year how Russian diplomacy managed to successfully bring together delegations from 36 nations – 22 of them represented by heads of state – plus six international organizations, including the United Nations, for the summit in Kazan.

These delegations came from nations representing nearly half of the global GDP. The implication is that a tsunami of thousands of sanctions imposed since 2022, plus relentless yelling about Russia’s “isolation,” simply disappeared in the vortex of irrelevance. That contributed to the immense irritation displayed by the collective west over this remarkable gathering. Key subtext: there was not a single official presence of the Five Eyes set-up in Kazan.

The various devils, of course, remain in the various details: how BRICS – and the BRICS Outreach mechanism, housing 13 new partners – will move from the extremely polite and quite detailed Kazan Declaration – with more than 130 operational paragraphs – and several other white papers to implement a Global Majority-oriented platform ranging from collective security to widespread connectivity, non-weaponized trade settlements, and geopolitical primacy. It will be a long, winding, and thorny road.

Onward drive, from Asia to the Muslim world

The BRICS Outreach session was one of the astonishing highlights of Kazan: a big round table re-enacting the post-colonial Bandung 1955 landmark on steroids, with Russian President Vladimir Putin opening the proceedings and then handing the floor to representatives of the other 35 nations, Palestine included.

The Cradle for more

EDITORS, THE BLACK AGENDA REPORT

“I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. ??There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”

It is the day after the 2024 US presidential elections and the people of the US lost. For what choice did they have? On one side was Kamala Harris, sitting Vice President of a regime in the middle of committing genocide and administering the massive repression of anti-genocide protestors, who was undemocratically chosen after a Democratic Party coup kept the sitting president from running. She offered to continue the path of genocide and war, with a promise to create world’s “most lethal” military. On the other side was Donald Trump who is as much a buffoon as he is dangerous. He matched the Democrat’s openly racist hatred of Palestinian people with his own racist hatred of Palestinians, Puerto Ricans, and Haitians. Significantly, Trump sounded less hawkish than Harris.

There were other options, of course. We were not supposed to know about the Green Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or the People’s Party. We were also not supposed to know that both of the major genocidal corporate parties have worked for decades to prevent the rise of any third party. The Democrats have been especially egregious – lying, cheating, suing to remove the Green Party from the presidential race.  

Many people in the United States did not vote because they understood what W. E. B. Du Bois understood almost seventy years ago: that in the US, “no ‘two evils’ exist.” In an essay titled “Why I Won’t Vote,” published in The Nation in 1956, Du Bois wrote: “There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.” Many people also saw, as DuBois did, that third parties have been given “no opportunity to take part in the campaign and explain its platform” or would be called “communist” (or “Russia-bots” in today’s parlance). For years, Du Bois had tried to vote for third parties, for socialist parties, for communist parties, for the “lesser evil” of the two racist parties – only to come to the exasperated conclusion that the US was too far gone and that voting in the United States was essentially pointless.

For Du Bois, the refusal to vote was not defeatist. It was, instead, a call to action, a call to hope. “If twenty-five million voters refrain from voting in 1956,” he wrote, “this might make the American people ask how much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest.” This is the hope that we should all have – the hope that folks will understand that a vote for either of the twin evils is a vote for corporate control, white supremacist inequality, war and genocide; the hope that the idea of US “democracy” will be revealed as the dumb farce that it is.

We reprint W.E.B. Du Bois’s essay “Why I Won’t Vote” below.

Why I Won’t Vote

by W.E.B. DU BOIS

Since I was twenty-one in 1889, I have in theory followed the voting plan strongly advocated by Sidney Lens in The Nation of August 4, i.e., voting for a third party even when its chances were hopeless, if the main parties were unsatisfactory; or, in absence of a third choice, voting for the lesser of two evils. My action, however, had to be limited by the candidates’ attitude toward Negroes. Of my adult life, I have spent twenty-three years living and teaching in the South, where my voting choice was not asked. I was disfranchised by law or administration. In the North I lived in all thirty-two years, covering eight Presidential elections. In 1912 I wanted to support Theodore Roosevelt, but his Bull Moose convention dodged the Negro problem and I tried to help elect Wilson as a liberal Southerner. Under Wilson came the worst attempt at Jim Crow legislation and discrimination in civil service that we had experienced since the Civil War. In 1916 I took Hughes as the lesser of two evils. He promised Negroes nothing and kept his word. In 1920, I supported Harding because of his promise to liberate Haiti. In 1924, I voted for La Follette, although I knew he could not be elected. In 1928, Negroes faced absolute dilemma. Neither Hoover nor Smith wanted the Negro vote and both publicly insulted us. I voted for Norman Thomas and the Socialists, although the Socialists had attempted to Jim Crow Negro members in the South. In 1932 I voted for Franklin Roosevelt, since Hoover was unthinkable and Roosevelt’s attitude toward workers most realistic. I was again in the South from 1934 until 1944. Technically I could vote, but the election in which I could vote was a farce. The real election was the White Primary.

Retired “for age” in 1944, I returned to the North and found a party to my liking. In 1948, I voted the Progressive ticket for Henry Wallace and in 1952 for Vincent Hallinan.

In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. There is no third party. On the Presidential ballot in a few states (seventeen in 1952), a “Socialist” Party will appear. Few will hear its appeal because it will have almost no opportunity to take part in the campaign and explain its platform. If a voter organizes or advocates a real third-party movement, he may be accused of seeking to overthrow this government by “force and violence.” Anything he advocates by way of significant reform will be called “Communist” and will of necessity be Communist in the sense that it must advocate such things as government ownership of the means of production; government in business; the limitation of private profit; social medicine, government housing and federal aid to education; the total abolition of race bias; and the welfare state. These things are on every Communist program; these things are the aim of socialism. Any American who advocates them today, no matter how sincerely, stands in danger of losing his job, surrendering his social status and perhaps landing in jail. The witnesses against him may be liars or insane or criminals. These witnesses need give no proof for their charges and may not even be known or appear in person. They may be in the pay of the United States Government. A.D.A.’s and “Liberals” are not third parties; they seek to act as tails to kites. But since the kites are self-propelled and radar-controlled, tails are quite superfluous and rather silly.

The present Administration is carrying on the greatest preparation for war in the history of mankind. Stevenson promises to maintain or increase this effort. The weight of our taxation is unbearable and rests mainly and deliberately on the poor. This Administration is dominated and directed by wealth and for the accumulation of wealth. It runs smoothly like a well-organized industry and should do so because industry runs it for the benefit of industry. Corporate wealth profits as never before in history. We turn over the national resources to private profit and have few funds left for education, health or housing. Our crime, especially juvenile crime, is increasing. Its increase is perfectly logical; for a generation we have been teaching our youth to kill, destroy, steal and rape in war; what can we expect in peace? We let men take wealth which is not theirs; if the seizure is “legal” we call it high profits and the profiteers help decide what is legal. If the theft is “illegal” the thief can fight it out in court, with excellent chances to win if he receives the accolade of the right newspapers. Gambling in home, church and on the stock market is increasing and all prices are rising. It costs three times his salary to elect a Senator and many millions to elect a President. This money comes from the very corporations which today are the government. This in a real democracy would be enough to turn the party responsible out of power. Yet this we cannot do.

Black Agenda Report for more

by CONOR GALLAGHER

“An industrial economy’s decline usually provides a grab bag of opportunities for financial predators and vulture funds.”

– Michael Hudson, “The Destiny of Civilization”

And so it goes in Germany where the decimation of the country’s industry and its working class continues apace. Volkswagen added to the carnage on Monday with plans to close three factories and potentially lay off tens of thousands of workers.

How are the “financial predators and vultures” doing? Quite well. Here are some numbers from WSWS:

While poverty is growing, at the top end of the scale the number of super-rich is on the rise. The annual ranking by Manager Magazin shows that the number of billionaires in Germany has recently risen by 23 to 249.

Manager Magazin has published a list of the 500 richest Germans and calculated that their private assets and wealth in 2023 amounted to a record €1.1 trillion, an increase of €53 billion compared to the previous year. This sum, €1.1 trillion, is almost two-and-a-half times the federal budget for the same year…about 0.6 percent of the population, own 45 percent of the country’s total wealth.

And Germany continues to become a much more unequal society with a Bundesbank survey finding that the top 10% of households have at least €725,000 ($793,000) of net assets and control more than half of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 40% of households have at most €44,000 of net assets.

What’s causing the surge in inequality and how have the wealthiest found ways to keep growing their fortunes while the national economy breaks down? Let’s take a look at the main drivers of inequality and then compare them to situation in Germany today.

Here’s Dutch economist Servaas Storm in a paper featured here at NC back in 2021 explaining the primary causes of increasing economic disparity:

The key driver of rising income inequality is the stagnation of real wage growth for the bottom 80% or so of U.S. households (Taylor and Ömer 2020). Real wage growth was suppressed below labour productivity growth, and this led to a secular decline in the share of wages (and a rise of profits) in national income. The main cause of the wage growth suppression has been the abandonment of full employment as the primary target of macro policy-making, in favour of inflation control, at the end of the 1970s. Fiscal policy was deprioritized in favor of monetary policy, conducted by independent central banks, single-mindedly focused on building credible reputations as inflation hawks, and counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization was made anathema by subjecting fiscal policy-making to rigid and deflationary rules, irrespective of the business cycle. For a period of time after the global financial crisis of 2008, austerity zealots, dreaming of expansionary fiscal consolidations, intensified the fiscal repression, bringing about one of the slowest and most costly economic recoveries from a crisis in history.

Labour markets were enthusiastically deregulated, with the explicit and generous approval of central banks and governments, to break the structural inflationary power of unions and to create a flexible reserve of surplus workers with no choice but to work in temporary low-wage jobs in what is now known as the ‘gig’ economy. Globalization and offshoring contributed to breaking the countervailing power of organized workers because they offered corporations (the threat of) an opt-out possibility that was not available to workers. Taken together, the change in macroeconomic policy regime produced a structurally low-inflation economy, based on ‘traumatised workers’ in precarious jobs, who could not plausibly fight for higher wages and more secure employment conditions, given their daily struggles and the systemic biases they are facing. The wellspring of cost-push inflation had been radically removed.

Stagnant wages and incomes for the 90% mean that income (and wealth) inequality rises and that aggregate household savings go up (as shown by Mian, Straub and Sufi). Higher household savings reduce consumption demand, which holds up fixed business investment for the domestic market. In effect, aggregate demand growth stagnates, and pressures for demand-pull inflation evaporate. With inflation (and expected inflation) being low in structural terms, central banks lower the interest rate, in accordance with the recommendations based on the monetary policy rules proposed by establishment economics.

The low interest rates, in turn, fuel asset-price bubbles, creating wealth gains for the rich, and over-indebtedness for the bottom 90% of households, which use cheap credit to finance essential expenses on education, medical care and housing. This reinforces wealth and income inequalities, and pushes up asset prices even more, but this does not lead to higher economic growth and better jobs, because the richest 10% use their savings and wealth gains not for investments in the real economy, but to speculate in financial markets. The past two decades have made it abundantly clear that the gains made by the top 10% in financial markets do not trickle down to the real economy.

Now let’s take some of Storm’s key points and see how they’ve been applied in Germany. In many ways the crises of the past four years — first the pandemic and then the self-inflicted wound of the country’s Russia policy — have put long-term trends into overdrive:

Stagnation of Real Wage Growth. “German wages set to rise at the fastest pace in more than a decade” announced a recent headline at Euronews. Sounds great, but if we dig in a little ways we get to this:

“The price-adjusted level of collective wages is still well below the peak value of 2020”, although about half of the purchasing power losses of previous years have been compensated for.

Ouch.

Naked Capitalism for more

by JUAN COLE

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Ta-Nehisi Coates made the argument for US reparations for slavery in 2014 in The Atlantic. In that essay, he made an analogy with German reparations to Israel. In his new book, The Message, Coates expresses regret for the unexamined Zionist biases in that analogy, which obscured the dispossession of the Palestinian people and their consignment to a form of Jim Crow — something he realized forcefully on a recent trip to Israel and Palestine.

Caribbean and African leaders of the British Commonwealth, CNN reports, are insistently raising the issue of British reparations for slavery and for Shanghaiing colonial subjects, shipping Indians off to Guyana and Fiji on false pretenses. British ships transported some 3 million Africans to the New World between 1640 and 1807, 400,000 of whom died in transit. The unpaid labor of these enslaved people and their descendants added significantly to Britain’s bottom line. Jamaica, one of London’s most profitable colonies because of the sugarcane trade (produced by slave plantations), figures Britain owes it $9.5 trillion.

Once we see that the Palestinians are a deeply injured party, it becomes clear that they are owed reparations. After World War I, the victors divvied up the defeated empires at Versailles and the satellite conference of San Remo. The League of Nations awarded the great powers “mandates,” giving them charge of territories on the grounds that they would administer them and also prepare them for independent statehood. This was a new form of colonialism, since the freebooters of the 18th century conquered countries like India purely for profit, with no obligation to ready it for independence. If it had been up to Winston Churchill, Britain would still be ruling India and taking money out of it to pay for his brandy and cigars.

As I point out in my new book, Gaza Yet Stands, the British Mandate of Palestine was peculiar compared to all the rest. The British Mandate of Iraq eventuated in an independent Iraq in 1932. Formerly German Tanganyika was a British Mandate and became independent in 1961. It joined with Zanzibar to become Tanzania in 1964. Syria, a French Mandate, became independent in 1946. The French Mandate of Togo became independent in 1961.

The British Mandate of Palestine, however, did not eventuate in an independent Palestine. The other League of Nations members, including France and Italy, remonstrated with Britain that it had to look after the native Palestinians, despite the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which the British (who did not then rule Palestine) promised a “Jewish national home” there that, they pledged, would in no way disturb the locals.

Lord Curzon wrote in 1920, “As regards the Palestine Mandate, this Mandate also has passed through several revises. When it was first shown to the French Government it at once excited their vehement criticisms on the ground of its almost exclusively Zionist complexion and of the manner in which the interests and rights of the Arab majority (amounting to about nine-tenths of the population) were ignored. The Italian Government expressed similar apprehensions. It was felt that this would constitute a very serious, and possibly a fatal, objection when the Mandate came ultimately before the Council of the League. The Mandate, therefore, was largely rewritten, and finally received their assent.”

Juan Cole for more

by DONALD C. JOHANSON & YOHANNES HAILE-SELASSIE

Every once in a great while paleontological fieldwork turns up a fossil so extraordinary that it revolutionizes our understanding of the origin and evolution of an entire branch of the tree of life. Fifty years ago one of us (Johanson) made just such a discovery on an expedition to the Afar region of Ethiopia. On November 24, 1974, Johanson was out prospecting for fossils of human ancestors with his graduate student Tom Gray, eyes trained on the ground, when he spotted a piece of elbow with humanlike anatomy. Glancing upslope, he saw additional fragments of bone glinting in the noonday sun. In the weeks, months and years that followed, as the expedition team worked to recover and analyze all the ancient bones eroding out of that hillside, it became clear that Johanson had found a remarkable partial skeleton of a human ancestor who had lived some 3.2 million years ago. She was assigned to a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, and given the reference number A.L.288-1, which stands for “Afar locality 288,” the spot where she, the first hominin fossil, was found. But to most people, she is known simply by her nickname, Lucy. With the discovery of Lucy, scientists were forced to reconsider key details of the human story, from when and where humanity got its start to how the various extinct members of the human family were related to one another—and to us. Her combination of apelike and humanlike traits suggested her species occupied a key place in the family tree: ancestral to all later human species, including members of our genus, Homo.

It can be precarious to hang such a pivotal argument on a single fossil individual. But in the half a century since Lucy’s unveiling, many more specimens of Au. afarensis have been found. Together they provide an exceptionally detailed record of this ancient species, revealing where it roamed, how it lived, how its members differed from one another and how long it endured before going extinct.

Scientific American for more

by PATRICK BOND & RICHARD WOLFF

Will the BRICS economic and political alliance change the world’s U.S.-centered balance of power? As the annual BRICS summit wraps up in Russia, we host a debate between American economist Richard Wolff and South African sociologist Patrick Bond over the significance of the conference. This year, the nine BRICS countries invited 13 new “partner states” into their alliance, which Wolff calls “historic” and “a serious economic competitor to the United States and its role in the world.” Bond, on the other hand, argues that BRICS should be considered a “subimperial” formation, which expands and legitimates the existing world economic system rather than truly disrupting it.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with the summit of BRICS nations that concluded Thursday in the Russian city of Kazan as President Putin made a comeback to the global stage, hosting 36 world leaders and representatives from countries including China, India, South Africa, Iran, even Palestine. Israel’s war on Gaza took center stage, with many heads of states demanding an immediate ceasefire. Putin also faced direct calls at the summit from some of Russia’s most important allies for Moscow to end the war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the BRICS coalition, which was founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, officially added 13 new nations to the alliance as partner countries, including Bolivia, Cuba, Nigeria and Turkey.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Here in New York, Richard Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School, founder of Democracy at Work, author of several books, including, most recently, Understanding Capitalism. And in Johannesburg, South Africa, we’re joined by the political economist Patrick Bond, distinguished professor and director of the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg, his recent CounterPunch article headlined “Rising Dangers of Imperial and Sub-Imperial Partnering.”

We’re going to begin with you, Patrick. Talk about the significance of this BRICS summit.

PATRICK BOND: I must quickly say thank you for having me. But also, in 10 or 11 days, you may know whether the great teams at Democracy at Work and Democracy Now! need to be in exile because democracy won’t be allowed. And you’ll come to Johannesburg, and we’ll have a very fine site for your production systems. It’s a great address here at the moment.

And I think the fact that we had the BRICS summit just 14 months ago — I was chatting and debating with Vijay Prashad, along with my colleague Trevor Ngwane. And it means that in the current period, where the de-dollarization rhetoric coming up to this BRICS, because Russia hosting it and being shut out of the SWIFT system, having $600-and-some billion seized illegally by the Western banks, and not getting loans, even from the BRICS New Development Bank, suffering sanctions, that meant a lot of attention has been on whether Vladimir Putin and his team can generate a de-dollarization strategy. Unfortunately — and fortunately, that didn’t transpire.

And then, since we’ve just come out of the Israeli genocide story, not using genocide in the Kazan Declaration on Wednesday night, not calling for sanctions, even though the United Nations General Assembly effectively did last month, and not acknowledging that nine out of the 10 BRICS countries have very profitable relationships, like South Africa, number one coal exporter to Israel, and China and India having companies that run the Haifa Port, you could turn those off and really put pressure on Israel if they really had the guts. But we see them talking left, walking right.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Richard Wolff, your takeaway from this BRICS summit? How historic was it?

RICHARD WOLFF: In my judgment, and even though Patrick is right about a number of his criticisms, this is a historic turning point. I cannot overstress it. Here we have, for the first time in a century, a serious economic competitor to the United States and its role in the world. We’ve never seen this before in the lifetimes you, me and the people watching this program and listening to it. Here are a group of countries that together have a larger GDP, a greater production, than the G7, the United States and its allies. We haven’t had that before. And the gap between them is growing. The economic growth of the United States this year, by the IMF, is scheduled to be 2.8%; in China, 4.8%; in India, 7%. So, they are growing faster than we are. They’ve been doing it for decades. It is a new economic world. And as an economist and an American, I am aghast that our presidential election isn’t putting that front and forward.

This is a new world. Everybody else in the world is adjusting to this reality. The American Empire and our system is in a decline relative to what the BRICS are about. Are there problems among them? For sure. Do they have their faults? Absolutely. This is not good and bad, but it is a radical alteration. And if we continue as a nation to pretend it isn’t happening or it isn’t important, we will continue to make big strategic mistakes, not the least of which is to bring us into a war kind of situation that people are already sensing might be in the air.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, for his comments at the BRICS summit.

Democracy Now for more

by ALI BHUTTO

The bangles cover Radha Kohli’s arms from wrist till shoulder and resemble a coat of armour. Radha, who says her name means “God’s wife,” is the only midwife for miles in the area surrounding the village of Nahuto. This western periphery of the Thar Desert is referred to in the local dialect as ‘Mohrano’, or the beginning, where the dunes gradually give way to the fertile plain of the River Indus.

Radha is known as the village doctor and turns up when called, even if at midnight, in the villages that lie in the vicinity. Trained by her mother-in-law, it took her thirty years to master the art of delivering babies. “Of the nine women in the house, she chose me,” she tells Eos.

In the Thar Desert, bangles signify marital status. Jheeni Kohli, who says her name means “soft-spoken”, discarded her bangles the day her husband died. Like most women in the village, her palms bear the rope-marks of years spent drawing water from wells.

The lost city of Nahuto

Local lore has it that the perennial Hakra River once flowed half a mile from Nahuto. The story goes that the area was a trading post of nine-hundred huts — or shops — and it is from here that the village gets its name — pronounced Nau-hut-o — according to Faqir Irshad Kunbhar, a local resident. One of the defining characteristics of the lost city was the large number of washermen that could be seen washing clothes along the banks of the Hakra.

Within sight of the village, amidst shrubs of euphorbia, lies a mound littered with shards of pottery, bricks and occasionally, bones. It is locally referred to as Nahutojo Bhiro. The word bhiro is the Thari equivalent for daro, or mound, and the name translates into the Mound of Nahuto.

Hoth Khashkeli, a resident of the neighbouring village of Mohobat Ali Shah, was among the locals hired by the provincial department of archaeology to help excavate the site in 2018. Hoth points to the exact spots on the north-eastern side of the mounds, where trenches were dug and then refilled with earth to preserve the ruins.

The excavations lasted three months and were conducted by Qasid Mallah, the chairman of the archaeology department at the Shah Abdul Latif University in Khairpur, and a six-member team. “They said the site was around five-thousand years old,” Hoth tells Eos.

Hoth’s eyes light up when he talks about the skeleton of a large fish that was unearthed here, in the middle of the desert. He also recalls seeing an ornament that depicted the head of a crocodile. (In the winter of 1926-27, a 2.5-inch crocodile head made of shell had been found by the archaeologist Daya Ram Sahni in Mohenjo Daro).

Dawn for more

by BADRI RAINA

History offers few more stark instances of oppressed peoples copycatting the ideological predilections and political praxis of their erstwhile oppressors once they come into their own than  the parallels between the Nazis and the zionists  who, originating in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, emerged as a political force out of the incalculable suffering of the Jewish people.

It is germane to underline at the outset that Zionism is not the same as Judaism: where the  latter  is a religious faith dating back to some four millenia, the former is an ethno-nationalist ideology akin, for example, to Hindutva in current day India.

And just as those who have followed Hindu religious practices for some thousands of years do not approve of Hindutva, so also orthodox Jews remain opposed to Zionism because, like Hindutva, it is less a faith than a totalitarian theory of state.

We should recall that the right-wing RSS in India was, on record, an admirer of  the Third Reich for having raised “race pride” to its “peak” (Golwalker in We, Our Nationhood Defined, 1938).

And such are the ironies of history that since after the end of the second world war and the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel,  the Hindutva right wing in India  has bestowed its admiration on the Zionist state for fending off the Arabs as the Nazis had the Jews.

Emerging from this, another interested shibboleth must also receive intellectual and political burial:  just as opposition  to Hindutva is not an  anti-Hindu phenomenon, so also opposition to the  Zionist state of Israel is not, emphatically, an anti- semitic marker.

As has been noted above,  Jews of real religious faith  are the sternest critics of the state of Israel.

lebensraum

From the 1880s onward, the driving impetus of German nationalism was  the desire for lebensraum (living space).

The  humiliation suffered by the German forces in the first world war, codified ignominiously in the terms and conditions of the Versailles Treaty which further curtailed Germany’s geographical spread  rankled to a point that the chief inspiration for the German call to war   was to extend German  territories  to the East by force, enslavement, or extermination.

The ideological/ philosophical  justification for this  expansionist agenda came from the Nazi view that  the Aryans were the master race  (Herenmasse),  destined by virtue of their racial  purity/ superiority to oust from existence the inferior races, chiefly the Jews  and   Slavic ones who  inhabited  Germany and countries to  the East, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Russia.  

The Jews were particularly a target for extermination because they were first  non-Christian (it is no secret that the Catholic church had  a cosy understanding with the Nazis), having betrayed Jesus, and then in control,  ostensibly, of the    financial  heartstrings of   Europe.

Out of  a beleaguered Judaism was to emerge a Jewish nationalist movement captioned Zionism.

In complicity  between  European and American ideologues, the dreadful experience of the Jewish people was made occasion for a double whammy in 1948: by helping Zionists to  grab  Palestinian Arab lands the Europeans, the British in the forefront, achieved the ouster of massive numbers of Jews from Europe, and the Zionist a political state of their own.

Some 800, 000 Palestinian Arabs  were externed  from their homes and hearths that had continuously belonged to them for much more than a millennium.

Just to note, between the time of the first world war and the full colonial occupation of Palestine by the Zionists,  the latter had come to spawn violent gangs  such as  the Stern and Irgun groups who often resorted to what are today called “terrorist” methods to make their point. Perhaps the first modern act of “terrorism” was the blowing up of the King David hotel in Tel Aviv, a blast in which some ninety or so people, including many Britains, lost their lives.

Further to note, one of these early terrorists was to become prime minister of the state of Israel; his name was Menachem Begin.

Since the formation of the Apartheid state of Israel, the Zionists have sought to implement their own version of lebensraum agenda.

There are some innocent watchers and commentators who think that if only the occupied Palestinians learnt to get used to their subservient existence in full measure, without resorting to their right to resist as granted by international law to occupied peoples, all would be well in that beleaguered region of the world.

Well, that is not exactly what the Zionists have ever had in mind.

From the first it has been their objective to follow the German Third Reich and ethnically cleanse the entire land of Palestine, that is, the enclave of Gaza and the West Bank in pursuit of the totalitarian objective of achieving a “greater Israel” that extends from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean.

Z Network for more

by MUKTA JOSHI

US-based Hindu American Foundation has laundered Modi gov’t’s track record on minorities, championed its interests.

On a Wednesday morning in September 2022, a lobbyist reached out to a congressional staffer in Washington, DC. He wanted to set up a meeting on behalf of his client to discuss some human rights concerns in Pakistan and a newly introduced resolution in the United States House of Representatives regarding religious minorities in India.

During the meeting a few weeks later, the client made an appeal: Could the congressional office where the staffer worked back a ban on sustainment packages for F-16 fighter jets sold to Pakistan due to that country’s alleged persecution of its Hindu minority?

This client was not a foreign government or a defence policy think tank. It was a domestic nonprofit called the Hindu American Foundation.

The staffer was taken aback. Despite being familiar with the group and its advocacy on behalf of Hindus in the US, the staffer did not expect it to be so deeply involved in geopolitics.

The Indian government at that time had been publicly pushing back against a $450m F-16 package for Pakistan. India’s defence minister had expressed concerns about it to his US counterpart, and the external affairs minister had openly disparaged the US government for the package.

“In that moment”, the staffer said, “it became clear to me that the Hindu American Foundation was acting on behalf of the Indian government.”

The foundation, also known as HAF, emerged two decades ago as a voice for the Hindu community in the United States. It wasn’t formed to champion the Indian government.

But since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014, HAF has ramped up its political activities in favour of the Indian government, which is led by Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

It has emerged, despite its claims of “nonpartisanship”, as an effective advocate of the BJP, attempting to influence the US government through meetings with members of Congress to push for the passage of multiple pieces of legislation on critical aspects of US foreign policy related to India.

Its founders, board members and a parallel political action committee – the Hindu American PAC – have made significant contributions to the election campaigns of legislators who have in turn supported HAF’s lobbying efforts on these issues.

Throughout this time, HAF has maintained a cosy relationship with the Modi government. It has acted in the US to counter the Modi government’s critics, collaborated with the Indian embassy on events and programmes, and corresponded with the embassy on sensitive matters.

Yet in public, HAF distances itself from the Indian government and the BJP. It vehemently refutes allegations that it acts on their behalf, reiterating that its members are merely Hindus engaged in the US political process and calling any allegations of government collusion “dual loyalty slurs”.

HAF appears to be treading a fine line. Its activities in favour of the Indian government, coupled with its continued collaboration with the Indian embassy, raise questions as to whether it should register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938.

Registration as a foreign agent is required any time an entity represents the interests of a foreign principal before any agency or official of the US on the principal’s behalf.

The definition of a foreign agent in US law includes “any person who acts … at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal … and who directly or through any other person engages within the United States in political activities for, or in the interests of such foreign principal.”

Al Jazeera for more

by BELEN FERNANDEZ

The Israeli military killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip on October 17, and it didn’t take long for the usual media suspects to line up with their anti-eulogies.

Reuters (10/18/24), for example, produced an obituary headlined “Yahya Sinwar: The Hamas Leader Committed to Eradicating Israel Is Dead”—a less than charming use of terminology in light of the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in Gaza.

Since last October, more than 42,000 Palestinians have officially been, um, eradicated—although according to a Lancet study (7/20/24; Al Jazeera, 7/8/24) published in July, the true death toll could well exceed 186,000. Per the view of Reuters, this is really the fault of Sinwar, a “ruthless enforcer” who, we are informed in the opening paragraph,

remained unrepentant about the October 7 attacks [on Israel] despite unleashing an Israeli invasion that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, laid waste to his Gaza homeland and rained destruction on ally Hezbollah.

Never mind that Sinwar’s elimination will have no impact on the genocide, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear: “Today we have settled the score. Today evil has been dealt a blow, but our task has still  not been completed.”

The New York Times headline (10/21/24) seems to express surprise that assassinating a negotiating partner is not a pathway to peace.

Further down in the obituary, Reuters journalist Samia Nakhoul managed to insert some biographical details that hint at reasons besides “evil” that Sinwar chose to pursue armed resistance:

Half a dozen people who know Sinwar told Reuters his resolve was shaped by an impoverished childhood in Gaza’s refugee camps and a brutal 22 years in Israeli custody, including a period in Ashkelon, the town his parents called home before fleeing after the 1948 Arab/Israeli war.

This, too, is a rather diplomatic way of characterizing the ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter that attended the 1948 creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land—an enterprise predicated on perpetual killing, as we are now witnessing most acutely. By portraying Sinwar’s actions as stemming from an intrinsic diabolicalness that made him hellbent on “eradicating” Israel—in contrast to Israel’s actions, which are implicitly restrained until “unleashed” by Sinwar—the corporate media delegitimize resistance while effectively legitimizing genocide.

This longstanding commitment to laying nearly all responsibility for the conflict at Palestinian feet also leads to bizarre headlines like the New York Times‘ “Yahya Sinwar Is Dead, But a Palestinian State Still Seems Distant” (10/21/24). It is the Biden administration’s alleged hope that Sinwar’s killing could “help pave the way for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.” The idea attributes the failure to create a Palestinian state to Sinwar rather than Israel, and ludicrously imagines that genocide, along with the massive destruction of housing and basic infrastructure that Israel is committing in Gaza, are logical ways to go about state-building.

That report came on the heels of another Times intervention (10/19/24) that critiqued “Hamas’s single-minded focus on the Palestinian struggle, which had dragged the whole region into the flames”—even while acknowledging that Israel is the party presently responsible for perpetuating the conflict. This particular effort bore the headline: “Despite Sinwar’s Death, Mideast Peace May Still Be Elusive.” Well, yeah.

‘Terrorist Hamas leader’

Fox News (10/17/24) labeled Sinwar a “terrorist,” but didn’t use the word when noting that he “rose to the top positionthe killing of previous leader Ismail Haniyeh in the explosion of a guesthouse in Tehran”; in fact, it couldn’t even bring itself to mention that Israel had carried out the assassination.

For its part, Fox News (10/17/24) deployed predictable lingo in its memorialization of Sinwar, describing him in the obituary headline as “The Israeli Prisoner Turned Terrorist Hamas Leader.” Indeed, the “terrorist” label never gets old, even after decades of being wielded against enemies of Israel and the United States, the Israeli military’s partner in crime and the primary financial enabler of the current bloodbath. Lost in the linguistic stunt, of course, is the fact that both the US and Israel are responsible for a great deal more acts of terrorism than are their foes.

But pointing out such realities goes against the official line—and so we end up with Sinwar the “Hamas terrorist leader,” as ABC News (10/17/24) has also immortalized him. Time magazine (10/18/24) opted to go with a front cover featuring Sinwar’s face with a red X through it.

CNN (10/17/24), meanwhile, offered space in the second paragraph of its own reflections on Sinwar’s demise to Israeli officials’ spin on the man, noting that they had “branded him with many names, including the ‘face of evil’ and ‘the butcher from Khan Younis,’” the refugee camp in southern Gaza where Sinwar was born.

Given the Israeli butchery to which Khan Younis is continuously subjected these days, it seems CNN might have refrained from taking Israel’s word for it. On just one bloody day this month, October 1, at least 51 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes on a tent camp in Khan Younis (BBC, 10/2/24)—a space that had been designated by Israel as a “humanitarian area.” Israel killed 38 more there yesterday (AP, 10/25/24).

FAIR for more