by ANATOL LIEVEN & TED SNIDER

The president promised to contain Gaza and Ukraine but both conflicts have been a slow burn to something much bigger

President Joe Biden has called America “the world power,” and has referred to his “leadership in the world.” If Biden does indeed see himself as a, or the, world leader, then he has been disappointing in his job and has mismanaged it.

The world today stands on the brink of larger wars, even potentially world wars, on two fronts simultaneously. That is, perhaps, a more precarious position than the world has found itself in in over half a century, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and perhaps longer. Then, the danger came from a single front: today, there is danger on two or even three.

The Biden administration seemingly subscribes to a foreign policy doctrine of nurturing wars while attempting to manage them so that they remain confined to America’s foreign policy interests and do not spill over into wider wars. But such fine calibrations are not easily done. War is sloppy and unpredictable. Though a nation’s plans may be well understood by its planners, calibration of what might push the enemy too far and cause a wider war depends equally on your enemy’s plans, calibrations, passions and red lines: all of which are harder to profile or understand.

What is more, the contemporary culture of the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems dedicated precisely to excluding the kind of knowledge and empathy that allows one to understand an adversary’s mind, and instead to fostering ill-informed and hate-filled prejudice.

Calibrating how far you can push militarily or politically without tipping the balance of containment and triggering full-scale war is dangerously worse than tricky. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah badly miscalculated how far the calibrated strikes and responses with Israel could go before a controlled conflict became a larger war. The price of miscalculation was his life and a war in Lebanon.

Successive U.S. and European governments, and the NATO Secretariat, calculated that they could, through a series of steps, expand NATO into the former Soviet space without triggering a military response from Russia. The result of this miscalculation has been a war that has been disastrous for Ukraine and severely damaging for Western interests and that risks ending in either Western humiliation or direct war between Russia and the West.

Despite the fragility of such calibrations, they seem to have become the centerpiece of U.S. policy. In both the Middle East and Ukraine, the U.S. nurtured wars by sending weapons and discouraging diplomacy. And in both theaters, the U.S. prioritized containing the wars they were supporting and preventing them from becoming wider wars.

In the Middle East, the focus has been on balancing supporting Israel and its right to defend itself with preventing the war from escalating into a wider regional war. Biden insists that “we’re going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out.” In Ukraine, the focus has been on providing Ukraine with whatever it needs for as long as it takes to attain the strongest position on the battlefield to win them their freedom, their sovereignty and their territorial integrity while preventing the war from escalating into a wider war with Russia. “We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine,” Biden has said. “Direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War Three, something we must strive to prevent.”

But Biden’s strategy is on the precipice of disastrous failure on both fronts. On both fronts the calibrations have gone dangerously wrong. The war in Gaza has spread to Lebanon and is on a quivering edge in Iran. After Iran’s missile strikes on Israel on October 1, the world awaits, not only Israel’s response, but Iran’s response to that. The risk is not just an Israel-Iran war. With the U.S. sending, not only a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, advanced missile defense system to Israel, but about 100 American troops to operate it, there is the risk of the U.S. being drawn into a war with Iran. If that’s not bad enough, that war could then, conceivably, draw in Russia.

In Ukraine, too, the calibration quivers on the edge of a wider war. Zelenskyy daily lobbies the U.S. to erase all red lines and green light strikes deeper into Russian territory with Western supplied long range missile systems, that, as in Israel, would require U.S. involvement.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warns that such a green light would “change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict dramatically” because it would “mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia.” If Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is correct that the U.S. is “seeing evidence” that South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence are right in their assertion that North Korea has sent 3,000 troops to Russia, then there is risk of a still wider war.

The Biden administration’s policy of calibrating how far you can nurture a war before pushing it over the precipice of escalation has gone badly and placed the U.S. on the edge of two wider wars. If Biden is the leader of the world, then he has recklessly and dangerously mismanaged it.

Responsible Statecraft for more

by B. R. GOWANI

Hail Musk,

Hi Elan,

I don’t have to hope because I know you are doing extremely well: financially, politically, economically, and propagandaically. I totally agree with Donald Trump, you’re a “new star” that is going to shine for a long long time.

Elon, you won’t believe this, but you’re the first person whom I have saluted with “hail” and there is a reason for that; I have seen great potential in you. You don’t give a damn about speaking the truth or any such nonsense: whether it’s

• “the coronavirus panic is dumb” or
• telling Taylor Swift “I will give you a child” or
• He [Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] will be gone in the upcoming election or
• worrying about asteroids with public money or
• another government stimulus package that is not in best interests of the people or
• getting subsidies worth billions of dollars or
• We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it Bolivia’s leader. …

One can go on and on but it’s suffice to say that the qualities of a great leader, that is, nastiness, cruelty, indifference, overthrowing governments, etc. are inherent to your existence.

Donald is exactly 25 years and two weeks older than you; he’s 78 now and is not going to live much longer. Even if he lives, he won’t have the vigor needed to continue his job as president. In Donald’s inner circle, you’re the most shrewd, cunning, and savage person, a bastard in a real sense of the word. This I am saying without any disdain; consider this as a tribute rather than criticism. You little devil, you have that hellish stuff in you, which I can see.

But I have one complaint with you; how dare you compare Trudeau with me? Trudeau is a small fish and is nowhere like me. I wouldn’t have minded if you would have equated yourself with me; in fact, it would have pleased me immensely, because, I can detect a future fuhrer in you.

I know, I know, you’ll pretend that you cannot reach the pinnacle of power because you’re not a US born citizen. But then I also know that you’re going to guide Donald to grab the maximum power, and thus, bring about change in the constitution so that a non-citizen could become a US president. In 2003, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch (of Utah) tried to introduce an amendment to the constitution but didn’t succeed, else Arnold Schwarzenegger and Elaine Chao would have benefited.

One piece of advise: Don’t ever try to prove Donald wrong because he has an equally big ego like you, and, he’ll have absolute power. You’ll be in a very tricky situation, so bid your time, be patient, get the amendment introduced, and once Donald is gone grab the power in its totality.

Listen Elon, change the caption as soon as possible in the above picture with the following heading:

START COMPARING ME TO ELON MUSK — I HAVE A BUDGET

Past Fuhrer to the Future Fuhrer:

with great love and best wishes,

Please don’t disappoint me.

Adolf Hitler

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

by GREGORY FORTH

The belief in witches is an almost universal feature of human societies. What does it reveal about our deepest fears?

If asked, most people in the West would say that wicked witches who fly unaided or turn into animals don’t really exist. And, according to all available evidence, they would be right. It’s more difficult to prove that no one practises ‘witchcraft’, that is, conducts rites or utters curses in an attempt to harm others. Yet regardless of what people say about witches, or even what they believe, the idea of the witch is a universal constant looming over cultures from the islands of Indonesia to the pizza parlours of the modern United States.

Fifty years ago, as graduate students at Oxford, my wife and I were preparing to do anthropological fieldwork on the island of Sumba, in eastern Indonesia. Not long after beginning our research, an elderly ritual expert happened to mention that yet another ritualist – one of his rivals, as it later turned out – had ‘eaten’ a woman, the wife of a third man. This took me aback, in part because the woman in question was still alive. But I soon learned that the old man was accusing his rival of being a mamarung, a witch, who on Sumba is said to cause illness and death by invisibly eating people’s souls. Meeting secretly at night, Sumbanese witches also capture human souls, transform them into sacrificial animals, and then slaughter these to kill their victims and consume their bodies.

Thinking about this after returning to the United Kingdom, I realised that the same accusations of ritual killing and cannibalism were levelled during the ‘witch crazes’ of the early modern period, from the 14th to 17th centuries, in Europe, resulting in the persecution and killing of many of those accused. European witches were also said to feast on human flesh, transform themselves and others into animals, join nocturnal assemblies, and fly through the air. Far more recently, I was reminded of the universal idea of the ‘witch’ by Pizzagate – the QAnon conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and other members of a supposed global elite were killing and eating children in secret satanic rites, conducted while operating a paedophile ring in a pizza parlour in Washington, DC. As I read further, I realised that the Pizzagate accusations were recycled versions of allegations levelled during the 1980s and ’90s against owners and employees of US daycare centres who were identically accused of sacrificing children and eating them.

But what is a ‘witch’? To prove that a belief in witches really is a human universal, we obviously need a definition. We also need to be clear about what ‘universal’ means. Actually, a definition commonly used by anthropologists, historians and other academics suits well enough. A witch is a human being who, motivated by malice, wilfully harms other people not openly by any physical methods, but by unseen, mystical means. Secret acts of ritual killing and cannibalism – essentially treating people like animals – are typical expressions of the witch’s hatred of humans. For example, witches among the Navaho of the America Southwest were accused of cannibalism, just like witches in New Guinea. Charged with the same horrendous acts, those US daycare workers would simply be seen as a variety of witches. In working through Satan, these rumoured devil-worshippers resemble not only the witches of medieval and early modern Europe, but equally witches described in Africa, Asia, the southwest Pacific, and native North and South America. For not only do non-Western witches kill people and eat them; they are similarly believed to obtain their powers through local demons. To cite one of many examples, Sumbanese witches possess evil spirits called wàndi that they keep inside their bodies and send out at night to attack their victims.

It hardly needs mentioning that I’m talking about ‘wicked witches’, and not the ‘good witches’ familiar to Westerners from The Wizard of Oz, nature-loving Wiccans, or the progressive young women who populate the pages of ‘witch-lit’. Such good witches find an explanation in the history of English, specifically the derivation of ‘witch’ from an Anglo-Saxon word further applied to healers and benevolent magicians. But the important point is that, throughout history and in a great variety of cultures today, people have imagined and continue to imagine thoroughly nefarious figures corresponding to the wicked witch.

Witchcraft reveals our persistent and enduring tendency to imagine the existence of evil people

To say that witches are universal doesn’t mean belief in them has been recorded in all cultures, or that, where recorded, widespread public accusations, witch-hunts or moral panics ensue. Whereas recent accusations of satanism in the West, including Pizzagate, evidently do reveal these features, witchcraft in non-Western societies often does not. For instance, the Hopi people of Arizona never openly accused people of being witches, for fear of retribution. Instead, they believed the evildoers would be punished in the afterlife.

Aeon for more

by PETER YONGQI GU & STEPHEN DOBSON

There is a belief widely held across the Western world: Chinese students are schooled through rote, passive learning – and an educational system like this can only produce docile workers who lack innovation or creativity.

We argue this is far from true. In fact, the Chinese education system is producing highly successful students and an extremely skilled and creative workforce. We think the world can learn something from this.

In a viral video earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook highlighted the unique concentration of skilled labour that attracted his manufacturing operations to China:

In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China you could fill multiple football fields.

To which Tesla CEO Elon Musk quickly responded on X: “True”.

We bring the expertise of academics to the public.

When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the Shenzhen headquarters of electric vehicle manufacturer BYD earlier this year, he was surprised to learn the company was planning to double its 100,000-strong engineering taskforce within the coming decade.

He might not have been so surprised had he known Chinese universities are producing more than ten million graduates every year – the foundation for a super-economy.

The ‘paradox of the Chinese learner’

Chinese learners achieve remarkable success levels compared to their Western – or non-Confucian-heritage – counterparts.

Since Shanghai first participated in the PISA educational evaluation in 2009, 15?year-olds in China have topped the league table three out of four times in reading, mathematics and science.

How can a supposedly passive and rote Chinese system outperform its Western counterparts? A number of Australian scholars have been studying this “paradox of the Chinese learner” since the 1990s.

Their research shows those common perceptions of Chinese and other Asian learners are wrong. For example, repetition and meaningful learning are not mutually exclusive. As one Chinese saying goes:

???????? – meaning reveals itself when you read something many times.

What can Western education learn?

An emphasis on education is a defining feature of Chinese culture. Since Confucianism became the state-sanctioned doctrine in the Han Dynasty (202BCE–220CE), education has entered every fabric of Chinese society.

This became especially true after the institutionalisation of the Keju system of civil service examinations during the Sui Dynasty (581CE–618CE).

Today, the Gaokao university entrance examination is the modern Keju equivalent. Millions of school leavers take the exam each year. For three days every July, Chinese society largely comes to a standstill for the Gaokao.

While the cultural drive for educational excellence is a major motivation for everyone involved in the system, it is not something that is easily learned and replicated in Western societies.

However, there are two principles we believe are central to Chinese educational success, at both the learner and system levels. We use two Chinese idioms to illustrate these.

The first we call “orderly and gradual progress” – ????. This principle stresses patient, step-by-step and sequenced learning, sustained by grit and delayed gratification.

The second we call “thick accumulation before thin production” – ????. This principle stresses the importance of two things:

• a comprehensive foundation through accumulation of basic knowledge and skills
• assimilation, integration and productive creativity only come after this firm foundation.

The Conversation for more

by SARAH ELIZABETH SCALES, BLAKE ESHARDT-OHREN, DEBARATI GUHA SAPIR, KHIDIR DALOUK, & ROHINI J. HAAR

The ongoing war in Sudan has often been overlooked amid higher-profile conflicts raging across multiple continents. Yet the lack of media and geopolitical attention to this 18-month-long conflict has not made its devastation in terms of human lives any less stark.

Since fighting broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, both of which had been part of a power-sharing military government, the country has seen the displacement of more than 14 million people and the carving up of the country by geography and ideology.

And while we may never know the exact death toll, the conflict in Sudan is certainly among the deadliest in the world today.

As scholars of public health, conflict and human rights and Sudanese-American health workers, we are keenly aware of how fraught it can be to estimate mortality in war for a slew of practical and political reasons. But such estimates are of critical importance: They allow us to understand and compare conflicts, target humanitarian aid for those still at risk, trigger investigations of war crimes, bear witness to conflict and compel states and armed groups to intervene or change.

The difficult work of counting the dead

A profound humanitarian crisis is occurring in Sudan, characterized by ethnic cleansing, mass displacement, food scarcity and the spread of disease, complicated further by flooding in the northern states.

Considering a death toll in such a conflict includes counting not only those who are killed as a direct result of violence – itself a difficult thing to determine in real time – but also those who have died by conflict-exacerbated factors, such as the absence of emergency care, the breakdown of vaccination programs and a lack of essential food and medicine. Estimating this latter death toll, called indirect mortality, presents its own challenge, as the definition itself varies among researchers.

In congressional testimony, U.S. special envoy to Sudan Tom Perriello recognized the estimation challenges when noting there had been anywhere between 15,000 and 150,000 deaths in Sudan – an exceedingly wide range that was attributable, in part, to the complexity of determining indirect mortality.

Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), a nonprofit specializing in conflict-related data collection, has recorded an average of more than 1,200 direct conflict deaths per month in Sudan, with nearly 19,000 deaths in the first 15 months of the conflict. This figure is similar to the 20,000 deaths estimated by the Sudan Doctors Union and the 19,000 figure used by the Sudan Protection Cluster, a centralized group of U.N. agencies and NGOs that used World Health Organization data.

ACLED sources its estimates of deaths from traditional media, reports from international NGOs and local observers, supplemented by new media such as verified Telegram and WhatsApp accounts. The Sudan Doctors Union, on the other hand, gives on-the-ground estimates of conflict deaths.

When available, distinct data sources such as surveys, civil registers and official body counts can make an estimation more accurate. However, this data is often available only in retrospect, after the cessation of conflict. It is therefore critical to use both the available data and precedents from previous conflicts to capture a reasonable estimate of the human costs of an ongoing conflict.

The Conversation for more

by FEZOKUHLE MTHONTI

The debacle around Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book shows us that no matter a writer’s individual acclaim, the liberal media establishment will never tolerate anything that fundamentally challenges its racist edifice.

In Michael Neocosmos’ excellent book, Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, the author presents three expressions of universal humanism across time and space. 

The first is articulated in 1222 in the Mande Charter. The expression is simple: toute vie (humaine) est une vie,(every human life is a life). The second is a popular Haitian saying, believed to have originated in 1804. Again, a simple expression: tout moun se moun men ce pa memn moun (every person is a person even if they are not the same person). Finally, Neocosmos brings a more contemporary articulation of this idea through a movement called Abahlali base Mjondolo, a socialist shack dweller movement in South Africa. In 2014 and likely before, this movement offered an isiZulu expression: unyawo alunampumulo (a person is a person wherever they may come from). 

These expressions center the human being as intrinsically universal, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, and class; three simple provocations that stand true despite constructed difference(s); expressions of an irrefutable call from history, guiding us through the present. 

A more recent iteration of these expressions comes in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ newly published book, The Message. In this book, Coates grapples with how our reporting, imaginative narratives, and mythmaking expose and distort our realities. In three essays, Coates takes his readers to Dakar, Senegal, Columbia, South Carolina and Palestine. Coates is reported to “have seen with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.” 

In a controversial interview on the US television network CBS, Coates was met with extraordinary vitriol by morning news anchor Tony Dokouipil. Turning to Coates, Dokouipil inquires: “What is it that particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish State, that is a Jewish safe place and not any other states out there.” Coates’ response immediately calls out the inherent bad-faith logic that undergirds Dokoupil’s interrogation: “there is nothing that offends me about a Jewish State,” he starts. “I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy no matter where they are.” Dokouipil interjects: “Muslim included?,” unmasking the double speak of liberal journalistic questioning. What is at stake here is not a balanced debate wherein opposing views can be expressed, but rather Dokoupil’s Islamophobia. 

Coates responds: 

I would not want a state where any group of people lay down their citizenship rights based on ethnicity. The country of Israel is a country in which half the population exist on one tier of citizenship and everybody else that’s ruled by Israelis including Palestinian-Israeli citizens. The only people that exist on that first tier are Israeli Jews. Why do we support that?

This is an important intervention from Coates. However, as the segment continues, the “debate” devolves in large part due to Dokouipil’s clear bigotry which at its core is located in his belief that Palestinian humanity is “unthinkable,” to borrow a phrase from the Haitian American academic Michel-Rolph Trouillot. It is important to note here that Dokouipil’s sentiments are not understood as an aberration to the institution of American corporate media. In fact, his views are commonplace. As Branko Marcetic argues in Jacobin:,

The past year of watching how the media and politicians talk about the war in Gaza has proven this true. Explicit calls for violence and even literal genocide (“We should kill them all,”Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee said earlier this year) against Palestinians go by with no comment, let alone condemnation. 

Africa is a country for more

A new book by journalist Bob Woodward claims to reveal details of meetings between the US Secretary of State and Arab rulers

US investigative journalist Bob Woodward has published a new book claiming that after 7 October, various Arab rulers asked the US to destroy Hamas citing its historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

In his new book, War, Woodward claims to provide details of the meetings of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken held with several Arab rulers shortly after 7 October, as Israel’s war against Hamas and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza was getting underway.

In the book, Woodward claims that when Blinken met with Jordanian King Abdullah II in Amman on 13 October 2023, the king told him, “We told Israel not to do this, we told them not to trust Hamas, Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood, Israel must defeat Hamas. We will not say this publicly, but we support the defeat of Hamas.”

Woodward claims that when Blinken visited the UAE on 14 October 2023 and met with Mohammed bin Zayed, the emir told him, “Hamas must be eliminated. We have repeatedly warned Israel that Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood. We can give Israel time to eliminate Hamas, but first, it must help us calm our citizens from the images of violence and destruction in Gaza by bringing in aid, establishing safe zones, and controlling the violence of the settlers in the West Bank. Let it help us with our citizens, and we will give it the space to eliminate Hamas.”

The book says that when Blinken visited Saudi Arabia on 14 October 2023, Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud told him, “Israel should not have trusted Hamas, and Netanyahu warned us against that repeatedly, because Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Saudi foreign minister continued, saying, “The terrorist groups are not only trying to eliminate Israel, but they also want to overthrow other Arab leaders. We are concerned about what the Israeli operation will do to all of our security, and what comes after Hamas may be worse.”

Bin Farhan added, “We will not pay a single dollar to rebuild Gaza after the chaos that Netanyahu created.”

The next day, Blinken met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who allegedly told him, “I want the problems caused by October 7 to disappear. A Palestinian state must be established before normalization with Israel. I do not want that, but I need it to justify normalization. I want to return to Vision 2030 by normalizing with Israel. Gaza must be calm first for us to normalize with Israel.”

Blinken’s next visit before returning to Israel was in Cairo, where he met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

Sisi then asked the US delegation to leave so he could meet with Blinken alone. Sisi then allegedly told Blinken that he “only wants to maintain peace with Israel.”

Egyptian Intelligence Chief Abbas Kamel then provided the US delegation with important information about the depth and extent of the tunnels under Gaza. He explained to them that Hamas is entrenched in Gaza and that it will be difficult to eliminate it. “Israel must not enter Gaza all at once but rather do so in stages. It must allow Hamas leaders to emerge from the tunnels before cutting off their heads all at once.”

Woodward also writes that Senator Lindsey Graham and Netanyahu “had scheduled a quiet negotiation between Netanyahu and a Saudi ambassador in Tel Aviv in November 2023 [the month after the Hamas attack on Israel]. It would be a historic moment.”

Regarding his sources, Woodward writes, “All interviews for this book were conducted under the journalist ground rule of ‘deep background.’ This means that all the information could be used, but I would not say who provided it.”

The Cradle for more

by ALAN MACLEOD

One year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.

The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.

Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country’s actions.

White House Insider

Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award “for overall excellence in White House coverage”—one of the highest awards in American journalism. Judges were impressed by what they described as his “deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the U.S. and abroad” and picked out six articles as exemplary pieces of journalism.

Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages,” and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

Protestors had called on reporters to snub the event in solidarity with their fallen counterparts in Gaza (which, at the time of writing, comes to at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but organizers gave their highest award to an Israeli intelligence official-turned-reporter who has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer of power in Washington.

Ravid was personally presented with the award by President Biden, who embraced him like a brother. That a known (former) Israeli spy could hug Biden in such a manner speaks volumes about not only the intimate relationship between the United States and Israel but about the extent to which establishment media holds power to account.

It was a moving and special night that I never imagined even in my wildest dreams. It wouldn’t have been possible without my editors at @axios who made my stories better, my sources who trusted me, my family that came with me to Washington, and you, the readers. Thank you pic.twitter.com/aMQd2prsam

— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) April 28, 2024

Ravid has made a name for himself by uncritically printing flattering information given to him by either the U.S. or Israeli government and passing it off as a scoop. In April, he wrote that “President Biden laid out an ultimatum to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their call on Thursday: If Israel doesn’t change course in Gaza, ‘we won’t be able to support you,’” and that he was “making his strongest push for an end to the fighting in Gaza in six months of war, and warning for the first time that U.S. policy on the war will depend on Israel’s adherence to his demands,” which included “an immediate ceasefire.” In July, he repeated anonymous sources that told him that Netanyahu and Israel are striving for “a diplomatic solution” – another highly dubious claim.

MPN for more

by MIKAIL AHMED SHAIKH

A look into the group’s origins and history may explain the violent nature of the ongoing conflict.

The attacks of October 7, 2023, saw over 1,000 people killed in Israel, while over 250 were taken hostage by Hamas. Israel was caught off guard, as was the rest of the world. Nobody saw it coming, nor did anyone see the Israeli military’s retaliatory scorched-earth campaign in the Gaza Strip.

It’s been over a year since that day, during which time Gaza has borne witness to one of the bloodiest conflicts in the region in decades.

Over 42,000 people have been killed in Gaza, with Israel no closer to rescuing the hostages, although the Israeli military assassinated Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in July and his successor Yahya Sinwar in October, who was the alleged mastermind of the October 7 attacks.

Meanwhile, South Africa has filed a “genocide” case against Israel with the International Court of Justice, while the International Criminal Court has applied for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes.

Attempts at truce talks and mediation have thus far failed and with an extensive bombing spree in Lebanon having followed — which killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah — there is a very real fear of the conflict expanding into a regional conflagration.

So, it warrants asking why Hamas attacked Israelis in the first place. An attack that led to one of the most violent asymmetric conflicts of the 21st century.

According to a 2023 analysis by Joe Macaron for Qatari state-run broadcaster Al Jazeera, Hamas’ attack was triggered following “growing demands for a response” to far-right Israeli policy in the occupied West Bank, especially surrounding illegal settlements.

“The rising tensions in the West Bank caused by these policies necessitated the shift of Israeli forces away from the south and into the north to guard the settlements,” Macaron writes. “This gave Hamas both a justification and an opportunity to attack.”

Moreover, Macaron argues that the normalisation of Arab-Israeli relations was an additional motive for the attack since the process “further diminished the significance of the Palestinian issue for Arab leaders who became less keen on pressuring Israel on this matter”.

On the other hand, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organisation, argues, “One of Hamas’s goals was simply to kill Israelis,” citing a report by The Washington Post which reported that attackers had written instructions to do so.

The CSIS piece also suggests that Hamas was driven by revenge for past Israeli violence and the illegal occupation of the West Bank.

Alternatively, a senior Hamas official told Al Jazeera in October 2023 that the group took hostages and expressed hope that the kidnappings would ensure the release of “all” Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

“We managed to kill and capture many Israeli soldiers,” said Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri. “Our detainees in [Israeli] prisons, their freedom is looming large. What we have in our hands will release all our prisoners. The longer fighting continues, the higher the number of prisoners will become.”

But the answer to why the attack was launched on Israel perhaps lies in the group’s past, in how Tel Aviv or the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood influenced the genesis of the group to control the Palestinian sphere of influence before it eventually became powerful enough to outgrow its creators.

October 7

Fighters from the Palestinian group Hamas attacked Israeli towns on Oct 7, 2023, killing and capturing scores of civilians and soldiers in a surprise assault.

The worst attack on Israel for decades unleashed a conflict that both sides vowed to escalate. According to the Rand Corporation, a US-based think tank, at least 1,200 Israelis were killed on October 7, with 250 others taken hostage and moved to the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, in retaliatory airstrikes that began the same day, Palestinian health officials reported that more than 230 people were killed and 1,600 were wounded in the Gaza Strip. That number has since ballooned to 42,847 fatalities as of October 24, 2024.

Dawn for more