I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
The Israeli rulers had many objectives to pursue in their genocidal
war against Gaza. They declared openly some, but they didn’t disclose
all in this way. Despite the 15-month duration of one of the most
devastating bombing campaigns of the twenty-first century they launched
on the besieged Palestine of Gaza, they were unable to eradicate Hamas,
despite killing some of their prominent leaders and members.
Among the undisclosed objectives was to cause maximum damage to the
infrastructure, such as buildings, houses, factories, shops, towns,
shopping malls, mosques, hospitals, schools, universities, colleges and
other civic amenities of the people in Gaza and kill as many civilians
as they wanted. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced and
tormented by constant violence and destruction. Indeed, they have done
this with the full support of America, Britain, Germany, and others.
Israel has succeeded in all these infamies, barbarian acts and crimes
against humanity.
They hope to carry on with the policy of annihilation of Palestinians
after the negotiated ceasefire is over, if it is ever allowed to work.
However, they are certain to cause as many difficulties and ambiguities
as they desire during the implementation of the ceasefire agreement.
Their ability to accomplish this task is not a secret. They’re masters
of trickery, manipulation, and propaganda.
Mr. Dave Sheldon, I'm sorry to have missed replying to your first comment, which you mentioned. The MSM usually doesn't give much or no information about the situation in the Gaza Strip (and also in the West Bank) where Israel is killing innocent civilians, including patients in hospitals, by indiscriminate aerial bombardments, missiles, and a marauding army.
But luckily, there are some people in the alternative media doing what the MSM, should also have paid due attention to. We know how the BBC under a Zionist has suppressed news and hid the facts as much as he could. The Zionist-dominated media and political establishment in Britain and other powerful Western nations operate this way.
This hapless situation forces me to share these facts with people. I believe, no person with human conscience and humane feelings can ignore what the Western-backed colonial-settler state has been doing, not only from September 2023, but for decades, starting from 1948.
I know, many people are indifferent to what has been happening in Gaza. There is also open support for Zionist ethnic cleansing in Palestine by some people; the process of ethnic cleansing is systematic to advance a long-term strategy of the Zionists. However, I concur with you that the Sudan war needs more attention. I will be pleased to see if people in this group start highlighting and finding the causes of the tragic civil war and the suffering of people there.
The problems of Zionist ideology and its ramifications are because of its political goals. It has nothing to do with religion, even though Israeli leaders have fully exploited the religious identities of Jews for their political ends.
When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved
an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep
sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and
calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of
the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and
overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against
the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from
the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about
poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us
to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more
verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially
abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially
motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really
doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension
of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer
acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she
withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had
a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers
“disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used
emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not
Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept
showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to
describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and
‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus
Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of
Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is
that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How
does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the
center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all
over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct
reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was,
as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as
stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his
prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative,
disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of
Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved
with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on,
no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of
the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president
had quickly gone on live television. “There are parents who will never
see their child again,” he said,
adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped
away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents,
and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he
asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why
do we keep letting this happen?”
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza
has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing
and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit
cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding
maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by
affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that
Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party
leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries
did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert
themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori
Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of
multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less
lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the
Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which
thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual
slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but
the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background
noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as
determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of
criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric —
unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en
masse — rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently
concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry
editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an
ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted
through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation,
surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William
Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
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Islamic nations saw a period of social and intellectual stagnation that started around the 13th century. Any critical and creative thinking about Islamic doctrine and its social practice had stopped by then. Thus the task was only to follow what had already been achieved in Islamic philosophical, political and juridical spheres and avoid any new ideas.
But in Europe, a new era was soon to start: the era of Renaissance, from the 14th to 17th centuries, that brought new ways to change the existing attitudes to religion, art, philosophy while Muslim nations remained in a state of regression. The Islamic world didn't experience the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.
Western nations were able to colonize many parts of the globe, including the Muslim countries. For the colonial armies to subdue and bring Afro-Asian nations under their direct control was not too difficult either. After the end of colonialism in the 20th century, the newly-independent Islamic countries saw much political and social turmoil that has persisted for many decades for a number of reasons. But one major factor that has been instrumental in perpetuating, strengthening and exploiting Islamic countries through the subservient ruling cliques, monarchies, dictators, etc., has been the role of US imperialism and the neo-colonialism of the old colonial powers in these countries.
“Donald Trump will have no penalty for
criminal wrongdoing, which is an affront to accountability and to a
system where no one is above the law, though the judge had little
alternative,” said one ethics expert.
After being convicted of 34 felonies in New York last year, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Friday received an unconditional discharge during a sentencing hearing that came just over a week before the Republican’s second inauguration.
Just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court—which includes three Trump appointees—allowed
the hearing to proceed, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan
Merchan declined to impose fines or sentence Trump to prison for his
crimes, which related to hush money payments to cover up sex scandals
during the 2016 presidential election cycle.
“Donald Trump will have no penalty for criminal wrongdoing, which is
an affront to accountability and to a system where no one is above the
law, though the judge had little alternative,” said
Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of the watchdog group Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “But now, formally, the next
president of the United States is a felon.”
“Children have reportedly been killed in several mass casualty
events, including nighttime attacks in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and
al-Mawasi, a unilaterally designated ‘safe zone’ in the south,” UNICEF
said on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, an Israeli strike on al-Mawasi in
south Gaza killed five displaced children who were sheltering in tents.
The IDF has repeatedly bombed al-Mawasi despite designating it as a
so-called “humanitarian safe zone.”
Displaced
Palestinian children sheltering at a school in Deir el-Balah, central
Gaza, on January 7, 2025 (IMAGO/APAimages via Reuters Connect)
Palestinian children are also dying due to the conditions caused by
the Israeli siege and relentless bombing campaign. UNICEF said that
since December 26, “eight infants and newborns have reportedly died from
hypothermia – a major threat to young children who are unable to
regulate their body temperature.”
Gaza health officials said in December 2023 that 17,000 children had
been killed in the genocidal war, a number that does not include those
missing and presumed dead under the rubble or indirect deaths caused by
the siege.
Newborn babies are especially vulnerable since many have been born
prematurely due to the health conditions of their mothers. Palestinian
mothers in Gaza also struggle to make milk, and there have been
shortages of formula and other baby products.
In October, The New York Times published accounts
from American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza, including
many who worked with babies. “I worked in a neonatal ICU. Several
infants died every day due to lack of medical supplies and appropriate
nutrition,” said Dr. Amen Odeh, a pediatrician from Texas.
“We had to make tough decisions about which very sick baby would be
on the ventilator due to lack of equipment. I saw a family bringing in
their dead 3-day-old infant who had been living in a tent,” Odeh added.
Despite the slaughter of children and death of so many newborns under
the siege, the Biden administration has continued to provide military
aid and political support to Israel. President Biden is reportedly
planning to approve one more major arms deal worth $8 billion before he leaves office.
Published date: 2 January 2025 11:10 GMT | Last update:5 days 3 hours ago
The incoming US president’s transactional approach to politics will
see immigrants suffer, while suppport for Israel’s oppression of
Palestinians will continue
A man shows support for US president-elect Donald Trump near his
Mar-a-Lago resort on 14 December 2024 (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty
Images/AFP)
Given his mercurial nature, shifting from the politics of revenge to
the politics of accommodation without explanation or changed
circumstances, it is foolhardy to predict what lies ahead as Donald
Trump prepares to be US president for a second time.
His rhetoric and ideology seem untamed and extreme – and this time around, he enters the White House with a strong electoral mandate as Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, and the support of an ultra-conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
This would seem to ensure the prospect of Trump’s total control over
the governing process in the US, but there are some daunting bumps in
the road ahead.
Some of the contours of Trump’s presidency have become clear even
before he officially returns to the White House. Firstly, it seems
certain that he will make millions of undocumented immigrants in the US miserable from day one.It is not a good sign that Trump blamed the New Orleans car incident
on weak border security considering it was the work of an American army
veteran who recently converted to the Islamic State group.
His obsession with stopping asylum-seekers and immigrants from
crossing the border without proper papers is certain to be acted upon.
Already, the man Trump has selected as “border czar” has indicated his
intention to deport entire families of undocumented persons, including naturalised citizens.
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Trump could get away with this approach, however cruel in
application, for a while – but the economics of the labour market will
soon pose a challenge, creating strategic labour shortages in such
critical sectors as agriculture in the southwestern US, exacerbating
inflationary pressures.
There are also considerations around the growing need for skilled workers in the high-tech sector,
which will increasingly shape the country’s economic future. These
workers have been given high priority in relation to robust economic
development, as Trump’s chief adviser, Elon Musk, keeps reminding him.
These concerns will be magnified if Trump goes ahead with his announced plans to place 25 percent tariffs
on imports from Canada and Mexico, along with punitive tariffs on
Chinese imports. Such policies are the surest way to start a mutually
destructive trade war.
Global dangers
On foreign policy, the outlook for a Trump presidency is more mixed,
but uncertain and globally dangerous. In the beginning, Trump will
probably seek to portray himself as a peacemaker, particularly in the
context of the Russia-Ukraine war.
This conflict is both an example of the type of “forever war” he
rejected during his first term in office, and an opportunity to explore
whether a cooperative relationship with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia could circumvent the Atlantic alliance that has been a centrepiece of American foreign policy since the end of World War II.
Pushing for a ceasefire and diplomatic compromise was a grossly
negligent missed opportunity during Joe Biden’s presidency, which seemed
determined to inflict a geopolitical defeat on Russia, even at the cost
of causing a disaster for Ukraine and its people.
Where does Donald Trump stand on Israel, Palestine and the Middle East?
If this change of direction occurs, Nato
loyalists will have to rethink European security arrangements, and the
American deep state will have to swallow defeat, or use its untested
leverage to back the primacy of the US in geopolitical realms by keeping
Russia out and Nato in.
When it comes to the Middle East, the story is different in terms of policy priority.
Trump has given every indication of wanting to exceed Biden’s unconditional support for Israel, including through the genocidal onslaught on Gaza,
land grabbing, ethnic-cleansing operations and settlement expansion in
the occupied West Bank, and escalating unlawful violence against
regional adversaries.
Trump, by his political appointments and undisciplined commentary,
seems determined to “finish the job” in Gaza, which can only be
understood as erasing Palestine and Palestinians as obstacles to the rapid establishment of Greater Israel from “the river to the sea”.
Beyond this, he seems determined to confront Iran
in a more muscular manner, possibly by destroying its nuclear
facilities and taking more overt steps to provoke regime change in
Tehran.
These policies, if actualised, would have many risks and adverse
consequences, including the possibility of a wider regional war and a
surge of anti-US sentiments. They would also cement Israel as the pariah
state of our time, which could weaken it to the point of emboldening
the peoples of the Arab world to rise up against their western-oriented
repressive regimes, and unite behind the cause of liberating Palestine
from settler-colonialism.
Contempt for internationalism
Finally, in every way, Trump and his entourage have signalled their
opposition to internationalism. Trump has long displayed an unwavering
commitment to an ultra-nationalist and transactional world view. He
exhibits contempt for addressing global challenges, and for the benefits
of cooperative problem-solving, even in the context of climate change.
In this sense, the UN will be valued only to the extent that it fully
backs American strategic priorities – and should it dare to censure or
oppose these priorities, Trump will surely threaten, and then cut, US
funding, or even withdraw US participation.
Given such attitudes, it is not surprising that Trump is dismissive
of the regulatory role of international law, especially if directed at
restraining the US. Say goodbye to the cynical pretensions of Secretary
of State Antony Blinken’s “rules-based world order”, which has seemed more a synonym for US-led geopolitics than a genuine submission to universally applicable principles.
In the end, the Trump presidency may be forced to choose between a form of neo-isolationism and neo-imperialism
Trump may unintentionally provide a service to humanity by stripping
away the liberal illusions shielding the reality that the US and its
friends habitually avoid the constraints of international law that their
rivals are bound to obey. In effect, Trump’s nihilism may be preferable
to Biden’s hypocrisy.
In the end, the Trump presidency may be forced to choose between a
form of neo-isolationism and neo-imperialism. If the isolationist
alternative prevails, then an accelerated transition will likely occur
from the post-Cold War world of unipolarity to a new era of complex
multipolarity.
If the neo-imperialist model prevails, due to a compromise between
the ultra-nationalist Trumpists and the globally ambitious American deep
state, tensions will emerge between antagonistic forms of multipolarity
and competing alliance networks, resembling in structure the Cold War,
yet with differences, including the agenda of geopolitical rivalries.
The de-centring of conflict that includes the partial bypassing of
Europe is all but certain. Europe is no longer the chief geopolitical
prize, as it was in the three 20th-century global wars (including the
Cold War).
Whatever else, the Trump presidency is likely to confound
expectations, including these, while keeping busy the world’s most
influential media platforms.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations
scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. In 2008 he
was also appointed by the UN to serve a six-year term as the Special
Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
