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.
Washington is pressing its NATO allies to help “systematically dismantle” the International Criminal Court (ICC) and abandon its mandate, in an effort to shield US officials from war crimes prosecutions and Israeli leaders from accountability over the genocide in Gaza, POLITICO reported on 9 September.
US envoy Matthew Whitaker reportedly delivered the demand behind closed doors in Brussels in mid-July, in front of the alliance’s 32 ambassadors, urging member states to help take the court apart and to walk away from the Rome Statute, three anonymous NATO diplomats told POLITICO.
“We will be watching closely who stands with America,” Whitaker said as he closed his remarks, according to the three diplomats.
Alongside his intervention, the US mission circulated a document to NATO delegations stating “The United States will systematically dismantle the capabilities of the ICC … we firmly request that you immediately take steps to withdraw.”
The paper instructed allies to assess the court as a threat to their own governments, to publicly denounce its mandate as “overreach,” and to halt all material support to it without delay.
It closed by calling for an “end [to] the charade of the ICC once and for all.”
This comes after US State Secretary Marco Rubio announced on 13 July 2026 a sweeping Washington campaign to isolate and dismantle the ICC “brick by brick,” pressuring allied nations hosting US troops to reject the court’s authority or face retaliation, following Trump’s 6 February 2025 executive order that imposed asset freezes and travel restrictions on ICC prosecutors and judges investigating US and Israeli war crimes.
The campaign has already stripped lead prosecutor Karim Khan of his post, following a sustained Israeli effort that weaponized sexual misconduct allegations against him after he issued the November 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former war minister Yoav Gallant over their leading roles in the Gaza genocide.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was sanctioned in February, after US technology firms complained to the White House about her findings that they were complicit in Gaza.
Nine of the court’s 18 judges and both deputy prosecutors have since been placed under US sanctions.
A Border Patrol Tactical Unit agent sprays pepper spray into the face of a protester attempting to block an immigration officer vehicle from leaving the scene where a woman was shot and killed by a federal agent earlier, in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Wednesday, January 7, 2026.
(Photo by Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)
The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States.
On September 11, 2001, the world watched as the World Trade Center, the twin towers that represented US global dominance, were struck by hijacked US commercial jetliners and came crashing to the ground. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, from high-powered executive to clerical workers and immigrant kitchen workers. The hijackers were Middle Eastern men, primarily from Saudi Arabia.
Twenty-five years later, many questions remain about how the US military and security establishment could have allowed this to happen. Hardly anybody believes the official 9/11 story, which raises more questions than it answers, and there are many competing theories about who was behind this tragedy. Was this an incredible US security lapse or a highly coordinated false flag? Whatever the case, the neocons in George W. Bush’s administration immediately declared a “war on terrorism,” and put into motion their longstanding designs to conquer seven Muslim countries in the Middle East (as revealed by General Wesley Clark)—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. Over the last 25 years, the US has initiated wars against all of these countries, as well as Afghanistan.
US administrations under Presidents George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump (again) are responsible for creating a hell on Earth throughout the Middle East, resulting in millions of deaths and millions more homeless refugees. Thousands of US soldiers also died in Iraq and Afghanistan, any thousands more carry the physical, mental, and spiritual wounds to this day.
These nations may never fully recover, but Iran still stands. It may be the only Middle Eastern country still strong enough to resist domination by Israel, the US, and the former European colonial powers. That is why it is being frantically targeted by militarists in Israel and the US And that is why the US peace movement must do all we can to end the escalating US on Iran.
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Under the slogan of “the war on terror,” the US government has carried out an increasing campaign of terror worldwide and against its own people. Torture has been normalized as represented by the extralegal Guantánamo torture prison on occupied Cuban land. The US and NATO provoked Russia into a catastrophic war in Ukraine which they continue to fuel with billions of dollars, arms, and military advisers. Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses have enabled an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. In January of this year, the US made a brazen attack on Venezuela, kidnapped its president and first lady, and are holding the Venezuelan government hostage while they steal Venezuelan oil. The US has blocked all oil shipments to Cuba, greatly exacerbating the damage done by the 64-year-old US blockade of Cuba, even as they threaten to invade. President Trump and “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth post “snuff videos” of their blatantly illegal bombing of boats in South American waters, where they have murdered hundreds of fisherman and alleged “narco-terrorists” without any evidence or judicial proceeding.
Trump’s War of Terror Comes Home
The stepped-up US aggression abroad is now being mirrored by state-sponsored terror in these United States. Armed gangs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents routinely carry out racist attacks on immigrant communities and people of color, no matter their immigration or citizenship status. The mass incarceration of Black men is now matched by mass incarceration of brown men, women, and children in for-profit prisons, where abusive conditions have led to many deaths. White supremacism is out in the open as cruel fascist practices are being normalized. US peace activists and immigrant rights activists are being labeled as terrorists and prosecuted as terrorists for nonviolent resistance to the terror of the state.
Even as the US war on Iran continues and escalates, the Trump administration and Republican Party are openly seeking to undermine the midterm US elections by blatant last-minute gerrymandering of congressional districts, by trying to prevent mail-in voting, by reducing the number of polling places, by threatening to deploy intimidating ICE agents at polling places and even “joking” about canceling the elections altogether. Veterans For Peace has joined with other veterans’ groups and military families in the Veteran Against Fascism coalition to do all we can to defend the elections, for example by providing safe accompaniment to the polls.
The Terror of Nuclear War
Adding to the atmosphere of global terror is the ever-growing threat of nuclear war. Multiple sources have confirmed that the Trump administration has been discussing the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in its war on Iran. Pentagon war-gaming of the US use of tactical nuclear weapons has consistently resulted in global nuclear war that leads to a nuclear winter in which billions of people would starve to death—those that survived the initial nuclear blasts and radiation illnesses. Seventy-five countries have ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which outlaws possessing sharing, transporting, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has ditched the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with Russia, while it carries out a series of wars that—if not checked—will inevitably lead to nuclear war. In fact, the US is actively planning to wage a war against China that would start with a US nuclear first strike on China. These policies only lead more countries to seek nuclear weapons, directly the opposite of the stated US policy and treaty obligations to seek nuclear non-proliferation and good-faith negotiations to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States. On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we must rededicate ourselves to resisting US wars at home and abroad.
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The attacks of September 2001 became the pretext for a new era of US-led intervention. Twenty-five years on, millions are dead and the promised ‘victories’ remain nowhere to be seen, says ANDREW MURRAY
Crowds in Manhattan watch smoke billowing from the World Trade Centre, September 11 2001
THE “war on terror” began 25 years ago today, when two hijacked passenger airliners were flown into the skyscrapers of the World Trade Centre in New York.
A third crashed into the Pentagon in Washington while a fourth, apparently targeting the US capitol, crashed in Pennsylvania after its passengers fought back.
It was immediately assumed that the hijackers — nearly all of them Saudi Arabian by nationality — were organised by al-Qaida, an Islamist militant group then headquartered in Afghanistan. Despite many subsequent conspiracy theories, it would seem that this was indeed the case.
Al-Qaida attributed their actions — which killed nearly 3,000 people, almost all civilian, in the first foreign attack on the US mainland since 1812 — to opposition to Israel’s US-supported oppression of the Palestinians, to the presence of US troops in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and the sanctions-driven starvation of Iraqi children.
9/11 was thus an act of terror already sitting in a continuum of US-driven violence and oppression across the Middle East — an explanation but not a justification.
It was immediately clear that the attacks would be the basis for a further aggressive extension of US war, across the Middle East and south Asia in particular.
In fact, it led to a devastating series of wars which caused the effective collapse of several states, millions of deaths and millions more made refugees. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen have been the principal victims of this war, which has also extended to parts of Africa and, in its impact and influence, most of the world.
Some of these wars had not the slightest connection to terrorism or al-Qaida and — in particular the Bush attack on Iraq — had been meditated long before 9/11.
The “war on terror” began with boasts of military omnipotence from Washington, along with brazen calls for the introduction of a new colonialism to deal with “failed states.” But nowhere has it ended with an outcome anything like that sought by the aggressors.
Most notoriously, the first theatre of war — Afghanistan — began with the ousting of the Taliban government in 2001 and ended with the return of the self-same regime 20 years, uncounted lives and massive destruction later.
However rightly it can be felt that the people of Afghanistan deserve a much better government, it cannot be denied that this outcome marked a historic defeat for US imperialism.
It scarcely fared better in Iraq, where the overthrow of Saddam Hussein led to a brutal occupation, sectarian civil conflict, economic despoliation and the wrecking of a state which George Bush had fancied turning into a “beacon of democracy.”
The occupation there was wound down in more-or-less ignominy — total in the case of the British forces deployed in Basra, driven out in humiliation.
Libya, the third major target, was turned into a failed state, split between rival governments and generating an immense refugee crisis, as a result of a Nato-sponsored intervention.
In Syria, Western interference in civil war not only sparked a massive refugee crisis but the rise of Isis and the eventual ascension of a jihadi-rooted government in Damascus.
Yemen, one of the world’s poorest countries, has been further degraded by a conflict to a large extent armed and directed from Britain, working alongside Gulf dictatorships. Yet the Houthis remain still standing and defiant.
The “war on terror” also spread further afield, to both west and east Africa in particular, with no better results for either the peoples there or the plans of the imperialists.
The full balance sheet for these wars remains yet to be calculated, but it does not seem to yield a single victory of the US and its allies, Britain first among them. The present war against Iran is a linear descendant of these conflicts, and does not look like changing that record.
Despite numerous contingent and specific factors, all these wars are rooted in the structuring of a world around US hegemony, in which Washington arrogates to itself the right to intervene where it wills in order to ensure subordination to its own strategic and commercial interests.
They are thus the main contemporary political expression of imperialism.
9/11 and these subsequent conflicts had the political consequence of restoring the concept of imperialism to the centre of public discourse.
After a generation in which it had been relegated to jargon as the world wallowed in the post-cold war “end of history,” the wars of aggression launched by the US, with British governments invariably at its side, whatever the views of the people, shone an unforgiving light on the realities of global power.
Imperialism has generally taken some care to present its depredations as being motivated by the most high-minded interests.
In the 19th century, colonial adventures were usually promoted as expediting the spread of Christian civilisation to peoples who had the audacity to get along without it.
In the 20th century, a more secular age, interventions were often explained as being necessary to stop the spread of communism, notwithstanding that communism, for all its global potency, was often entirely absent from the territories concerned.
In the present century the “war against terror” has stood duty, the first conflict even declared as being against an abstraction rather than a country or peoples.
This war elided with the developing notion of “liberal” or “humanitarian” intervention, which had been trialled, to its progenitors’ satisfaction, in the 1999 war against Yugoslavia.
It was ideologically amplified by Tony Blair, then still fairly popular, who went to Chicago to spell out the conditions in which great powers, or those with the approved political markers, could and should intervene in other countries’ affairs.
He spelt out five criteria. International law or United Nations approval were not among them, and the wars to follow did not meet all of them in any case. Blair’s political reputation is now collateral damage following his decision to lead Britain into the Iraq aggression alongside George Bush.
That decision, above all, gave rise to the largest anti-war movement in Britain’s history, indeed probably the strongest mass movement of the left since the high days of Chartism in the 1840s.
Its effects resonate to this day, not least in the enduring movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
At its core lay an alliance of most of the socialist left with Muslim communities, alongside trade unions, the mass of young people and sections, like military families, never previously drawn into mass anti-war campaigning.
That coalition was described by the New York Times as the “second superpower” in the world, at the time when the US believed itself to be effectively unchallengeable.
The movement also laid much of the foundation for Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to the Labour Party leadership in 2015, something that was certainly not on Blair or Bush’s agenda when they embarked on their policy of open-ended war.
These developments have placed anti-imperialism at the heart of socialist politics in Britain, to the teeth-grinding rage of those savants and organs of the soi-disant left who embrace the international politics of the ruling class even as they pretend to a domestic radicalism.
9/11 also had more negative impacts in Britain — it led to a rising tide of Islamophobia, now reaching epidemic proportions, as well as occasioning one attack after another on our liberties, exemplified in the harassment of the Palestine solidarity movement and the mass arrests of peaceful sympathisers with Palestine Action.
Today, the “war on terror” has faded somewhat behind the darkening shadow of great power conflict. With the rise of China, it is clear that the US is no longer the sole superpower.
The proxy war being waged by Nato in Ukraine is the harbinger of still more devastating conflicts, as the anti-war movement warned from 9/11 onwards.
Today, 9/11 is best marked by the renewal of the anti-war movement in the face of impending neofascism and war, by the re-establishment of its broad fighting unity, and by absorbing the greatest single lesson of those terrible events a quarter of a century ago — that there can never be peace alongside imperialism.
Andrew Murray was the first chair of the Stop the War Coalition, serving from 2001 to 2011, and is now its deputy president
“We won,” President Donald Trump declared in March, less than two weeks after launching his war of choice against Iran. Claiming that nation was “very much destroyed and, even, obliterated,” Trump had already promised the conflict would bring peace to the region and, somehow, the globe. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump wrote. But more than six months and two failed ceasefires later, the floundering conflict sputters along. And you may have noticed that world peace has yet to be announced.
Having again been bested in battle — the latest loss in a long-running series of meaningless victories (like over lowly Grenada), stalemates (like the forever war in Somalia), and defeats (like conflicts in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) — the U.S. military has slunk away from the fight in favor of an “economic D-Day” that so far seems to be little more than bluster.
Trump’s other stated war aims, like Iran’s unconditional surrender and seizing its oil infrastructure, have also fallen by the wayside. In the end, the major accomplishments of Trump’s war seem to be limited to death and destruction: hundreds of U.S. casualties that the Pentagon has sought to downplay and cover-up, and thousands of Iranian deaths that the Pentagon is loath to mention or investigate, including a family of eight — five of them children, one a 20-day-old infant.
But the almost 40,000 Iranians killed or wounded in the war may only scratch the surface of the true toll, as Ashley Gate writes in her latest piece for TomDispatch. The rough outlines of the ecological devastation are only just coming to light. And if history is any guide, the environmental fallout of the war may reach far into the future, affecting untold numbers of Iranians who survived the conflict and many others in generations to come.
Esmaeil Baqaei, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, recently warned of the increasing environmental damage caused by the U.S. war, drawing attention to oil contamination in the Persian Gulf that has begun washing up on Iranian shores. “This incident is only one visible example of the extensive pollution — both overt and concealed — that has degraded the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” he wrote on X. “Who bears responsibility for compensating these damages? Is it the nations that consume the inexpensive energy exported from our region, the shipping insurers, or the aggressors and their partners who have transformed the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman into a theater for military operations and the testing of highly destructive weaponry?”
Alongside death and destruction that has killed or wounded tens of thousands of Iranians, the U.S.–Israeli war has caused massive environmental devastation. By March, attacks had already resulted in more than 300 incidents of potential environmental harm, documented across 12 countries in the region, according to a report by the Conflict and Environment Observatory. These toxic exposures threaten not only today’s war victims, but also future generations who will grapple with the knock-on effects.
The ongoing satellite blackout has hindered the work of those tracking the environmental devastation.
Major commercial satellite companies have restricted or delayed the publication of their Middle East data at the behest of the U.S. government. Likely intended to obscure the true extent of damage inflicted on U.S. military facilities across the region, the ongoing satellite blackout has also hindered the work of those tracking the environmental devastation that has accompanied the conflict since it began in February. Even with the limited data, the Conflict and Environment Observatory has concluded that “[a]ll parties to the conflict” have appeared to target “environmentally risky facilities,” including oil infrastructure and water desalination plants.
According to research by the Climate and Community Institute, U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran in the first 14 days of the war emitted roughly 5 million metric cubic tons of greenhouse gases. Put another way: In two weeks, coalition strikes produced roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as the country of Iceland does over the course of a year. And as the war dragged on, missile facilities, weapons depots, oil infrastructure, nuclear facilities, dual-use and civilian infrastructure including power stations and desalination plants were also increasingly struck.
The environmental threats these targets pose is enormous. Damaged desalination plants jeopardize the civilian water supply and flood nearby land and marine environments with harmful chemicals like sulfuric acid. Bombed infrastructure fills urban streets with asbestos-contaminated rubble and dust, heightening the risk of respiratory illness and cancer among exposed populations. Damaged weapons facilities pollute surrounding areas with explosives, highly toxic liquid propellants, and heavy metals. And the targeting of nuclear facilities risks radiation exposure or worse, an uncontrolled nuclear disaster, like a meltdown.
Fossil fuel infrastructure has also remained a key military objective for all belligerents. Israeli strikes on more than two dozen Iranian oil depots in early March engulfed the capital city of Tehran in a cloud of toxic smoke that rained black carbon and sulfuric acid on the city’s 9 million residents. Attacks on oil tankers and other commercial vessels have leached oil and spilled fuel into myriad waterways from the Egyptian port of Damietta, where Iran struck two liquefied natural gas vessels, to the coast of Sri Lanka, where the U.S. sank an Iranian frigate. And such environmental damage is likely to increase as the conflict continues to sporadically flare up.
The U.S. has a long history of starting wars that leave deep environmental scars. And for decades, U.S. troops have paid for it with exposures to toxic substances, including defoliants like Agent Orange, an herbicide the U.S. sprayed across Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s; smoke from oil depot fires that dotted the landscape in and around Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War; and the military base burn pits of the post-9/11 forever wars. The PACT Act of 2022 extended healthcare access to millions of veterans who served from the last half of the 20th century to today and now suffer from a wide range of conditions related to such wartime exposures, including cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and reproductive issues likely caused or exacerbated by their military service.
Health problems among U.S. veterans often mirror those of local communities in war zones as they are exposed to the same toxic substances. Just as American troops returned home from Iraq with higher rates of diseases like urinary and blood cancers, doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for example, reported higher birth abnormalities and miscarriages among the local population.
Fallujah offers a glimpse of the environmental fallout that the people of neighboring Iran may face in the years to come. More than half of Fallujah was leveled in a U.S. Marine-led siege of the city in 2004. Hospitals, water systems and electrical grids were destroyed. A similar wave of destruction accompanied the ISIS takeover of the city in 2014. Fallujah was then besieged and heavily bombed in 2016 during the U.S.–Iraqi military operation that retook the city. Iraqis in Fallujah fled en masse in both 2004 and 2014. Those who returned were greeted by demolished homes, bomb craters, chemical spills, and houses with ash covered walls littered with bullet holes.
“The Trillion Dollar War Machine,” by William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman Available at Bookshop.org.
Since 2004, Fallujah has seen a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer rates and similar spikes in early onset cancer and respiratory diseases, according to a study co-authored by local physicians. Elevated rates of miscarriages and lethal birth defects that followed the initial U.S. invasion have never diminished. Reports on these poor health outcomes by doctors at Fallujah Women and Children’s Hospital led to the creation of a multidisciplinary study steered by researchers from Purdue University in the U.S. and Britain’s Newcastle University which tracked the intergenerational health effects of heavy metal exposure.
Depleted uranium munitions — which shatter and ignite on impact, allowing them to penetrate heavy armor plating — have been used by the U.S. in combat since the Gulf War. Spent rounds then release particles of radioactive uranium and other heavy metals, like titanium, into the surrounding earth, water, and air. Heavily bombarded areas in Fallujah were left with a greater percentage of heavy metals in their soil as a result.
Those who returned to the city after the battles, rebuilt their homes, reseeded contaminated farmlands, and drank and bathed in local waters now carry higher levels of radiation and heavy metals in their bodies. Indeed, uranium was found in the bones of one-third of study participants, all of whom were children during the 2004 siege — at levels roughly 300 times higher than their generational peers in America.
While highly toxic on its own, uranium levels are also often a marker for exposure to heavy metals including lead, arsenic, and mercury, which have been known to harm virtually every organ in the human body. Today, elevated rates of miscarriages and lethal congenital anomalies plague families in Fallujah.
“War itself is always about combustion,” explained Kali Rubaii, a cultural anthropologist and Purdue University assistant professor who led the study on Fallujah. “The combustion of generally toxic materials redistributes these toxicants into people’s air, water and food. Every time someone breathes in everything in the air, they are inheriting the pollutants of war.”
Post-war surges in birth defects, respiratory diseases, and cancers in Fallujah have now been directly linked with exposure to the weapons of war. As the pollutants of war are largely universal, the study’s implications lie far beyond Fallujah. Recommendations for those returning to bombarded areas are included in the study’s appendix in both Ukrainian and Arabic. When I spoke to Rubaii in March — two days after Tehran was drenched in black rain — she hoped the study’s finding, and its recommendations for returnees, could be of help to those living near the Persian Gulf.
The U.S–Israeli war on Iran has only exacerbated ongoing environmental crises in the Middle East, including a five-year-long drought, brought on by years of insufficient rainfall linked to human-induced climate change, that poses a severe threat to Tehran’s water supply. The Persian Gulf’s fragile coral reefs and mangrove forests have also, for years, suffered under rising water temperatures, intensive vessel activity, and growing industrial pollution.
“The most effective way to limit heavy metal toxicity from war is by not bombing cities.”
The Persian Gulf’s ecosystems still bear the scars of oil spills from the U.S. battles with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. Now, according to a recent study from the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, oil spills in the Gulf have increased dramatically since the beginning of the war to cover roughly four times the area in March 2026 as they did one year earlier. Though it is still too soon to calculate the full extent of the environmental harm imposed by the ongoing conflict, the toxic airborne pollutants, land contaminated with heavy metals, and oil-soaked waterways will pose a threat to life for decades to come. Read Our Complete Coverage TomDispatch
As Rubaii’s study concludes, “the most effective way to limit heavy metal toxicity from war is by not bombing cities.” While we live in an age where threats to civilian infrastructure are espoused and ordered by prime ministers and presidents alike, the illegality of these attacks — and their grave ecological consequences — cannot be ignored. The targeting of a country’s energy infrastructure, waterways, bridges, and homes makes it more likely that the attacked nation will respond with attacks on similar targets, placing civilians at risk in the present and, due to environmental contamination, for following generations.
People can’t be healthy if they live on sick lands.
The International Committee of the Red Cross — which works to uphold the laws of war — has repeatedly affirmed that the environment itself is a civilian object and must be protected. Under the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, to inflict disproportionate widespread and severe environmental damage is a war crime.
The Iran war has already sparked a global fuel crisis, threatened future harvests, and placed tens of millions of people at risk of hunger, imperiling this generation and the next. It has also subjected civilians to toxic smoke, black carbon rain, and other public health hazards. People can’t be healthy if they live on sick lands. Even after the final bomb of the Iran war has dropped, the ecological devastation and health hazards will haunt U.S. service members and local residents alike. Fallujah has shown that even long after the guns fall silent, war victims continue to suffer with the fallout of conflicts that have, quite literally, seeped into their bones. Share
President Donald Trump attends a meeting at the White House Oval Office in Washington, DC on September 9, 2026.
(Photo by White House)
“Even for the notoriously corrupt and lawless Trump, this explicit and desperate attempt to buy votes in the November election is a new low,” said one watchdog leader.
Many Democrats in Congress are on the growing list of critics calling out President Donald Trump for his Wednesday night vow to give US voters $5,000 each if they help Republicans win control of the Senate and House of Representatives—where they already have majorities—in the November midterm elections.
“Nothing says confidence like trying to bribe people for votes,” Congressman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) quipped Thursday.
When Fox News’ Laura Ingraham later asked, “Why not just give the money now?” Trump attempted to blame Democrats.
Noting the president’s jumbled response to that question, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said: “I don’t know what this even means, but I do know the reason Trump won’t give a straight answer is that he doesn’t really mean to send these checks to anyone. He has lied about this over and over again, and he’s lying now. Just like he lied when he said he would lower costs.”
Some critics highlighted other cases of Trump pledging to give Americans money, including alleged savings from the actions of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an effort spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk.
Congressman Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said: “So now it’s $5,000 bribes that Trump will never deliver to attempt to make voters forget what they are paying for gas and food. What ever happened to those promised DOGE checks? Americans are not fools, we know he lies daily.”
Blasting the president as “our pathological liar-in-chief,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also pointed to previous instances of Trump promising money, from a 10% cap on credit card interest rates to $2 for a gallon of gasoline.
“The Trump administration is not about helping working families,” the former presidential candidate stressed. “It’s about giving a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1% and throwing 15 million Americans off the healthcare they have.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has also sought the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, shared on social media Groundwork Collaborative’s roundup of 15 times Trump has promised a check, dividend, or rebate—and not delivered.
Some Democratic governors also took aim at Trump. California’s Gavin Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028, said: “After making you sicker and poorer with his war, Donald Trump now wants to buy your vote with $5,000 in taxpayer-funded blood money. The most corrupt man ever to occupy the Oval Office.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul emphasized that “Trump owes New Yorkers $13.5 billion for his illegal tariffs and hasn’t paid up.”
“Now he’s dangling $5,000 checks if Republicans win Congress. A trillion-dollar campaign bribe from a guy who doesn’t pay his bills,” she added. “Fool me once…”
It’s not just elected Democrats ripping Trump’s new pledge. Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, said in a Thursday statement that “even for the notoriously corrupt and lawless Trump, this explicit and desperate attempt to buy votes in the November election is a new low.”
“Trump knows he can’t do this, and yet he’s attempting to bribe voters with the false promise of cash to help his party win an election, which is antithetical to every principle of American democracy,” she continued. “Every Republican at the convention and across the country should loudly and vehemently denounce Trump for proposing this dangerous and transparently illegal scheme. The fact that no one has done that yet is cause for deep alarm about the future of American elections.”
As Israel’s war on Gaza enters a grim third year, the prevailing narrative developed by mainstream Western media serves as a masterclass in institutional complicity; filtering genocide through a lens of manufactured neutrality.
Since October 2025, when the so-called ceasefire – which Israel has repeatedly violated – began, the tragedy in Gaza has been effectively erased from the news cycle. The incredible suffering of the Palestinian people has been treated as if it were unworthy of attention.
Because of this severe marginalization, it is more important than ever to look critically at the media’s role in constructing and perpetuating the ongoing genocide, and restore the crisis to the public prominence it requires.
By adopting Israel’s security-centered narrative without question, major news outlets continue to legitimize state violence. Cloaking its atrocities in the sanitized language of “self-defense” does more than just distort a humanitarian crisis; it creates an ideological shield that hides the true human cost from the public.
Institutional media coverage of the catastrophe, however, cannot simply be dismissed as negligence or professional oversight; it represents a systemic structure of complicity that began eight decades ago.
Well before 7 October 2023, the media laid the ideological and narrative foundation that facilitated Israel’s immediate massive military retaliation and ongoing atrocities in Gaza.
From the beginning of the Zionist enclave, editorial frameworks have been shaped around a singular imperative: safeguard and legitimize, at all cost, Israel’s survival and expansion. By trading critical journalism for propaganda, they systematically manufactured public consent for state-sponsored violence.
To fully grasp the situation in Gaza – a 140-square-mile concentration camp blockaded by air, land and sea – requires historical context that Western editors have actively scrubbed from copy and airwaves. Rarely, if ever, have they presented the current quagmire within the more than 80-year continuum of Israeli land theft, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid.
The institutional media almost never expose the public to the core ideology upon which the Zionist colony was built and on which it sustains its expansionist “logic.” To truly understand Israel, however, it is essential to know that it was founded on the supremacist belief in the expendability of the indigenous Palestinian population.
If journalists had simply examined the agenda and words of Israel’s Zionist founders and its strongest defenders – which abound – public perception would look radically different today:
“We should there [Palestine] form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” (Theodor Herzl, Austro-Hungarian political founder of modern Zionism; from his political tract, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), 1896.
“Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach… And we are…demanding that this outside Power should carry out this task vigorously and with determination.” (Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of modern Likud Party; from his The Iron Wall), 1923.
“We must expel the Arabs and take their places… And, if we have to use force…then we have force at our disposal.” (David Ben-Gurion, Polish-born first Israeli prime minister; letter to his son), 1937.
It [Israel] is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” (then-Senator Joe Biden, U.S. Senate), 1986.
“Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” (Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister; lecturing troops entering Gaza on 10 October), 2023.
“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 16 October address to Knesset following the attack),
Furthermore, the media have skewed the reality of Palestine by continuing to characterize the Arab-Israeli struggle as a “conflict.” This terminology hides a violent history of Zionist colonization that began in 1948, and perverts the asymmetrical Palestinian response to dispossession. A false equivalence is created that masks the fact that one party (the colonizer) holds absolute power over the lives of the colonized.
Isolating the daily brutality of the occupier from the foundational violence of the occupation warps public perception of the crisis. It falsely casts indigenous resistance as unprovoked aggression, while normalizing an inherently brutal system of subjugation.
The media has also largely neglected to scrutinize diplomatic initiatives like the Oslo Agreements (1993 and 1995) and Abraham Accords (2020). By overlooking their systemic faults, they essentially legitimized the occupation, and normalized the groundwork for ongoing Israeli military dominance and territorial expansion.
Consequently, over the years, Western outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, and NPR, have consistently served as public relations agents for the Pentagon and Israeli Occupation Forces.
One of the media’s most insidious tools has been language manipulation. From the start of the Gaza war, news outlets have employed a form of linguistic apartheid that dictates how human life and death are valued; essentially who is worthy of mourning.
Hence, the Israeli assault on Gaza has relied on rhetoric calculated and structured to strip Palestinians of their humanity; effectively masking acts of mass violence behind the language of routine administrative tasks.
Such linguistic sleight of hand is mirrored in official, clinical euphemisms designed to shield Israel’s military from accountability – recasting mass atrocities as “operations,” intentional starvation as “logistical challenges,” and the erasure of entire families as mere “collateral damage.” By design, this “functional framing” reduces human beings to mere casualty counts and transforms genocide into a sanitized tragedy.
The media has rendered Palestinian suffering an accidental byproduct, rather than the result of deliberate violence, through the use of the passive voice; in which verbs float free of actors, where lives “are lost,” hospitals “are destroyed,” and buildings “collapse.”
There have been a number of instances in which news outlets have issued directives explicitly instructing reporters to avoid using specific terms such as: occupied territory, refugee camps, ethnic cleansing, and particularly genocide and Palestine.
Journalists and media personalities have understood that straying from the approved Israeli narrative or foreign policy consensus meant career stagnation, professional blacklisting or outright termination.
This starvation of empathy has done more than misrepresent, it has constructed a permissive semantic structure, that covertly shields and absolves perpetrators of their crimes. It ensures that mass devastation is read not as a human catastrophe, but as an abstract, inevitable footnote of geopolitics.
The most damning indictment of the media’s failure is that the truth has survived not because of, but in spite of institutional journalism. The heavy burden of documenting the war has fallen on courageous Palestinian journalists, citizen chroniclers, and independent digital outlets reporting from inside the ruins, often at the cost of their lives. As of mid-2026, international organizations and press watchdogs report that more than 260 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza.
It is now widely recognized that in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, numerous media outlets rushed to publish unverified and sensationalized accounts of atrocities. Particularly egregious was the fake, often repeated narrative of “40 beheaded babies.” This fabrication, as well as the accusation of systematic mass rape—later debunked by independent journalists and international organizations – served a singular purpose: to generate the emotional and moral outrage necessary to justify Israel’s indiscriminate retaliation.
For decades, mainstream media has presented Palestinians as inherently menacing, less evolved and obstacles to U.S.-Israeli geopolitical ambitions. Consequently, they created the political conditions and domestic apathy that has allowed billions of dollars in weapons to flow unconditionally from Washington to Tel Aviv.
Following three years of unchecked Israeli devastation in Gaza and escalating violence in the occupied West Bank, some news organizations have finally begun to label Israel as the menace and core threat to regional peace.
Under the guise of objective neutrality, mainstream newsrooms have institutionalized a practice of “genocidal blindness” – the refusal to apply legal or historical definitions (as the International Court of Justice has) to the live-streamed destruction of a civilian population.
They have also prioritized official state denials over documented evidence gathered on the ground. By prioritizing political access and government-approved sourcing over accountability and truth, mainstream journalism has forfeited its ethical credibility.
True objectivity requires matching language to verified reality. Over time, however, the media have reduced an ancient-rooted society to a negligible footnote in a biblical or European romance.
The failure of the Fourth Estate to properly contextualize and to voice the outrage that the holocaust in Gaza deserves will be remembered as an historic betrayal of the public trust; a watershed moment signaling its eventual collapse.
Dr. Behnam is a political scientist who specializes in comparative politics with a focus on West Asia. His “Cultural Foundations of Iranian Politics,” published by University of Utah Press, and still in print, was recognized by Choice as Outstanding Academic Book for 1987–1988.
British foreign minister Ed Miliband has reaffirmed his commitment to Israel as it continues to perpetrate genocide in Gaza. Thomas Krych ZUMA Press Wire/Newscom
British foreign minister Ed Miliband on Tuesday announced plans to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
He called Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from their West Bank lands “ethnic cleansing” and finally accepted the 2024 International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is illegal.
But while his statement in Parliament – and a shorter video on X – were ostensibly about supporting Palestinians, they reveal that Britain’s overriding priority remains protecting Israel as a racist Jewish state.
Miliband begins not with Palestinians but with Israel, his attachment to it and Jewish feelings.
He promises several hundred million dollars to fight “anti-Semitism” – a much-abused term Israel and its lobby have redefined to mean opposition to Israel’s crimes and its racist ideology Zionism. He recalls idyllic childhood visits to Tel Aviv and picking oranges on a kibbutz, but does not mention that the “sanctuary” Israel gave his grandmother and other relatives was only made possible by the Nakba – the deliberate expulsion, under British supervision, of Palestine’s indigenous population to make way for European settlers such as Miliband’s family.
While young Ed was picking oranges, Israel was bombing Palestinian refugees, murdering Palestinian writers and poets and imposing apartheid across historic Palestine.
Pro-Zionist, anti-Palestinian
He proclaims himself “unwavering” in support of a state that has spent almost eight decades expelling, occupying, besieging and killing Palestinians – and the last three years perpetrating genocide.
Israel’s supposed “right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people” is sacred and beyond question.
Palestinians, meanwhile, appear mainly as objects of suffering whose future Britain and its allies are entitled to decide, including by admonishing the collaborationist Palestinian Authority to “accelerate reform” – whatever that means.
Miliband repeatedly condemns Hamas, demands that it disarm and bars it from any role in Gaza’s future. He makes no comparable demand that Israel dismantle the army that continues to destroy Gaza and carry out daily massacres there.
Nor does he deign to tell Israel which of its blood-soaked leaders can hold office.
Effectively justifying genocide, Miliband asserts that 7 October “makes plain the grave threats that Israel faces” and that it “has every right to defend itself.”
Echoing Trumpian neocon propaganda, he claims falsely that “Iran continues to threaten Israel and Jews across the world” – when it was Israel that bombed a synagogue in Tehran during the US-Israeli war of aggression, the second such unprovoked attack in less than a year.
Miliband also vows more British sanctions against Lebanese resistance organization Hizballah, which he mislabels as an Iranian “proxy,” as if Lebanese people have no right or interest to defend their land against Israeli massacres and occupation.
The UK foreign minister’s efforts to swaddle his mild sanctions in love for Israel were – as expected – to no avail. Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar swiftly announced retaliation, including the closure of Britain’s consulate in occupied East Jerusalem and travel bans on British officials.
Supporting genocide
Substantive discussion of Gaza is buried deep in the statement, after Miliband’s declarations of love for Israel and lengthy discussion of West Bank settlements.
Even then, he begins by repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda, claiming that on 7 October: “Men, women, children and babies killed, mutilated, and tortured by Hamas terrorists.”
In Gaza, Miliband acknowledges mass killing, deliberate deprivation, forced displacement and wholesale destruction. He notes that more than 70,000 people have been killed, including at least 20,000 children.
Yet he refuses to call it genocide, despite repeated declarations by Israeli leaders that their goal is to destroy Gaza and expel its people.
Instead, Miliband claims Britain must await a final judgment from an international court. This is cowardly and depraved political evasion dressed up as respect for law. Under the Genocide Convention, governments must act once a serious risk is apparent – not after a court confirms the extermination has occurred. Britain does not await final judgments before naming alleged international crimes when the accused is an official enemy. Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared unequivocally that President Vladimir Putin and his army were “committing war crimes.”
British police are investigating alleged war crimes in Ukraine while arresting thousands of British citizens for opposing genocide in Gaza.
Miliband himself called Russia’s intervention in Ukraine “illegal,” although no international court has ruled it so.
Nor does he promise to end British military support for Israel. He refers to suspended arms licenses and restrictions on exports that “materially contribute to the occupation” – a vague standard if ever there was one – but announces no comprehensive arms embargo, end to military cooperation or halt to British assistance enabling Israel’s crimes, including ongoing British military overflights of Gaza shrouded in official secrecy. Miliband offers no plan to identify, arrest and prosecute Israeli officials and soldiers responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, or any pledge to arrest the already indicted war crimes fugitives Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.
Israeli perpetrators are not threatened with the “full force” of British sanctions. Miliband reserves that language only for those involved in settlements.
Rescuing racist Israel
This, apparently, is the post-Keir Starmer reset – the “better” policy Prime Minister Andy Burnham promised after admitting Labour “didn’t get it right” on Gaza.
The reality was exposed before Miliband spoke. Bloomberg reported that British diplomats had privately assured Washington the measures were “largely symbolic” and would have no material impact on Britain’s wider trade or security relationship with Israel.
Burnham’s PR push is likely meant to placate angry Labour voters without disturbing the relationship sustaining Israeli apartheid and genocide and the regime of Jewish supremacy these crimes perpetuate.
The narrow focus on settlements reflects the real purpose – candidly stated by Miliband – of rescuing the so-called two-state solution.
This “solution” offers Palestinians disconnected enclaves under permanent Israeli military, economic and political domination – the equivalent of apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans. They would be expected to call these fragments a state, renounce their right to return and accept Israel’s permanent existence as a Jewish supremacist entity.
Consequently, Western governments treat settlements as a deviation from an otherwise legitimate Israel, rather than one expression of a brutal settler-colonial project founded on mass expulsion.
Their disagreement with Israel is only over how much Palestinians should be dispossessed.
Israel’s government and much of its Jewish population support total dispossession, including through mass expulsion and extermination, to take over all of historic Palestine.
By contrast, Britain and other Western governments believe that the Zionist theft of 78 percent of the land of the Palestinians in 1948 should be enough. Canada, France and several other European countries are joining Britain for the same reason.
Their joint official statement explicitly says the objective is to “protect” the two-state solution.
This is coordinated action to rescue a segregation plan, not end Israel’s racism. That is why Miliband can recognize an imaginary “State of Palestine” and condemn settlements while maintaining his “unwavering” support for Israel and proclaiming: “I wholeheartedly oppose the boycott, divestment, sanctions or BDS campaign.”
Miliband says the British will no longer be “bystanders.” But that has never been the case. Britain will continue protecting Israeli apartheid, rejecting meaningful pressure and refusing to name the genocide it enables.
This is not solidarity with Palestinians. It is just the latest Western attempt to rescue the genocidal Jewish supremacist state that Britain created.
(Photo credit: Laure Boyer / Hans Lucas)
Crowds in Manhattan watch smoke billowing from the World Trade Centre, September 11 2001
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