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.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry has described accusations of Iranian involvement in various security incidents, including the suspected plot on the RAF Fairford airbase in the UK, as a “raft made of lies”.
“False flags are an old craft: manufacture the incident, assign the blame and harvest the consequences,” Iranian Foreign Minister spokesman Esmaeil Baqeai said in a social media post.
As the international public grows sceptical of “an unlawful war of aggression against Iran, and where the aggressors have no honest way to justify a war of choice, even a raft made of lies can look like salvation to those who are drowning,” Baqeai said.
Yesterday, we reported that UK police arrested a 22-year-old British national on suspicion of a “terror” offence. The arrest was linked to a security incident near the UK airbase that hosted US warplanes used in the Iran war.
False flags are an old craft: manufacture the incident, assign the blame, and harvest the consequences.
In a world where the American and international public is weary of an unlawful war of aggression against Iran, and where the aggressors have no honest way to justify a war of… pic.twitter.com/RNKTilUrTv
Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin, the leader of Israel’s Zehut party, who has a clear path to a seat in the Knesset in the upcoming election, has said in a new interview that it would be “moral” to kill babies in Gaza.
Feiglin made headlines last year when he declared that every child and every baby in Gaza is the “enemy,” a viewpoint he doubled down on in an English-language interview that was published by The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
Feiglin said in the interview that he personally doesn’t want to see babies killed even though he thinks it is “morally” the right thing to do, and that he would prefer all Palestinians to be expelled from Gaza instead.
“I’m saying again again because I’m Jewish and I guess I’m a bit a little bit weak morally. I don’t want to see babies killed, okay? Morally, that should have been done, because of everything I explained. So, but because … I’m Jewish with a soft heart, I would open the borders and let them all go, but no one can stay. And it has to be a part of the Jewish land, Jewish state,” he said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Feiglin said it was “100%” a Jewish point of view to “wipe out” Gaza, expel all the Palestinians, and annex Gaza and the West Bank. He labeled all of Gaza as the “enemy,” not just Hamas.
“The baby that would be born — I’ll say something very tough now, excuse me for saying it — the baby that will be born tomorrow in Gaza, the Arab baby. Notice I’m not saying Hamas, I’m not saying Palestinian … the enemy is Gaza, not Hamas. The baby that will be born in Gaza tomorrow will do exactly the same — God forbid — to your baby that would be born in Jerusalem,” he said.
Feiglin served in the Knesset from 2013 to 2015 as a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and founded Zehut in 2015. Zehut is now running on a joint electoral list with Religious Zionism, the party led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, another outspoken proponent of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Feiglin holds the No. 2 spot on the joint list, and recent polling has shown the alliance clearing the electoral threshold needed to win seats in the Knesset.
‘It will take generations to recover from the harm that has already been done over the past three years,’ MSF says
ฤฐlayda รakฤฑrtekin, AA.com,
05 October 2026
ฤฐSTANBUL
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Monday that Israel was continuing its genocide in Gaza and was “progressively asphyxiating” the region, urging governments to take immediate action.
In a statement, MSF said the conditions for the people’s survival were being “systematically destroyed” through sustained violence, “deliberate” blockade of essential supplies and the destruction of healtcare as well as infrastructure.
“In the past year, the physical trapping of people in Gaza has been made increasingly definitive by the establishment of Israel’s Yellow Line,” the French medical charity said.
Recalling that it was originally presented as temporary, MSF noted that the line is now reinforced by military positions, berms and ongoing demolitions while it has continued to move west, “squeezing people into a smaller and smaller area.”
MSF said people risk being shot by Israeli forces when approaching the area, while its teams continue to treat those wounded by gunfire nearby.
“The Yellow Line cannot be treated simply as a line on a map,” said Amande Bazerolle, MSF head of emergency response in Gaza. “It has become a mechanism of encirclement and ethnic cleansing, while cutting communities off from the infrastructure, healthcare, water and other essentials they need to survive.”
MSF said violence was not only confined to the areas around the “Yellow Line,” reporting having treated over 1,200 cases of violent trauma across Gaza in June and July alone.
It recalled that MSF teams treated more than 200,000 trauma cases over the past three years while Israel’s military offensive killed over 74,000 people.
The organization said overcrowding and limited access to clean water, sanitation, shelter and healthcare are contributing to the spread of disease. Its teams also treated over 11,000 skin disease cases and 1,500 chickenpox cases in June and July.
It also pointed to the dramatic deterioration of access to healthcare over the past three years as hospitals run out of basic supplies and patients unable to access essential medicines and treatment.
“Restrictions on essential supplies, such as engine oil and spare parts, are also crippling the infrastructure needed to keep hospitals, ambulances and water systems running, with generators already breaking down and water-trucking operations reduced,” the statement said.
It added that the crisis is not limited to Gaza as violent occupier attacks, military operation and raids on homes, displacements as well as home demolitions escalated rapidly across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
“It will take generations to recover from the harm that has already been done over the past three years, and in the preceding decades, while the excruciating consequences of Israel’s ongoing genocide are still being felt every day,” Bazerolle said.
She warned that Israel carried out destruction, displacement and deprivation “with impunity” while such practices became “normalised.”
“Governments must act now to ensure Israel stops the destruction and killing, prevents ethnic cleansing, and stops denying Palestinians the means of survival,” Bazerolle added.
In this photograph released by the U.S. Navy, military planes stand on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, July 4, 2024, in the South China Sea. [AP Photo/Seaman Ryan Holloway]
The events of the past week leave no doubt that the Trump administration, w complicity of the entire US political establishment, is preparing a major escalation of the Iran war. Having failed to achieve its objectives through a massive bombardment and then a blockade of the country, the White House is preparing a new and desperate gambit, potentially involving the deployment of ground troops or even the use of nuclear weapons.With the complicity of media and Democrats, Trump prepares major escalation of Iran war
The greatest danger is the chasm between the scale of what is being prepared and the public’s awareness of it. One month before the 2026 midterm elections, Trump’s conspiracy to escalate the war is being greeted with a wall of silence by the US media—which devoted just minutes to the war in this weekend’s Sunday talk shows—and by the Democratic Party, which has done nothing to alert the public to the renewed onslaught against Iran that the administration is preparing.
On September 22, US President Donald Trump threatened in his speech before the United Nations to “annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly.” His threat followed a secret White House meeting, reported by the journalist Seymour Hersh on June 10, at which Trump spoke “about a nuclear option that could perhaps bring a quicker end to the war.”
These threats cannot be dismissed as bluster. Trump is the president of the United States and has already killed thousands of people in the months-long bombardment of Iran. The forces now converging on the Persian Gulf give him the means to carry out his threats. Nothing would be more dangerous than complacency.
After seven months of war, US imperialism has failed to achieve its aims of dominating the Strait of Hormuz, militarily defeating Iran and overthrowing its government. The administration is improvising, desperately seeking a way out of the political disaster the war has produced. But its improvisation is driven by the logic of events. American imperialism cannot accept defeat in the Persian Gulf, and each failure becomes the basis for an ever-greater escalation.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press reported that the White House had sent a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East. The USS Theodore Roosevelt left San Diego on September 27, followed the next day by the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island with about 2,200 Marines. They will join the carrier USS George Washington and more than 50,000 US troops deployed across the region.
Trump “has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms,” the Journal reported September 25. He was briefed in August on opti
The US Coast Guard said Friday that its forces intercepted a ship that was attempting to bring fuel to Cuba, as the US continues to enforce a ramped-up oil embargo on the country, which has caused a devastating humanitarian crisis.
The Coast Guard said that the incident occurred in early September, when a “Coast Guard tactical team” boarded the M/V Grace, a 300-foot-long container ship, in the Caribbean Sea.
Photo of the interception released by the Coast Guard
The Coast Guard said it then escorted the ship to Mexico, where Mexican authorities found fuel stored in the ship’s ballast tanks. It said that earlier in the summer, US Coast Guard personnel stopped and boarded the M/V Jaira Provider, another vessel it accused of carrying fuel bound for Cuba.
The Trump administration ramped up the oil embargo on Cuba after it attacked Venezuela to abduct President Nicolas Maduro in January, which gave the US the power to cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to the island nation. The US also pressured Mexico to end its oil exports to Cuba.
The embargo has caused daily blackouts, which have been detrimental to the civilian population of Cuba. Cuban doctors told The New York Times back in March that patients were dying due to the US blockade, as the conditions at hospitals caused by the fuel shortages were leading to preventable deaths.
The escalated blockade has come with threats and preparations for military action against Cuba. CBS Newsrecently reported that the US Military has been working to establish “the groundwork for potential action around Cuba.”
The USS Theodore Roosevelt, left, and the USS Carl M. Levin prepare for a refueling in the Pacific Ocean, Nov. 16, 2025. [Photo: Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Aaron Haro Gonzalez ]
The Trump administration is sending the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and three amphibious warships carrying about 2,000 Marines to the Middle East. The ships will reinforce the US forces arrayed against Iran with as many as 10,000 sailors and Marines, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing US officials.
The deployment follows US President Donald Trump’s threat before the UN General Assembly on September 22 to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly” and to “drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations.” Two days later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the General Assembly that Iran’s “murderous regime will be toppled,” declaring: “This evil regime will fall, and we will all celebrate that day.”
The buildup puts the White House on a course to massively accelerate the war following the US midterm elections on November 3, which are expected to reflect the overwhelming unpopularity of the war among workers and young people. But while the Democrats may be the beneficiaries of the elections, they have pledged, like Trump, to ensure the subjugation of Iran to American interests.
The Journal reported September 25 that Trump “has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms.” The Journal wrote Thursday, citing US officials, that the ships would arrive by late November.
Bloomberg, citing a US official, wrote that the deployment “gives American commanders more options if President Donald Trump chooses to escalate attacks on Iran.”
Axios quoted a US official Thursday as saying the region “could potentially have up to three aircraft carrier strike groups. This is much more firepower.”
The Roosevelt sailed from San Diego on Sunday, and the USS Makin Island amphibious group followed on Monday. Whether the Roosevelt will add to the carriers already in the region or replace one of them has not been decided, Axios reported, citing a second official. The United States already has more than 50,000 troops in the region.
In recent weeks the Trump administration has also sent two more Patriot missile batteries to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Axios reported Thursday, to protect energy facilities “in case President Trump decides to resume major combat operations against Iran.”
On Thursday, as he left the White House, Trump said: “They’ll either sign a very fair deal, or they won’t exist any longer,” The Hill reported.
In an interview with Time magazine conducted Monday and published Thursday, Trump was asked whether he would “ramp up bombing after the midterms.” He answered: “Possible.”
Pressed again, Trump said: “We have a lot of weapons. You know, we’ve been stocking up for the last six months.” Reminded of his threat at the UN to “annihilate” Iran, he said: “Yeah, I would do that. It’s possible.”
Dominant sections of the US media are agitating for an escalation of the war.
In an editorial headlined “The Battle of Hormuz Is Turning,” the Journal’s editors declared Thursday that the US military had “turned around the battle of the Strait of Hormuz.” They wrote: “This is what progress looks like: Iran’s oil is blocked while the world’s oil increasingly gets through.”
The editorial concluded: “The challenge now is to sustain the pressure and push the US tactical advantage to accomplish strategic objectives—finishing the nuclear program or the regime itself.”
At least five tankers have come under attack in or near the Strait since Monday, the shipping news site Riviera reported Friday. On Thursday the Kuwaiti supertanker Kazimah III caught fire after it was struck by what the UK Maritime Trade Operations center called “an unknown projectile.”
The US Navy has blockaded Iran’s ports since July. By Wednesday it had redirected 125 commercial ships, according to the US military, and on September 26 Trump boasted that the blockade was “a wall of steel.”
Reuters reported Thursday, citing three senior Iranian officials and an insider, that Iran is preparing “a broader and more forceful response if the United States resumes large-scale military attacks.” According to the news agency, “Senior commanders are reviewing plans to expand potential targets beyond US-linked assets to countries that support US military operations and possibly to locations outside the Middle East.”
Official figures compiled by Al Jazeera count at least 3,527 people killed in Iran by US and Israeli bombing between February 28, when the two powers launched the war, and August 28. By September 28, the US military had counted 19 American service members dead and 861 wounded.
Leading Democrats spent the past week attacking Trump for losing the war and for “weakness” toward China.
Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona told CNN on Wednesday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should be “figuring out how to win this war in Iran.”
Democratic Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts accused Trump of losing the war in an interview with CNN on September 25. Trump, he said, had sent Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping a message “of appeasement and weakness.”
In remarks on Capitol Hill about Xi’s state visit last week, aired Sunday on “Fox News Sunday,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut denounced Trump for “feting and celebrating Xi while he is aiding Iran, which is trying to kill our sons and daughters.” He said he was “shocked and deeply alarmed that the president, in effect, is kowtowing to him and failing to release the money that Taiwan needs to defend itself.”
Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, interviewed Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” declared: “We can’t leave the Strait in the hands of the Iranians.”
The buildup against Iran is proceeding alongside the escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia, which Moscow has answered with the threat to use nuclear weapons if NATO moves to cut off Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.
“Russia would be ready to use all its arsenal, including nuclear weapons, to defend its territory if NATO countries try to isolate Kaliningrad region from the rest of the country,” the Russian embassy in Ireland wrote on September 29.
Russian President Vladimir Putin repeated the threat Thursday at the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Russian foreign-policy forum. “If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation—in this case, Kaliningrad, although it could potentially involve other territories as well—the question of Russia using all the weapons at its disposal would inevitably and immediately arise,” he said.
Asked about Russia’s warning at a Euronews conference in Brussels on Wednesday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte responded: “We will defend every inch of NATO territory.”
The World Socialist Web Site is the voice of the working class and the leadership of the international socialist movement. We rely entirely on the support of our readers. Please donate today!
In front of the court building, activists gathered for a solidarity rally before the start of the trial against five pro-Palestine activists, holding a banner reading, “Free the Ulm 5, shut elbit down” on April 27, 2026 in Baden-Wรผrttemberg, Stuttgart, Germany.
(Photo by Julian Rettig/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The trial of five Palestinian rights activists, now approaching its final stage, has exposed for all to see not only Germany’s increasingly neofascist playbook for silencing dissent but complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Germany is a country with a long and complex relationship to authoritarianism. It is also of course the country that gave birth to the most evil political regime, Nazism, in the modern era.
The Allies agreed on the denazification of Germany as a goal after the end of World War II, but the general consensus is that it wasn’t a success. Some high-ranking Nazis were put on trial and sentenced to death, others were removed from public positions, but the majority of Nazis were reintegrated into postwar German society and even landed high-ranking positions.
Now, Germany is again displaying worrying signs of authoritarianism, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. However, Germany’s love affair with authoritarian rule runs deeper than the current surge of the AfD. Its legal and judicial system has become notorious for its restrictions on freedom of speech and its penchant for framing dissent “not as a democratic expression but as a threat to public order.”
The treatment of the Ulm5 young activists is in clear violation of European human rights law.
The Ulm5 trial underway in Stuttgart, and now approaching its final stage, has exposed for all to see not only Germany’s increasingly neofascist playbook for silencing dissent but complicity in Israel’s genocide.
In the early hours of September 8, 2025, five young pro-Palestinian activists broke into the German branch of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems in Ulm, southern Germany. Once inside, they broke windows and destroyed furniture and technical equipment. They also sprayed slogans on the walls, such as “Free Palestine” and “Germany finances, Israel bombs.” No one was injured in the attack, and the activists not only remained on site but called the police themselves and waited to be arrested.
Since their arrest, the five activists—Daniel Tatlow-Devally (an Irish citizen), Leandra Rollo (a Spanish-Argentinian citizen), Crow Tricks and Zo Hailu (British citizens), and Vi Kovarbasic (a German citizen)—have been held in separate prisons and under highly degrading conditions. They are subjected to solitary confinement conditions lasting 23 hours a day, with just a couple of very short family visits per month. Irish politicians who visited Daniel Tatlow-Devally in prison were shocked by what they witnessed.
The Ulm5 activists are being treated like terrorists; in fact, they are being treated in a similar fashion as were the kidnappers, bank robbers, and murderers of the militant “Red Army Faction” group during their arrest in the 1970s. It is thus no coincidence that the trial of the Ulm5 activists is being held at Stuttgart-Stammheim, the very venue where the terrorist trials of the 1970s were held.
The defense team of Ulm5 has asked repeatedly why the trial is being held at high-security Stuttgart-Stammheim courthouse when the five defendants merely caused property damage without anyone being hurt, but no answer has been provided. Yet the answer is clear. It’s because German authorities treat Palestinesolidarity as support for terrorism. In the eyes of current German laws, especially in connection with the long-standing political assertion that “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’รฉtat,” the genocidal party must, by necessity, be protected and those who protest against its crimes must, by extension, be treated as nothing more than criminals or plain terrorists.
Conveniently enough, the Ulm5 pro-Palestinian activists are being charged under Section 129 of the German Criminal Law, which is directed toward ordinary organized crime and criminalizes “whosoever forms an organization, the objectives or activities of which are directed toward the commission of crimes, or whoever participates in such an organization as a member, recruits for it, or supports it.” Section 129 has two components. Subsection (a) is labeled “forming terrorist organizations” and applies to “whosoever forms an organization whose aims or activities are directed at the commission of murder… or genocide… or crime against humanity… or a war crime;” subsection (b) is directed toward any person or organization whose aim is to cause “serious physical or mental harm to another person;” commit offenses against the environment; and commit offenses under the provisions of the Weapons of War Act.
If anything, 129a applies to Israel for carrying out genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Israel’s crimes against Palestinians have been well documented by scores of international bodies and international human rights organizations while many Holocaust scholars, including Israeli organizations, have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza should be treated as a case of genocide. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups also committed crimes against humanity on October 7, according to international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch.
Charging the Ulm5 pro-Palestine activists under Criminal Code Section 129 is a criminal act in itself by the German authorities. It shows that Germany is unwilling to tolerate any dissent or protest and will employ the repressive apparatus of the state to the possible maximum extent in order accomplish this goal. Indeed, this is not the first time that Criminal Code Section 129 has been used to suppress protests. A nationwide raid was carried out in May 2023 against the climate change protest group “Last Generation” after, ironically enough, the parliamentary body of the AfD had called on the Federal Government to examine the conditions for a ban on the organization, alleging that it was in violation of the constitutional order. And in March 2025 German public prosecutors filed charges against five members of the group for “forming a criminal organization.”
In Berlin alone, more than 3,000 climate activists have been sentenced over the past few years, according to the German newspaper Die Zeit.
Both climate activists and pro-Palestinian activists are being thoroughly pursued in Germany by its police state. Marginalized groups in cities like Berlin and elsewhere are also feeling “the politics of extreme policing,” as Berlin-based journalist and author Hanno Hauenstein put it.
The grotesque Ulm5 trial has multiple critical hearings scheduled for the month of October (the trial is slated to end in January 2027) as prosecutors seek to convict the young activists with being members of a criminal organization, which carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. The defendants are always handcuffed when they walk into the courtroom and are held in a bullet-proof glass cage.
This is an image straight out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. Or perhaps what one might have expected to see with the AfD in power. But it’s all quite revealing of how far contemporary Germany has gone into becoming once again a police state. And if this state of affairs has become again “normal” in mainstream German society, it is nonetheless an utterly disgraceful situation for the rest of Europe. The treatment of the Ulm5 young activists is in clear violation of European human rights law, as the defense lawyer of one of the accused young activists has already argued, and using the Criminal Code 129 to target protest movements and activists is plain fascism.
It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits.
It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do.
Many people said we wouldn’t last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong.
Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work.
But here’s the urgent message from me today. It’s never been this bad out there. And it’s never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever.
We don’t accept corporate advertising and never will. We don’t have a paywall because we don’t think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you.
When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we.
Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives?
—Craig Brown, Co-founder
about:blank
about:blank
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in US politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers, and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021); Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2023); and A Livable Future Is Possible: Confronting the Threats to Our Survival (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2024).
