Democracy gone Astray: 10/01/2023

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

‘There’s just no excitement’: Retail politics takes a nosedive in a Trump-dominated campaign

If the Republican presidential primary this year is putting you half to sleep, you’re not alone. And it’s not just because Donald Trump is running away with the nomination.

Operatives and party activists in key early voting states say they can’t recall a recent cycle in which they had such little interaction with candidates.

There are the anecdotes: Over the Labor Day weekend, the unofficial start of the fall campaign, not a single candidate stepped foot in Iowa. Several weeks later, the first weekend of autumn passed with zero candidates making a stop in any state.

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — A massive blast rocked a Gaza City hospital packed with wounded and other Palestinians seeking shelter Tuesday, killing hundreds of people, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said. Hamas blamed an Israeli airstrike, while the Israeli military said the hospital was hit by a rocket misfired by Palestinian militants.

The health ministry said at least 500 people had been killed. Video that The Associated Press confirmed was from the hospital showed fire engulfing the building and the hospital’s grounds strewn with torn bodies, many of them young children. Around them in the grass were blankets, school backpacks and other belongings.

The U.K.’s top defense official repeatedly declined to second President Joe Biden’s comment that an Israeli occupation of Gaza would be “a big mistake.”

In an interview Tuesday evening, British Secretary of State for Defense Grant Shapps was given multiple opportunities to agree with Biden’s remark on “60 Minutes.” The president said that Israel had every right to defend itself and target Hamas during a ground invasion of the enclave. But he warned that Israeli forces shouldn’t stay behind after uprooting the militant group to control Gaza’s 2.3 million people.

BEIRUT — Iran-backed militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah are closely coordinating their next steps in fighting against Israel, a senior Hamas representative in Lebanon told POLITICO on Tuesday, just hours after Tehran warned of “preemptive action” against Israel.

Ahmed Abdul-Hadi, the head of Hamas’ political bureau in Beirut, insisted Gaza-based Hamas had not given its ally Hezbollah any advance notice of its attacks against Israel on October 7, which killed more than 1,400 people. Despite this, however, he described a continual cooperation between the two groups, stressing Hezbollah was now “geared for a major war” against Israel in the north, while Hamas would burst Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “dream” of driving it out of Gaza.

Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi is promoting emergency regulations that would allow him to direct police to arrest civilians, remove them from their homes, or seize their property if he believes they have spread information that could “harm national morale” during Israel’s ongoing war against Palestinians in Gaza.

These emergency regulations, titled “Limiting Aid to the Enemy through Communication,” would apply to the general public as well as local and foreign media reporters. The regulations would empower Karhi to order police to arrest journalists, halt media broadcasts, and confiscate a media outlet’s output if he views it as “enemy propaganda” or harmful to national security and public order. These regulations would apply to both inaccurate and factual reporting.

My husband and I are 100 percent Palestinian from Gaza. We live in diaspora in the United States with my 5-month-old daughter. My husband’s entire immediate family is in Gaza. They live in the now-devastated Rimal neighborhood and are among the hundreds of thousands internally displaced in Gaza within the past seven days. This displacement is both due to airstrikes flattening more than 1,300 residential structures in Gaza, and due to the evacuation order issued October 13 to over 1 million people to flee the north for the south of Gaza.

Jim Jordan’s allies attempted to badger House Republicans into making him speaker. Those tactics backfired on Tuesday, and could soon doom his speakership push outright.

The Ohio Republican’s most vocal GOP defectors during Tuesday’s failed speaker vote said they were pressured to back Jordan by party bosses back home and national conservatives with big megaphones. Most of those skeptics viewed it as a coordinated push with a threatening theme: Vote for Jordan — or else.

Imagine being in Sderot, Israel, and hearing Hamas rockets land near your home. You’re scared; you instantly take mental stock of your family members’ location. Then you hear gunfire. Screaming. You recognise a scream. A few minutes later you’re holding your daughter’s corpse. She’s still warm and will be for a while yet, but she is dead. A Hamas bullet severed her subclavian artery, and that was that. You pray out loud, essentially singing, to trade places with her. It doesn’t work. She is dead. You are alive. You want to die. You won’t.

Donald Trump’s decision to declassify evidence given by a former British spy about the former US president’s alleged links with Russia led to the disappearance of two Russian sources, according to a court document.

Christopher Steele, who used to run MI6’s Russia desk, compiled the notorious “Steele dossier” investigating Trump’s connections to Russia. In a witness statement released on Tuesday, Steele said publication of his testimony to the Mueller investigation on the matter, originally classified secret, was an “egregious and reckless act” that “served no purpose other than to expose me and Orbis [Steele’s company], our sources and our methods”.

Hundreds of people are reported to have been killed in a massive explosion at a crowded hospital in Gaza City, in the biggest single loss of life in the blockaded territory in all the five wars between Hamas and Israel since the militants took over the strip in 2007.

The Gaza health ministry, which is run by Hamas, said at least 500 people were killed on Tuesday night in what it said was an Israeli airstrike on al-Ahli al-Arabi, also known as the Baptist hospital. A spokesperson for the Gaza civil defence put the number of killed at about 300.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have underscored their countries’ strong ties ahead of an international forum in Beijing, saying that continuing “geopolitical tensions” due to the war in Ukraine do not affect their relationship.

“Despite the fact that in the current geopolitical conditions, the possibilities for keeping contact and developing relations are very limited, it cannot but cause satisfaction that our ties with many European countries are maintained and developed,” Putin said, according to Russian news agencies.

“One of those countries is Hungary.”

Hundreds of people have been killed in an Israeli air raid on a hospital in the besieged Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian authorities.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Tuesday that at least 500 people were killed in the attack on al-Ahli Arab Hospital in central Gaza.

The Hamas group, which governs the Palestinian territory, said the attack was a “war crime”.

Images shared on social media appeared to show fire engulfing the building, widespread damage and bodies scattered in the wreckage.

On Saturday, October 7, Noura* went to work as usual early in the morning at the hospital in Israel where she’s been employed for more than two years.

The Palestinian health care professional had taken a quick glance at the news, but in the rush to make it to work in time, she had not fully understood the magnitude of what was happening in the country: an attack by the Palestinian armed group Hamas on southern Israel that would leave at least 1,300 people in Israel dead. In response, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has launched a deadly bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 2,300 Palestinians, and enforced a complete siege on the enclave, blocking supplies of food, medicines and fuel. A ground invasion appears imminent.

Deir el-Balah, Gaza — On the eighth day, my family and I awoke still in shock, finding ourselves in a new location within the Gaza Strip, the town of Deir el-Balah in the south of the enclave.

The harrowing scenes from the previous day remained etched in our minds. During the early hours of the previous day, while intense bombings continued to shake Gaza, journalists in WhatsApp groups began discussing rumours of Israeli calls for residents of the northern and central Gaza Strip to evacuate southwards.

Some journalists initially dismissed this as Israeli psychological warfare meant to intimidate people.

Ramallah, occupied West Bank – Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip are facing a “real catastrophe”, United Nations officials warn, as Israel’s heaviest bombardment of the occupied enclave rages on for the 11th consecutive day.

In a report on Tuesday, the UN said the Israeli army continued pounding southern areas despite previously telling residents to move south ahead of a looming offensive by land, air and sea on the tiny coastal strip of land.

It also stressed that “water remains a key issue as people will start dying without water”, a warning that came hours after the World Health Organization said there are only “24 hours of water, electricity and fuel left” in Gaza.

Regional efforts are under way for the passage of much-needed humanitarian aid into Gaza via the Rafah crossing, with the United States expected to hold talks with Israel, which blocked the crossing linking Gaza to Egypt in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack.

Hundreds of tonnes of necessary supplies from several countries and NGOs have lined up in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula just south of Gaza as the besieged enclave reels from non-stop Israeli air strikes.

The enclave of 2.3 million people suffers from shortages of food, water, and fuel, as well as critical medical care for residents wounded in the indiscriminate bombardment for the last 11 days.

On October 12, after days of bombardments, the Israeli government ordered 1.1 million Palestinians living in the north of the Gaza Strip, which includes Gaza City, the most populated urban area, to move to the south of the besieged territory. It promised that for a 24-hour window, the roads would be safe for those wanting to flee the impending ground invasion. Many began to move towards the south immediately on foot, others climbed onto trucks and the “lucky ones” packed up their cars.

Israel has been bombing the roads in the northern part of the Strip for days, making any evacuation attempt slow and arduous. Worse yet, there were reports of the Israeli government breaking its promise and targeting convoys moving towards the south. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, an Israeli strike on the Salah al-Din Road, a main thoroughfare in the overcrowded territory temporarily declared “safe” by the Israeli military, killed 70 people attempting to flee towards the south on October 13.

Dressed in a T-shirt bearing her missing granddaughter, Roni Eshel’s, smiling face, Zehava Eshel addressed a crowd of protesters gathered in front of the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv. “The country was supposed to protect her,” she said, her voice hoarse.

The Israeli military have labelled 19-year-old Roni Eshel, an IDF soldier stationed at a base near the kibbutz of Nahal Oz, as a missing person. All that the Eshel family know is that Roni last texted her mother from a friend’s phone in the early hours of Saturday 7 October, during the unprecedented incursion by Hamas militants that has so far left more than 1,300 Israelis dead.

Since then, Zehava Eshel said, the family has heard very little.

Joe Biden’s high-stakes visit to the Middle East to avert an all-out war raises serious questions about the level and nature of the president’s previous engagement in the region.

Just as Israel suffered a total intelligence breakdown over the horrific Hamas attacks, diplomats stand charged with their own collective system failure, at the heart of which was treating the Palestinian issue as best managed, not solved.

While the EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, said “the world has failed miserably” in the Middle East, the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was forced to deny the Biden team took its eye off the ball, when asked about his claim three weeks ago that the region was “quieter” than it had been in two decades.

Gaza diary part three: ‘Now I am writing condolence messages just using autocomplete’

Sunday 15 October

12.30am My sister receives a phone call from her friend who is living abroad. With the poor internet connection, our loved ones are making international calls just to check on us. They talk for almost an hour, both of them crying. Their conversation is mainly about the guilt my sister’s friend is feeling due to being away from her, and my sister telling her how much stronger she feels because of her support.

Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) on Monday envisioned a short House speakership for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) should he gain enough support to win the leadership role.

McCaskill told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace it was “astounding” that House Republicans want to elevate Jordan, who played a key role in Donald Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, to the top job.

NEW YORK — The progressive third party that lent its cavalry to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s election win last year is vowing a “robust ground game” to help New York Democrats flip House seats next year.

And the New York Working Families Party is plotting its 2024 strategy under new leadership, POLITICO reported exclusively Monday.

Ana María Archila and Jasmine Gripper — co-founder of Make the Road New York and executive director of Alliance for Quality Education, respectively — will helm the state party as its first-ever co-directors. They will fill a vacancy created in May after Sochie Nnaemeka stepped down when they start next month.

LONDON — A lawyer for Donald Trump told a London judge Monday the ex-president plans to prove that “shocking and scandalous claims” about him in a largely discredited report by a former British spy were false and harmed his reputation.

Trump has sued the company founded by Christopher Steele, who created a dossier in 2016 that contained rumors and uncorroborated allegations about Trump that erupted in a political storm just before he was inaugurated. Trump is seeking damages from Orbis Business Intelligence for allegedly violating British data protection laws.

Ah Man*, 28, was forced to leave Hong Kong at the end of 2020 after being arrested at the height of the pro-democracy protests, when millions took to the streets in defiance of the growing influence of Beijing.

But the UK has felt anything but a safe haven for the former Hongkonger after a string of incidents involving Chinese activists.

In 2021, pro-democracy campaigners were reportedly attacked in Chinatown, central London; again in 2022 outside the Chinese consulate in Manchester; and once more this summer in Southampton.

But something in the news this week made him even sicker: The notion of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) becoming the next House speaker.

Colbert pretended to get the heaves as he talked about the possibility.

“Gosh, got a little nauseous,” he said, covering his mouth for effect. “And I don’t think it’s the COVID.”

The Israeli government and many of its high-profile supporters have falsely claimed that Hamas published footage of a doll and suggested it was a child killed by Israel’s military, according to a Palestinian journalist who published the video.

“Hamas accidentally posted a video of a doll (yes a doll) suggesting that it was a part of casualties caused by an IDF attack,” Israel’s main Instagram page claimed Friday. That post received more than 52,000 “likes,” and a similar post from the country’s page on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, received more than 1.3 million views, according to both sites’ public-facing metrics.

The cataclysm that you and I are witnessing in Gaza is a genocide in the awful making.

It is not an “onslaught”. It is not an “invasion”. It is not even a “war”. It is a genocide.

The apocalyptic scenes and sounds in Gaza are proof that a cruel, occupying army is intent on achieving its overarching aim: the annihilation of what remains of an already shattered slice of land and the indiscriminate killing of helpless, exhausted children, women and men.

Over decades, a succession of immune Israeli governments and their useful proxies, the rampaging settler militias, have waged incremental genocide, bit by bit, with the explicit approval, consent, and encouragement of Western governments – who, in a predictable show of performative solidarity with a ruthless ally – have bathed their tourist attractions in blue and white or the Star of David.

The Israeli call for civilians to evacuate the northern half of the Gaza Strip does not seem to have produced the desired results as of yet.

Nobody knows what the primary intention of the announcement made on Friday was, but whatever it was, it fell short of anything that could be called full Israeli success.

Israel has been in near-constant armed conflict with Palestinians since that state was proclaimed in 1948. For three-quarters of a century, the two sides have been trying to outsmart and outgun each other. The first step in that is to know one’s enemy.

At least two more Navy ships carrying thousands of Marines are heading to the Israeli coast to help in any potential U.S. response to the fighting on the ground between Hamas and Israel, two Defense Department officials said Monday evening.

The USS Bataan Amphibious Ready Group, including up to 2,400 Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, will stage in the eastern Mediterranean Sea in the event they are ordered to evacuate Americans caught in the fighting.

At times of carnage, herd-like agitation and tribal polarization, many may dismiss ethical principles as a nuisance or an intellectual luxury. I cannot and shall not. I desire nothing more than seeing an end to all violence in Palestine and everywhere else, and this is precisely why I am committed to struggling against the root causes of violence: oppression and injustice.

I have dear friends and colleagues in the Gaza “prison camp”, as former British Prime Minister David Cameron once called it, a modern-day ghetto whose 2.3 million residents are predominantly refugees descending from communities that faced massacres and planned ethnic cleansing during the 1948 Nakba.

Canada’s defence minister has accused China fighter jets of carrying out a “dangerous and reckless” interception of a Canadian military plane over international waters.

Bill Blair spoke after Canada’s Global News said a Chinese jet had come within five meters (16ft) of a Canadian surveillance plane taking part in a UN operation to enforce sanctions against North Korea.

The incident took place in international waters off the coast of China, said Global, which had a crew on the plane. Blair said that while the Chinese air force regularly interacted with planes on UN missions, the incident on Monday had put the Canadian aircraft at significant risk.

Hamas has said that 250 people are being held hostage in Gaza, and that they will be released “when conditions are ripe”.

In a televised statement late on Monday, Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson for Hamas’s military wing, said the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam brigades had been holding 200 people captive since the Hamas raid on 7 October.

He said about 50 others were being held by other “resistance factions and in other places” and claimed that at least 22 hostages had been killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza.

Queer Arizona State University Professor 'Bloodied' By College Republicans

Two members of a conservative group followed and harassed a queer Arizona State University professor who founded a drag story hour, starting an altercation that ended in the two people shoving the professor down and “bloodying his face,” the university president told faculty and staff on Saturday.

Security footage from the altercation last Wednesday shows two people — one with a camera — from the right-wing group Turning Point USA following and questioning professor David Boyles. After the professor appears to try to grab the camera or push it out of one of the men’s hands, the other knocks Boyles to the ground.

The executive chairman of Ford Motor Company broke his silence on the monthlong auto workers strike on Monday and said the work stoppage could “devastate local communities” if it continues.

Bill Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford and the company’s chairman since 1999, also criticized the United Auto Workers union for recently shutting down the company’s Kentucky Truck Plant, where it produces highly profitable large pickups and SUVs. Workers walked out of the Louisville facility, which employs 8,700, in a surprise strike last Wednesday.

The Israeli ambassador to the U.K. said Monday there is “no humanitarian crisis” in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.

Hamas launched an unexpected attack on Israel last week, taking more than 100 people hostage and killing an estimated 1,400 people, according to Israeli forces.

Israel declared war in response, announced a complete siege of Gaza — where Hamas are based — and launched a series of air strikes.

World leaders are gathering in Beijing for China’s belt and road initiative (BRI) forum, the third such event since the trademark global development drive was launched by President Xi Jinping 10 years ago.

The BRI was originally envisioned as a vast physical and digital infrastructure project to connect China with central Asia, south-east Asia, Europe and the rest of the world. It later broadened into a mammoth infrastructure financing vehicle for Chinese lenders to support projects in nearly every corner of the world, particularly in the global south. With that support came China’s mounting influence on the world stage, even as western countries became increasingly sceptical of the BRI.

Gaza diary part two: ‘We decide to stay. Then I start crying’

Friday 13 October

3am I manage to sleep for a couple of hours. Last night, there was no internet connection; even the mobile data was very bad. With eyes half-open, I check my phone and see many messages from people saying that residents of north Gaza and Gaza City should move south. The adrenaline starts, my heart is beating fast. In no time, my eyes are wide open and I get out of bed.

Gaza diary: ‘We survived another night. Every inch of my body aches – lack of sleep is torture’

Saturday 7 October

6am I wake up thinking about my tennis session. Tennis, don’t I sound fancy! This year I decided to take care of my mental and physical health. This means no stress, no negative energy and definitely more tennis.

I check my mobile to see what else I have scheduled. A visit to the doctor and some errands. I see a message from my friend telling me it seems we won’t meet for tennis. There is a “situation”. As a Gazan, there is no confusion about what is meant. An escalation. Again.

China and Russia have hardened their positions towards the conflict in Gaza in recent days, as the war between Israel and Hamas aggravates existing geopolitical tensions and underscores the growing gulf between the cold war allies and western powers such as the US, UK and France.

The Chinese foreign minister said over the weekend that Israel’s bombing campaign had gone “beyond the scope of self-defence” and that it “should stop collective punishment of the people of Gaza”.

A federal judge has barred Donald Trump from attacking witnesses, prosecutors and court staff involved in his Washington, D.C., criminal case, imposing a gag order that sharply escalates the tension between Trump’s 2024 bid for the presidency and the realities of his status as a criminal defendant.

“First Amendment protections yield to the administration of justice and to the protection of witnesses,” Judge Tanya Chutkan said Monday as she issued the gag order. “His presidential candidacy does not give him carte blanche to vilify … public servants who are simply doing their job.”

Spain’s minister of social rights released a statement Monday calling on her country’s coalition government to petition the International Criminal Court to open a war crimes investigation into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing the ongoing aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip and the devastating blockade that has prevented the free flow of desperately needed humanitarian aid.

“Using the horrific murders of Israeli civilians by Palestinian armed factions as an excuse to justify Israel’s crimes in general and the massacre in Gaza in particular is unacceptable,” Ione Belarra, the leader of Spain’s left-wing Podemos party, said in a video statement posted to social media.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) is all in for Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) bid to become the next House speaker.

And the Texas Republican told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he’s not letting Jordan’s role in Donald Trump’s failed plot to overturn the 2020 election result change his mind.

As a rabbi for a Chicago-based synagogue that holds a deep shared commitment to the struggle for Palestinian liberation, I am holding so much intensity and emotion right now.

I am filled with horror hearing the cries for vengeance voiced by the Israeli government and media, and witnessing the shattering military response that Israel has unleashed on the people of Gaza.

Ezra Yachin, 95, is one of more than 300,000 army reservists Israel has mobilized since Hamas launched a surprise on Israeli targets last Saturday. Yachin will not see combat, but “has been motivating soldiers,” according to media reports. “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin told Israeli soldiers, in a video that has since gone viral. “Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live. Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”

I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

—Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1964

Letter From the Gazan Prison

I say to moderates in the United States and Europe that you have to go to the root of the problem in Palestine. Unfortunately, the world for decades didn’t care about the suffering, the genocide and the oppression of Palestinians. But just when Israel screamed, all the world suddenly awakened and started to talk as if the events started just on October 7.

An intense US-led diplomatic effort failed on Monday to ease the plight of 2 million Palestinians trapped under bombardment in Gaza, with supplies of water, food and medicine all running out, raising the prospect of a humanitarian disaster.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, arrived back in Israel after a tour of the five Gulf Arab states and Egypt as part of an ongoing but faltering diplomatic mission. US media reported that Joe Biden was considering a trip as an already dire situation drastically deteriorated.

The words "democratic Taiwan" appeared more times in the island's national day celebrations this year than any other - by far.

"We have brought the international spotlight to Democratic Taiwan," declared President Tsai Ing-wen last week, in her last national day address before she steps down as the first democratically elected female president.

RAMALLAH — My morning last Saturday, like so many others in this region of the world, began with a barrage of successive messages on my phone that startled me awake. I stood up and stared bleary-eyed into my phone. The headlines slowly burrowed into my foggy brain: Hamas had launched an operation and militants had broken through the fence that had kept Palestinians in Gaza under siege for 16 years.

I sent frantic WhatsApp messages to friends from Gaza who live in the West Bank: My neighbor Ola told me her family had to flee their home to another part of the densely populated enclave. My friend Tahreer said five of her extended family were killed in Israeli shelling and her friend Eman had learned that her father, mother and brother had all died in an airstrike.

In September 2020, former President Donald Trump hosted a White House signing ceremony to celebrate the Abraham Accords, a series of peace agreements his administration helped broker between Israel and several Arab states. In a moment of triumph, Trump hailed these historic peace deals as “the dawn of a new Middle East.”

On Oct. 7, 2023, a new Middle East appeared to emerge. But it was not the one that Trump, or President Joe Biden after him, hoped for.

Israel has endured its fair share of violence over the years. Yet the shocking attacks by Hamas have ushered in a grim new chapter in the region that highlights a bitter truth: While Israel’s normalization with other Arab states is an important diplomatic achievement, it hasn’t brought Israel peace or security.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) threatened Iran on Sunday, calling the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah “a proxy of Iran” and warning that Iran would face consequences should Hezbollah escalate the tense situation along Israel’s northern border.

“If Hezbollah, which is a proxy of Iran, launches a massive attack on Israel, I would consider that a threat to the State of Israel, existential in nature,” Graham said Sunday during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.

Democracy Gone Astray

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Tuesday, October 17, 2023