Democracy gone Astray: Saturday, October 14, 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.]

Saturday, October 14, 2023

The Homophobia, Racism and Conspiracy Theories on Display at ‘Parents’ Rights’ Rallies

It was advertised as a protest focused on children and families. But at a rally in Vancouver, an antisemitic slur was hurled. In Ottawa, a flag with a Nazi swastika was displayed at a park. And at protests across Canada, protest signs equated education and advocacy about LGBTQ2S+ issues with pedophilia.

Last week, protests co-ordinated under the banner of “1 Million March 4 Children” took place in cities and towns across Canada. In many cities, including Vancouver, those protests were met and outnumbered by counter-protests supporting the rights of queer people, especially trans youth.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the Middle East on Friday to protest Israel’s assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 1,500 people, displaced more than 330,000, devastated the enclave’s infrastructure, and pushed its healthcare system to the brink of collapse.

Demonstrators in Jordan, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Malaysia, Bahrain, Iran, Egypt, and Lebanon expressed outrage over Israel’s ongoing attack and the decadeslong occupation of Palestinian territory.

“This rally is aimed at condemning what is happening in occupied Palestine, the bloodletting, and the violation of rights,” Abu Kayan, an organizer of a rally in Baghdad, told Agence France-Presse.

Booker Prize-winning writer Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, has been charged, along with retired law professor Sheikh Showkat Hussain, for allegedly seditious comments supporting the separation of Kashmir from India.

They were speaking at a 2010 Delhi conference, the same year right-wing activist Sushil Pandit filed the complaint on which these latest charges draw.

Nearly 13 years later, on October 10, Delhi’s lieutenant governor V.K. Saxena, with the approval of Narendra Modi’s government, sanctioned the prosecution. Roy and Hussain are accused of making statements promoting social enmity, prejudicing national integration and inciting offences against the state and public tranquillity.

Part of being Palestinian American is having to watch Israel treated as the U.S.’s “special ally” and essentially the 51st state. This week, that feeling is particularly acute as the U.S. is planning to augment its aid to Israel with an additional $2 billion, even as Israeli officials call for genocidal acts, horrific human rights abuses and collective punishment in the Gaza Strip.

In these moments, Palestinian Americans like me face the constant guilt that our tax dollars are funding the oppression and apartheid conditions faced by our families and people in Israeli-occupied Palestine. For instance, U.S. funds help subsidize Israel’s illegal settlements across the West Bank. Israel has now placed Palestinian cities and villages in the West Bank under closure, and Israeli forces have just provided already heavily armed Israeli settlers with over 1,000 additional M16 rifles, which is terrifying given the history of settler violence.

Russia appears to have launched a “renewed offensive” against Ukrainian troops in the eastern part of the country as the war inches closer to entering its second winter, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Friday.

But Russian troops haven’t made much progress, Kirby said, adding that the new attacks are “not a surprise.”

Chinese technology giant Huawei has had it with European Union officials calling it a "high-risk" supplier.

The firm, a leading manufacturer of telecoms equipment, filed a complaint with the European Ombudsman office last month after the bloc's industry chief Thierry Breton described Huawei and its smaller Chinese rival ZTE as "high-risk suppliers" at a press conference on June 15.

He doesn't have the votes ... yet: Jim Jordan wants to be the next speaker. But like Steve Scalise (and Kevin McCarthy) before him, the Ohio Republican is still far short of a majority on the floor.

It would be hard to overstate the frustration and resentment among House Republicans right now — at the end of a week that broke their conference’s chaos meter.

GOP leadership sent members home for the weekend with plans to reassess on Monday after Jordan beat Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) with 124 votes, then picked up less than 30 more votes when Republicans were pressed whether they’d support him on the floor.

WASHINGTON ― Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the House Republicans’ new speaker-designate, has until Monday to try to round up more votes from his GOP colleagues to win the speaker’s gavel or likely face the same fate as the previous speaker-designate, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.).

In a simple up-or-down vote Friday on whether they would support him on the House floor for speaker, Jordan garnered only 152 votes from his fellow House Republicans, compared to 55 against him.

On Tuesday, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and Ranking Member Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., introduced a resolution pledging Congress would stand “with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists.” Nearly every member of Congress announced their support for the resolution — with the exception of 13 Democrats.

The surprise attack by Hamas militants against Israel last Saturday now looks set to trigger a war potentially more destructive than any that the region has seen in years. Reeling from a series of armed assaults by the militant group that are believed to have killed around 1,300 Israelis, including many civilians, Israel’s newly formed unity government said that it is preparing for a decisive battle in the Gaza Strip.

While the world focuses on the Hamas massacre in Israel and Israel’s bombing of Gaza, settlers in the West Bank are taking advantage of the chaos to attack and expel Palestinians from small villages.

Settlers — Israeli Jews living in the occupied West Bank — and soldiers have killed 51 Palestinians in the West Bank since Saturday, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah. At least two villages, Al-Qanub and Wadi Al-Sik, have been entirely depopulated as a result of the violence by Israeli settlers.

US officials have accused North Korea of supplying vast amounts of military hardware to Russia for use in Ukraine.

Pyongyang has supplied up to 1,000 containers of "equipment and munitions" in "recent weeks", National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby said.

Officials also released photos of what they said were 300 containers assembled for transport in Najin, North Korea.

On Saturday, October 7, Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip embarked on a multipronged attack on Israel, dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, firing a barrage of thousands of rockets and infiltrating areas in the south of the country.

The unprecedented operation had profound ramifications both for the Israelis and the Palestinians. In Israel, some 1300 people were killed and over 3,300 others were injured. In Gaza, Israel’s retaliatory attacks claimed over 1500 lives and wounded 6500 others. Israel also cut off the electricity supply and blocked the entry of food and fuel to the Gaza Strip as part of an unlawful “total siege” strategy adopted on Monday. With an Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip imminent, the scale of the violence, disproportionately targeting Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants, is expected to magnify.

Gaza City, Gaza – Ahmed al-Saadi and his family have so far escaped the Israeli bombing campaign that has levelled entire neighbourhoods and killed more than 1,900 people in the Gaza Strip since last Saturday.

But after they sought refuge in a United Nations school, that too was attacked from the air – multiple times, said al-Saadi.

“Some people were killed. If schools are not safe, then where do we go? Where can an entire population seek safety?” he asked.

Gaza Strip – In the Gaza Strip, children’s ages are measured by how many Israeli assaults they have been through.

About half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million is under 18, and the current offensive is Israel’s fifth major one in 15 years.

The constant trauma has resulted in four out of five children in Gaza living with depression, grief and fear, according to a 2022 report by Save the Children.

As reports of Hamas fighters attacking southern Israel last Saturday flooded phones and television sets around the world, Kenyan President William Ruto took to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

“Kenya joins the rest of the world in solidarity with the State of Israel and unequivocally condemns terrorism and attacks on innocent civilians in the country,” he wrote. “There exists no justification whatsoever for terrorism, which constitutes a serious threat to international peace and security.”

A group “yelling out anti-Palestine statements” and “waving an Israeli flag” assaulted a Palestinian man in Brooklyn, the New York City Police Department said.

The man was with two friends Wednesday night when three cars rolled by and those inside made the remarks, the NYPD said in a statement to HuffPost.

It's tempting to view Vladimir Putin as a James Bond-style villain sitting at a giant control panel, in a mountain hideout, sowing chaos around the world.

He presses one button and there's unrest in the Balkans.

He presses another and the Middle East explodes.

It's tempting… but probably inaccurate. It exaggerates the Kremlin leader's global influence.

There’s only one person who plausibly could impose order on the sullen, snarling House Republican conference and the free-floating chaos for which it stands. So far, however, there’s scant evidence that one person gives more than a passing damn about the outcome.

Donald Trump, by all appearances, was more in sync with Rep. Jim Jordan, an outspoken Trump backer from Ohio, to be the next House Speaker. But he did not make any vigorous effort on his behalf. When the Republican conference instead gave a tepid nomination to Rep. Steve Scalise, a go-along, get-along Louisianan, Trump could have shown his clout and put Scalise in his debt by telling the GOP it was time to close ranks, especially amid war in Israel.

The House GOP has entered an angrier and more bewildered phase in its leadership crisis.

The fractious Republican conference has rejected a second speaker hopeful in eight days — this time, Kevin McCarthy’s longtime heir apparent, Steve Scalise. While Republicans appear to be turning next to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), some are already airing open doubts that Jordan can pull off what the majority leader couldn’t.

The lesson Republicans have learned in the frenetic week since McCarthy’s fall: They have no clear choice for leader who can unite their ranks — no matter how long this drags out and their chamber of Congress is paralyzed.

Seth Meyers on Thursday pointed to old footage of Donald Trump explaining why he likes Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio.) as an example of how the former president has utterly “weirdified” the GOP.

The “Late Night” host aired a clip of Trump from February 2020 in which the ex-president recalled, “When I first got to know Jim, I said, ‘Huh. Never wears a jacket! What the hell’s going on? He’s obviously very proud of his body.’”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) has withdrawn from the race to become the chamber’s next speaker, he said Thursday night.

“It’s been quite a journey, and there’s still a long way to go,” Scalise told reporters. “I just shared with my colleagues that I’m withdrawing my name as a candidate for the speaker designee.”

“If you look at where our conference is, there’s still work to be done.”

PARIS (AP) — French prosecutors are investigating a suspected poisoning Thursday of a Russian journalist who fled after denouncing the war in Ukraine on live TV.

Marina Ovsyannikova called emergency services and was hospitalized after suddenly falling ill as she left her Paris apartment and said she suspected she was poisoned, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

Israel says it is striking parts of a secret labyrinth of tunnels built underneath the Gaza Strip by Hamas, as it continues to retaliate for the Palestinian Islamist militant group's unprecedented cross-border attack on Saturday.

"Think of the Gaza Strip as one layer for civilians and then another layer for Hamas. We are trying to get to that second layer that Hamas has built," an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said in a video on Thursday.

Burkina Faso's military leaders have signed a deal with Russia to build a nuclear power plant to increase electricity supplies.

It is the junta's latest move to align itself with Russia after falling out with most of its Western partners.

The junta has turned to Russia for economic and military support since it seized power last year.

Israel has used white phosphorus in its continuing military operations in Gaza and Lebanon, putting civilians at serious risk, Human Rights Watch has said, following an investigation.

Human Rights Watch said it verified footage taken in Lebanon and Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, showing multiple uses of artillery-fired white phosphorus over the Gaza City port and two rural locations along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Human Rights Watch also interviewed two people who described an attack in Gaza, the rights group said.

Amid a heavy retaliatory air and artillery assault by Israel against the Gaza Strip on October 10, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted a message on Facebook to residents of the al-Daraj neighborhood, urging them to leave their homes in advance of impending airstrikes.

It’s not clear how most people in al-Daraj were supposed to see the warning: Intense fighting and electrical shortages have strangled Palestinian access to the internet, putting besieged civilians at even greater risk.

The WHO put out a statement yesterday saying that medical supplies in all of Gaza’s hospitals have started to run out. At the same time, Dr. Ashraf al-Qidra, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Health in Gaza, put out a press release saying that health services have entered a “critical phase,” and that medical supplies, tools, and fuel are about to run out. He added that the hospitals are at full capacity, and the injured are now forced to lie on the floor.

The scene at al-Shifa’ Hospital, Gaza’s central hospital, is bloody. Women, children, and the elderly, and even young people, are forced to lie down on the floor.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis responded this week to demands from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who called for the prosecutor to hand over documents and communications relating to her investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

Willis sent a letter on Wednesday rejecting Jordan’s demands for the documents, which he requested in the days after Willis’s office indicted Trump over the summer. A number of political observers have suggested that Jordan’s demands were motivated solely by a desire to intimidate Willis and aid Trump.

Since last weekend I’ve been glued to the news and frantically checking on my family and friends in Gaza and the West Bank. I grieve for the loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives and I mourn with all those who lost loved ones and those who continue to suffer the consequences of the longest occupation in modern history.

This week’s violence did not start with Hamas’s October 7 act of armed resistance against Israel, which surprisingly shocked Israelis and the world. As a result of the attack — which some have argued is better understood not as an act of war but as an “open-air prison revolt,” due to the suffocating conditions of the never-ending siege of Gaza — Israelis have momentarily experienced what Palestinians have endured on a daily basis for decades. The nightmare that has unfolded is the direct and inevitable result of a decades-long policy of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

After Hamas launched more than 2,000 missiles from Gaza and sent hundreds of fighters into Israel on October 7, killing hundreds of civilians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on Hamas. But Israel’s retaliation, including massive bombing from the land, air and sea, and its collective punishment of Gazans — denying them food, water, electricity and gas — reveals that Netanyahu has actually declared war on the Palestinian people, especially those in Gaza.

Israeli warplanes are conducting indiscriminate bombings throughout Gaza, targeting homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and civilian buildings. As of October 10, Israel had reportedly used 1,000 tons of explosives and targeted 500 locations, primarily in civilian residential areas.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) spoke out Thursday against Israel’s plans to block electricity, water and fuel from Gaza, calling it a “collective punishment and a violation of international law.”

Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz this week vowed to cut off energy supplies to the isolated Palestinian territory until Hamas militants from the region free Israeli hostages they’ve taken amid one of the group’s most brutal attacks on the Jewish country in decades.

House foreign affairs committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told reporters Wednesday that Egyptian officials warned Israel about the potential for an attack days before Hamas militants stormed across the Gaza border to slaughter hundreds of people on Saturday.

Israel has pushed back on the claim, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissing as “fake news” the reports that the country received any sort of warning.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) ripped some Republicans in Congress when Stephen Colbert questioned him on his “excellent meme game” during Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Late Show.”

Colbert asked Fetterman if it was awkward seeing those people he’s “put up a devastating meme about” around the Capitol.

Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to return to his “birther” conspiracy theory roots during a campaign event in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The former president — one of the most prominent pushers of the false claim that former President Barack Obama was not born in America — claimed President Joe Biden’s administration was “inviting” terrorists into the country because his “boss” is secretly Obama.

Police in the centre of Paris used tear gas and water cannons to break up a pro-Palestinian rally, after the French government banned such demonstrations.

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said those defying it should be arrested as "they are susceptible to disrupt public order.''

Despite the ban, thousands of protesters gathered in Paris, Lille, Bordeaux and other cities on Thursday.

Last Saturday Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement that has governed Gaza since being elected in 2006, carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel. It struck almost fifty years to the day after a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria against Israel, which has not experienced an assault on this scale within its borders since it was founded in 1948.

Precise details of the attack are still being reported, but the basic elements are worth reviewing. In a matter of hours, Hamas’s military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, carried out a multifaceted operation.

Israeli and American officials, like many of their supporters, have called the Hamas incursion on Saturday “Israel’s 9/11”, drawing parallels between Hamas and al-Qaeda and between Israel and the United States.

“If the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing,” President Joe Biden said, “our response would be swift, decisive and overwhelming.” The “brutality” and “the bloodthirstiness” of Hamas, he added, “brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS”. He even repeated the sensationalist and unsubstantiated claims that Hamas fighters had “raped women” and “beheaded babies”.

Kyiv, Ukraine – “I want to thank you, my friend, for what you have done,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin about four years ago.

His words followed Moscow’s transfer to Tel Aviv of the remains of Zachary Baumel, an Israeli serviceman who had been missing in action since 1982, the time of the first Israeli-Lebanese war.

Netanyahu expressed nothing but gratitude to Putin, even though the Russian soldiers who discovered Baumel’s remains were fighting for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, one of Iran’s closest allies.

When dealing with a breakup, there are some obvious best practices: break out the tissues and fire up a movie you’ve seen 20 times; do some vaguely reckless online shopping; wonder aloud about calling your other exes; invite some friends over to convince you not to do that.

Alternatively, you can just keep running for president.

When Cornel West, famed public intellectual, philosopher, jazz man, pastor, actor and frequent provocateur, told me about his recent divorce from the Green Party, he sounded almost giddy. He was obviously the initiator.

Robert De Niro came at Donald Trump like a raging bull at The New Republic’s “Stop Trump Summit” on Wednesday ― and the actor wasn’t even there. (Watch the video below.)

Recovering from COVID-19, the “Killers of the Flower Moon” star wrote down his feelings and had ex-Trump administration official Miles Taylor read them at the New York City gathering.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) is facing new questions over a custom $19,000 lectern her office purchased earlier this year.

The lectern in question is a custom blue wood-paneled stand purchased with a government credit card in June. Matt Campbell, a lawyer and blogger, first posted the invoice for it on X, formerly known as Twitter, last month, prompting a political firestorm over its sky-high price. Similar lecterns sell for much less, but the governor’s office paid the invoice to an events company called Beckett Events LLC, whose founder was once a lobbyist in the Washington, D.C., area.

BRUSSELS — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Brussels on Wednesday to discover a Europe no longer completely focused on the war Russia has unleashed on his country, but he's rolling with the punches.

He insisted that there was no danger of Israel crowding Ukraine out of the limelight, and instead encouraged Western politicians to visit Israel — replicating similar treks to Kyiv by most of the world's leaders.

China appears to have decided that its road to greater global clout lies through the Palestinians — no matter what hits it takes for going soft on Hamas.

Beijing’s initial statement failing to condemn Hamas for this weekend’s attack drew immediate backlash from Israeli and U.S. officials for minimizing the brutality the Palestinian militants had visited on Israel.

PALM BEACH, Fla. — He criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called Hezbollah “very smart.” Both less than a week after the attack on Israel.

It was, as billed, a speech about the atrocities abroad. In the most Trumpian way possible.

Speaking to more than 3,500 supporters at a Palm Beach, Fla., convention center, former President Donald Trump spent nearly two hours recounting how he helped move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and boasted about signing the Abraham Accords, which formalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Elon Musk has made himself Europe's digital public enemy No. 1.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on Saturday, the billionaire's social network X has been flooded with gruesome images, politically-motivated lies and terrorist propaganda that authorities say appear to violate both its own policies and the European Union's new social media law.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis once again shot down House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Wednesday, calling his ongoing attempts to wade into the prosecution of former President Donald Trump “ignorant,” “troubling” and an abuse of power.

“A charitable explanation of your correspondence is that you are ignorant of the United States and Georgia Constitutions and codes,” Willis wrote in a letter to the lawmaker. “A more troubling explanation is that you are abusing your authority as Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary to attempt to obstruct and interfere with a Georgia criminal prosecution.”

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said every Hamas member was "a dead man" after the first meeting of his country's emergency government.

Alongside him, opposition figure Benny Gantz said it was "a time for war".

But US President Joe Biden said he had spoken to Mr Netanyahu and made it clear that Israel must "operate by the rules of war".

In the immediate aftermath of the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel from Gaza, my Facebook feed lit up with friends sharing variations of a famous quote by the Martinique-born anti-colonial philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon on their feeds, to the effect that the violence of colonialism can only, and will naturally, be met by the violence of the colonised. The actual quote is from Les Damnes de la terre (Wretched of the Earth), and can only be understood in the context of the fuller argument Fanon is making: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Wednesday appeared likely to uphold a Republican-drawn congressional district in South Carolina that a lower court found was racially gerrymandered.

The case — Alexander v. South Carolina Conference of the NAACP — tests the legal limits of partisan gerrymandering when it intersects with race. The NAACP is accusing Republican lawmakers of drawing the state’s 1st District, represented by GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, by shuffling Black voters in and out of the district to make it reliably Republican.