Democracy gone Astray: Tuesday, September 10, 2024

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.]

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

How Israel is squeezing 1.8 million Palestinians into an airport-sized area

The Israeli military has asked Palestinian residents of Gaza to evacuate to a part of the town of al-Mawasi in the south of the besieged strip, designating it as a safe space.

The directive comes at a time when Israel has stepped up its bombing of southern Gaza, especially around the city of Khan Younis, which the Israeli military claims is sheltering leaders of Hamas.

Donald Trump said Tuesday he will not be a dictator “except for day one” if he returns to office in 2025.

In a town hall with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, the former president was pressed on whether he would disavow taking retributive action against all his enemies if he reentered the Oval Office. He initially shied away from responding, but when asked a second time said he would only be a dictator on the first day of his second term. He emphasized that it would be for two specific issues.

Something is rotten in the imperial court of Chairman Xi Jinping.

While the world is distracted by war in the Middle East and Ukraine, a Stalin-like purge is sweeping through China’s ultra-secretive political system, with profound implications for the global economy and even the prospects for peace in the region.

The signals emanating from Beijing are unmistakable, even as China’s security services have ramped up repression to totalitarian levels, making it almost impossible to know what is really happening inside the country.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman predicted Monday what a second Donald Trump presidency would be like, emphasizing that her grim take was “not hypothetical.” (Watch the video below.)

Asked about possible staffing and policy scenarios, the Pulitzer-winning journalist told CNN host Kaitlan Collins that the former president, according to what he has said or what Haberman and fellow Times reporters have found, Trump:

WASHINGTON ― House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday that Republicans are blurring faces in security footage from inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to protect rioters from prosecution.

“We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” Johnson said at a news conference.

The Department of Justice has long had access to the footage and has used it in some of the roughly 1,200 criminal cases against people linked to the riot, when hundreds pushed past police to storm the Capitol.

More than 15,000 people, of whom at least 6,000 were children. That’s how many people Israel has reportedly killed in the Gaza Strip in a matter of weeks – and those numbers are still rising. Israel has bombed basic societal infrastructure and civilian targets such as hospitals, schools, shelters and refugee camps. Israel has imposed a siege, preventing food, medicine, water and fuel from reaching the 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in the occupied Gaza Strip, leading Oxfam to accuse Israel of employing “starvation as a weapon of war”.

The government of Guyana has breathed a sigh of relief after a referendum intended to rubber-stamp Venezuela’s claim to about two-thirds of the South American country’s territory appeared to have backfired.

Nicolás Maduro had hoped to leverage his country’s century-long claim to the disputed Essequibo region to mobilise public support but voting stations across the country were largely quiet on Sunday as most voters shunned the issue.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced Monday evening that he opposes what he sees as the unconditional military aid to Israel that President Joe Biden has requested as part of a supplemental spending bill due for a vote this week.

Sanders, who drew left-wing ire in recent weeks for stopping short of endorsing a permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, cited his concerns about the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths and displacement.

Princeton Professor Robert P. George, a leader of the conservative legal movement and confidant of the judicial activist and Donald Trump ally Leonard Leo, made the case for overturning Roe v. Wade in an amicus brief a year before the Supreme Court issued its watershed ruling.

Roe, George claimed, had been decided based on “plain historical falsehoods.” For instance, for centuries dating to English common law, he asserted, abortion has been considered a crime or “a kind of inchoate felony for felony-murder purposes.”

Congressional Republicans are steeling themselves for a return to daily life with Donald Trump — which means constant, uncomfortable questions about his erratic policy whims and political attacks.

With Trump far ahead of the GOP primary pack and leading President Joe Biden in some polls, Republicans are getting a preview of future shellshock akin to their experiences in 2016 and his presidency. It’s likely to continue for the next 11 months. And perhaps four more years after that.

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Saturday called the House vote to expel former Rep. George Santos a “regrettable day,” lamenting what he viewed as an affront to due process principles and the rule of law.

The House voted Friday to expel Santos 311-114, with 105 GOP members joining Democrats to oust their fellow Republican.

“We allowed [House Republicans] to have a vote of conscience,” said Johnson in an interview with Fox News. Johnson opposed Santos’ expulsion.

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Plenty of observers seem to think that’s all one needs to know as one beholds Donald Trump’s seemingly inevitable Republican nomination for president and possible second term. They assume that because it wasn’t fascism the first time, it cannot be fascism the second time; Trump is expected once more to be the bumbling, blustering buffoon, supervised by adults in the room.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that the Western military alliance should be ready for bad news from the Ukrainian front as Kyiv continues to defend against Russia's all-out invasion.

"Wars develop in phases," Stoltenberg said in an interview Saturday with German broadcaster ARD. "We have to support Ukraine in both good and bad times," he said.

The U.S. intelligence community was not aware of Hamas’ plan to attack Israel, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Sunday, after the New York Times reported last week that Israeli officials obtained the plans more than a year before the Oct. 7 attack occurred.

“The intelligence community has indicated that they did not have access to this document,” Kirby told NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.” POLITICO reported Friday that there was no indication Israel had shared the blueprint for the attack with the United States.

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — The Israeli military said Sunday that its ground offensive had expanded to every part of Gaza, and authorities ordered more evacuations in the crowded south as they vowed that operations there against Hamas would be “no less strength” than the earlier efforts in the north.

Heavy bombardment followed the evacuation orders, and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip said they were running out of places to go in the sealed-off territory that borders Israel and Egypt. Many of its 2.3 million people are crammed into the south after Israel ordered civilians to leave the north in the early days of the war, which was sparked by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack in Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

Dozens of people attended a noisy fringe protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday night outside the Israeli military’s headquarters, protesting against the renewed bombardment on Gaza that they blame for the halt in the release of the estimated 130 hostages still held by Hamas.

The group gathered after the regular weekly rally demanding the release of all the hostages held by Hamas, and marched around the Israel Defense Force’s Kirya military base demanding an urgent meeting with the country’s war cabinet and pressing for a ceasefire.

Israel continued with its intense bombing campaign across the north and south of Gaza for a third day since the end of the truce with Hamas, killing hundreds of Palestinians in a 24-hour period, according to local officials.

On Sunday night, the Israeli military also said it has expanded its ground operation to all of Gaza. “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] continues to extend its ground operation against Hamas centres in all of the Gaza Strip,” spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters in Tel Aviv. “The forces are coming face-to-face with terrorists and killing them.”

A former U.S. Olympic swimmer who won two gold medals has been sentenced for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

In Washington, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon on Friday sentenced Klete Keller, 41, to six months of home confinement and three years of probation. Though prosecutors had asked for 10 months in federal prison, they also acknowledged that Keller cooperated with the government.

Israeli officials were displeased when Mohammed Nazal, an 18-year-old Palestinian, described his ordeal in Israeli prisons after being released as part of a truce agreement with Hamas last week.

The teenager from the town of Qabatiya in the occupied West Bank told Arab and Western media how he was beaten and denied medical assistance, but this was refuted by Israeli authorities who tried to paint him as a liar.

His testimonies and medical records have now been verified by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency, Sanad, providing further evidence of the brutal mistreatment Palestinians suffer in Israeli prisons that has only exacerbated since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7.

The ongoing explosion in public activism in the United States and the world for a ceasefire in Gaza and equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians is a battleground as important as the military face-off over Gaza in this century-old conflict.

It reveals the eroding efficacy of traditional pro-Israel propaganda in the face of more visible and explicitly apartheid policies by Israel and widespread, technically proficient mobilisations by pro-Palestine and pro-justice movements. It also signals how people across the globe recognise the Palestinians’ suffering and their battle for national rights as among the last anti-colonial struggles in the world.

Democracy gone Astray