Democracy gone Astray: Saturday, September 07, 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.]

Saturday, September 07, 2024

'I’m calling from Israeli intelligence. We have the order to bomb. You have two hours'

The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.

It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.

He'd been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s anti-abortion bona fides are undisputed, but Thursday night he downplayed the chance of action on a federal abortion ban during an interview with Sean Hannity, asserting there are more pressing issues facing his caucus.

“There is no national consensus” on abortion, he said in his first prime-time interview.

It was a stark turn for a congressman who has pushed several bills to restrict abortion nationwide and indicative of the competing pressures of his new role — including keeping control of the House.

Israeli forces have arrested Ahed Tamimi, a prominent 22-year-old Palestinian activist, for “inciting terrorism”.

They announced the arrest on Monday following another round of overnight raids and fighting in the occupied West Bank. Violence has been spilling over into the territory since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last month.

Al Jazeera correspondent Zein Basravi reported multiple raids by the Israeli army across the West Bank, including in the village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah, where Ahed Tamimi was arrested.

Russian forces have bombarded Ukraine’s port city of Odesa with missiles and drones.

Four missiles and 22 attack drones were launched from the occupied region of Crimea of Ukraine at the Black Sea port late on Sunday, Ukraine’s air force reported on Monday.

The attacks injured at least eight people, destroyed grain, and damaged the 124-year-old Odesa Fine Arts Museum.

On October 24, a statement by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres caused a sharp reaction by Israel. While addressing the UN Security Council, the UN chief said that while he condemned in the strongest terms the massacre committed by Hamas on October 7, he wished to remind the world that it did not take place in a vacuum. He explained that one cannot dissociate 56 years of occupation from our engagement with the tragedy that unfolded on that day.

The Israeli government was quick to condemn the statement. Israeli officials demanded Guterres’s resignation, claiming that he supported Hamas and justified the massacre it carried out. The Israeli media also jumped on the bandwagon, asserting among other things that the UN chief “has demonstrated a stunning degree of moral bankruptcy”.

Since Israel unleashed its brutal bombing campaign in Gaza on October 7 in the wake of a deadly Hamas attack, settler attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem have more than doubled from an average of three to eight incidents a day, according to the United Nations.

The spike in settler attacks have forced hundreds of Palestinians to flee their homes in the past three weeks amid the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that has killed more than 9,500 people.

So, who are the settlers and where do they live?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday denied a report that EU and U.S. officials have spoken with the government in Kyiv about possible peace talks with Russia.

“No leader of the United States or European Union, our partners — nobody puts pressure on us for us sitting at the negotiation table with Russia and give something away,” Zelenskyy told a joint press conference in Kyiv with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who was on an unannounced visit to the worn-torn country.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib accused President Joe Biden of supporting genocide in Gaza, warning that voters “won’t forget” his actions at the polls in 2024 in the strongest intraparty rebuke to the president since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war.

In a video posted Friday to X, formerly known as Twitter, Tlaib featured interspersed clips of Biden administration officials expressing support for Israel, videos of dead and injured Palestinians in Gaza and clips from pro-Palestinian protests around the U.S., before closing with a direct message from Tlaib to Biden.

Former President Barack Obama cautioned against ignoring the complexities of the Israel-Hamas war, warning that “all of us are complicit.”

“If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree,” he said in an excerpted interview with Pod Save America released Saturday.

Reflecting on his presidency, Obama posed the question, “Well, was there something else I could have done?”

A man who worked as a State Department official during the Trump administration was sentenced to 70 months in prison Friday for his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Federico Guillermo Klein was convicted on 12 counts in July, including six that charged him with assaulting, resisting or impeding police officers, after a bench trial before U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden. His co-defendent, Steven Cappuccio, was also convicted for actions related to the insurrection.

Ukraine’s top general has admitted the fightback against Russian aggression has reached a deadlock, and the prospect of “a deep and beautiful breakthrough” is unlikely.

A deadlock is exactly what Russian president Vladimir Putin wants, because it allows him to plant the idea of perpetual stalemate in the minds of western leaders who, staring at a difficult economic outlook for 2024, want a settlement.

Ahead of then-President Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) played the role of providing a constitutional rationale for Republican House members to justify voting against certifying the electors from a handful of states.

Johnson argued in favor of an idea known as the independent state legislature theory, which holds that the Constitution grants the power to set election rules to state legislatures alone. And since changes to election rules during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure ballot access were made by various other state government officials and bodies, including state and federal courts, Johnson argued that those rules violated the Constitution and, therefore, the submission of electors under those rules was also unconstitutional.

A day after Israel struck a convoy of ambulances transporting critically wounded patients from the al-Shifa Hospital to the Rafah border crossing, the Israeli army has intensified its bombardment of the Gaza Strip, hitting schools, mosques and more hospitals.

On Saturday morning an Israeli air missile struck the Al Fakhoura school run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing at least 15 people and injuring 54, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Wars, assassinations, coups — the perpetrators of violence confidently believe that the consequences will be discrete and limited to their own goals. They’ll kill their enemies, raise their arms in simian triumph, and that’s the end of the story.

In reality, committing violence is like kicking a football covered in razors into history, where it lunges around, bouncing this way and that, slicing open random people across the world in a trajectory so complex that no human being can predict it.

Khirbet Zanuta, occupied West Bank — Amin Hamed al-Hadhrat took a break from taking down his family’s home in the South Hebron Hills, crying. “I know in a day or two I’m going to live somewhere else, but I still can’t imagine it happening,” the 37-year-old said. “All I know is living here. All my father knew was living here. I don’t know what it is like to live anywhere else.”

This week, al-Hadhrat’s village of shepherds, Khirbet Zanuta, joined the growing swell of Palestinian Bedouin villages forcibly emptied since October 7 due to violent attacks from armed Israeli settlers often wearing Israeli military uniforms.

WASHINGTON — Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) introduced legislation on Thursday to ban Palestinians from the United States in an echo of former President Donald Trump’s infamous “Muslim ban.”

The bill would pause visas for Palestinians and go a step further by revoking any visas issued since Oct. 1.

Zinke claimed the policy would protect Americans from the threat of Palestinian terrorists abusing the immigration system in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel last month and Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

A handful of Ukrainian troops who have reached the occupied side of the Dnipro River are clinging to a foothold in Russian-controlled territory in the south of the country despite a fierce bombardment.

The marines have secured a beachhead that could allow Ukraine to reclaim more of the Kherson region that lies between Ukrainian territory and Crimea, seized by Russia in 2014, a fillip for a counter-offensive showing few gains elsewhere, but only if they can find a way to bring armoured vehicles and heavy weapons across the wide river separating the two militaries.

Reproductive justice advocates allege that police in Idaho have made the first “abortion trafficking” arrest after an Idaho teenager and his mother were charged with “kidnapping” for bringing the teen’s girlfriend out of state for an abortion.

The 15-year-old who had an out-of-state abortion, identified in court records as K.B., was living in Idaho with her boyfriend and his mother when she became pregnant. In May, the same month Idaho’s “abortion trafficking” law went into effect, her boyfriend and his mother brought her to Oregon to obtain abortion medication.

Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) checked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Thursday, after the Republican brought up the removal of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue while going to bat for an amendment that bars the use of certain funds to take down national monuments.

Greene — who cited George Orwell’s “1984” while rambling about “communist Democrats” erasing the past — touched on the removal of Confederate symbols in 2020 before noting the recent melting of a Lee statue previously taken down in Charlottesville, the Virginia city where 2017′s Unite the Right rally was held.

At a law society hearing in August, John Carpay, the controversial president of Alberta’s far-right Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, expressed abject contrition for hiring a private investigator to spy on a senior Manitoba judge.

But in an abrupt about-face last week, Carpay downplayed the judicial surveillance and claimed Manitoba Justice officials attempted to silence and intimidate him by filing bogus politically motivated criminal charges against him.

Carpay levelled that accusation last Friday after Manitoba Justice stayed criminal charges of attempted obstruction of justice and intimidation of a justice system participant against him, and fellow JCCF lawyer Jay Cameron.

Fears are mounting that Gaza’s hospitals, many already on the brink of collapse, may come under intensified attack as the Israeli military moves deeper into the enclave.

In recent days, Israeli warplanes have been circling closer to two hospitals in Gaza City – al-Shifa and al-Quds – bombing areas in their immediate vicinity. Both hospitals have received orders by the Israeli military to evacuate, a demand that doctors and independent experts say is impossible to fulfil, given the large numbers of patients in their wards, including patients on life support.

After weeks of uniting behind Israel’s right to defend itself following Hamas’ initial attack, mainstream Democrats are beginning to raise concerns about the increasingly harsh toll on Palestinians in the Gaza offensive as the conflict approaches the one-month mark.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado are among those who have backed away from a full-throated endorsement of Israel’s military operations — a notable shift because they’re not from the progressive wing and had almost uniformly backed Israel and military aid. They are starting to express discomfort with the impact that Israel’s current course of military operations is having on noncombatants.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is not worried about Western sanctions — quite the opposite, in fact.

Faced with the prospect of a 12th round of EU sanctions — which could include trade in anything from diamonds to needles — the Russian leader brushed off the plan as ridiculous and took a jab at Europe and its crawling bedbug problem.

Perhaps Danielle Smith forgot where she was when she told the attendees at the Pembina Institute’s Alberta Climate Summit that clean electricity by 2035 was impossible and anyone who thought otherwise was a fantasist.

The summit attendees paid $400 to $600 for the one-day event, which brought together “thought leaders from industry, government, civil society groups, Indigenous governments and rural communities to hear success stories, identify opportunities and challenges, and explore solutions related to Alberta’s clean energy future.”

It is now clear that Israel is engaging in a genocide of the Palestinian people. As reported by Al Jazeera, the Israeli state has “loosened” its military rules of engagement, essentially giving its soldiers the green light to kill anyone they encounter inside the Gaza Strip as part of their ground operations. Israeli politicians and soldiers are talking openly about turning Gaza into dust, eliminating Palestinians, and imagining Israeli settlers living on land that used to be called Gaza. Palestinians are being deliberately deprived of all the basic necessities for life, including food, water, shelter and medical care. Bombs from the air are indiscriminately killing and maiming Palestinians. Palestinians are being encouraged to leave their lands and homes in northern Gaza and head towards the south – Israel clearly wants to colonise northern Gaza and turn it into a security or military zone, permanently expelling the Palestinians who currently live there.

Donald Trump will seek to turn to aggressive right-wing lawyers to enact his extreme agenda if he wins back the White House in 2024, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said Wednesday, citing a new report from The New York Times.

Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.), in speaking with Wallace about the latest reporting from the Times, suggested just how bad things could get in a second Trump term.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has revoked his country’s ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a move he says is designed to bring Moscow in line with the United States.

The new law to abandon the landmark agreement outlawing nuclear weapons tests was signed on Thursday, a week after Russia’s upper house Federation Council unanimously approved it.

The lower house State Duma had already passed the bill in an accelerated vote. With Putin’s signature, the legislation came into effect on Thursday.

Sociopaths in suits.

For all their genteel embroidery and grand honorifics, the mundane men who lead Western “democracies” in Washington, DC, London, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa and Canberra, and the mostly men-in-waiting aching to take their place, are just sociopaths in tailored suits.

One of the principal prerequisites of leading, or aspiring to lead a Western “democracy”, is the willingness, even eagerness, to order others – without a scintilla of regret or remorse – to kill innocents, and also to approve and applaud when a dear friend kills innocents without regret or remorse.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli ground troops have advanced to “the gates of Gaza City” in heavy fighting with militants, the military said Wednesday, as hundreds of foreign nationals and dozens of seriously injured Palestinians were allowed to leave Gaza after more than three weeks under siege.

The news came as U.S. President Joe Biden called for a humanitarian “pause” in the fighting. Biden was speaking at a Minneapolis campaign fundraiser when a protester interrupted him, calling for a cease-fire.

Congress is considering a bill that would significantly slow down humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip amid ongoing airstrikes and a ground invasion by Israel that have left at least 8,000 dead and strained critical resources in the already besieged Palestinian territory.

The debate over the bill comes two weeks after its sponsor said U.S. officials should make all efforts to slow down any humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza and suggested that there is no distinction between civilians — including children — and the militant group Hamas that massacred some 1,300 Israelis in an October 7 surprise attack.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, was the top donor to Rep. Mike Johnson during his most recent campaign, chipping in $25,000 between 2021 and 2022, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of his political contributors. Johnson’s first order of business as speaker of the House is to seek budget cuts in exchange for a $14 billion aid package for Israel.

The new Republican speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, is “dangerous” due to his role in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former Wyoming Republican congresswoman and January 6 committee vice-chair Liz Cheney said.

“He was acting in ways that he knew to be wrong,” Cheney told Politics Is Everything, a podcast from the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “And I think that the country unfortunately will come to see the measure of his character.”

Netanyahu Rejects Calls for Ceasefire as Gaza Death Toll Surpasses 8,300

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected international calls for an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza during a press conference on Monday.

Since the Hamas-led infiltration attack on October 7 that killed around 1,400 people, Israeli forces have waged a genocidal bombing campaign against Palestinians, killing more than 8,300 people in Gaza — more than a third of whom are children, according to the latest figures from the Gaza Health Ministry. Thousands more Gazans are estimated to be trapped under the rubble.

What’s happening in Gaza is genocide. The bodies keep falling, piling up. This is happening under our collective watch, our moment in history.

Israeli forces have now killed more than 8,300 people in Gaza, including at least 3,400 Palestinian children, and tens of thousands more face an acute risk of death as the Israeli military continues to prevent people in Gaza from accessing adequate food, clean water and functional medical care. The U.S. State Department has reportedly estimated that 30,000 babies under 6 months of age with barely formed immune systems are currently drinking contaminated water in Gaza. I dread to imagine the colossal ways in which illness and starvation wrought by conditions like these may soon push the death toll exponentially higher, even as Israel continues expanding its ground attacks under the cover of the ongoing communications blackout caused when Israeli forces severed Gaza’s phone and internet systems.

WASHINGTON ― A Republican proposal to offset the cost of U.S. aid to Israel by cutting IRS funding would backfire and actually lose billions of dollars for the government, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) this week introduced a bill that would pay for $14 billion worth of Israel aid by slashing the same amount from the IRS, thereby hampering tax collection efforts.

I’ve been away, and I’m a little jet-lagged, but it seems to me that we’ve just seen the first use of the Alberta Sovereignty Act.

By the government of Saskatchewan.

On Monday, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced provincial gas utility SaskEnergy won’t collect or submit the federal carbon tax on natural gas used to heat homes starting on Jan. 1.

Republican Texas billionaire Harlan Crow could soon receive a subpoena to produce information about his relationship with conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as the Judiciary Committee steps up its ethics probe into the high court.

Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin (Ill.), who chairs the panel, and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), who heads a subcommittee on federal courts, oversight, agency action, and federal rights, on Monday announced they would hold a vote to authorize subpoenas for Crow, conservative legal activist Leonard Leo and GOP donor Robin Arkley II.

JERUSALEM (AP) — An Israeli government ministry has drafted a wartime proposal to transfer the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people to Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, drawing condemnation from the Palestinians and worsening tensions with Cairo.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office played down the report compiled by the Intelligence Ministry as a hypothetical exercise — a “concept paper.” But its conclusions deepened long-standing Egyptian fears that Israel wants to make Gaza into Egypt’s problem, and revived for Palestinians memories of their greatest trauma — the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people who fled or were forced from their homes during the fighting surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.

The United Auto Workers have a deal. Deals, that is.

If the tentative agreements reached in recent days between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three automakers cross the finish line, it will mark a turning point in a year of labor unrest.

Union President Shawn Fain will have delivered his promised record economic contract — though falling short of his original ambitions — using the unconventional strategy of bargaining with all three companies at once, and perhaps accelerating growing support for unions.

The following article is adapted from The Dissident: Alexey Navalny, Profile of a Political Prisoner, to be released today by Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

In the West during the Soviet era, Russian dissidents developed a certain celebrity aura. Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, for instance, were seen as fearless fighters, standing up to an evil empire and enduring long and painful exiles, repressions and other punishments meted out by the Communist regime. The refusenik Natan Sharansky, who served eight years in prison for high treason and espionage before being released in a prisoner exchange, became a member of the Israeli parliament and deputy prime minister. President George W. Bush even awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann highlighted a “chilling” aspect of Donald Trump’s attempted appeal of the gag order in his 2020 election interference case.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s order bans the former president from criticizing prosecutors, court staff and any potential witnesses in public. It was temporarily lifted Friday for Chutkan to assess an appeal but was reimposed late Sunday following more rhetoric from Trump.

The United States has dismissed Russia’s attempt to blame Ukraine and the west for an antisemitic riot at an airport in Muslim-majority Dagestan.

President Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine and “agents of western special services” after a mob descended on Makhachkala airport in Russia’s North Caucasus on Sunday evening in search of Jewish passengers on a plane that arrived from Israel.

In the racial-reckoning summer of 2020, local leaders in a small American town gathered for a contentious vote on whether to take down a statue that honored a man who was, as one assessment read, “steeped in racial division, violence and injustice.” Would they join local leaders from cities in Virginia, Alabama and other states to remove a memorial praising a figure who symbolized a “historical trauma” that still caused anguish and anger among their constituents?

The town council listened, and debated, and finally decided. By a margin of 6-1, the seven members voted to join the floodtide of decisions elsewhere to take down another symbol of historic oppression.

Michael Cohen said Donald Trump’s abrupt departure from Wednesday’s court proceedings in New York proves his temperament is not suited for the presidency.

Trump stormed out of court after Cohen, his former personal attorney and fixer, testified that the ex-president had never asked him to inflate the numbers on his financial statements. Cohen was testifying in the $250 million New York civil fraud trial concerning Trump’s business dealings.

Finding articles and accounts sensitive to the asymmetries between Israel and Palestine amid the unfolding war is no simple matter. This interview with international relations scholar Richard Falk, however, hopes to show the ways in which Israel has created asymmetric conditions that have situated the attainment of Palestinian rights and aspirations beyond horizons of realistic hope.

Without undermining the horrible reality of historical and current antisemitism, Falk breaks down the implications of Israeli foreign policy and discourse, and how state actors work to divert attention away from government policy and action. Falk explains how the intentional smearing of critics and broadening of the accusation of antisemitism furthers Israeli violence and stigmatizes pro-Palestinian voices. He analyzes three elements that distinguish Israeli state propaganda, making it a powerful military weapon particularly in periods of intense conflict. He provides strategies to address the “both sides” argument.

We were told Hamas killed 1400 Israelis on October 7, that they carried out rapes and torture of civilians en masse and, of course, that they beheaded babies.

These claims are being used to justify Israel’s bombardment of Gaza – the world’s largest open-air prison. Israel’s bombing of the strip, where over 50% of the population are children, has cost the lives of more than 5,000 people and left more than one million homeless.

People reportedly lost all access to internet and communication services across the Gaza Strip on Friday night as Israel announced an expansion of its ground attack and launched what observers described as the largest aerial assault since its latest bombing campaign began nearly three weeks ago.

Al Jazeera reported that it has only “sporadic communication” with its correspondents on the ground in the besieged Gaza Strip. The outlet has been able to go live intermittently via satellite phones.

Israel’s ground invasion of northern Gaza has in effect begun, following the Israeli military’s announcement on Friday of its plan to “expand” its ground attacks.

“Explosions from continuous airstrikes lit up the sky over Gaza City for hours after nightfall,” according to the Associated Press, and families with loved ones in Gaza were terrified to learn on Friday that Israel has taken down internet and communications throughout the region, largely cutting off contact between the 2.3 million people who live there and the outside world, and making it difficult for journalists to track the scale of ground attacks. According to the Washington Post, “The Hamas media center reported heavy nighttime clashes with Israeli forces at several places, including what it said was an Israeli incursion east of Bureij. Asked about the report, the Israeli military reiterated early Saturday that it had been carrying out targeted raids and expanding strikes with the aim of ‘preparing the ground for future stages of the operation.’”

Armed with a brush and a bucket of grey paint, the Russian anti-war activist Ilya Zernov walked through Belgrade until he reached a large mural that said “Death to Ukraine” on the side of an apartment block.

As Zernov, 19, started painting over the mural, he said he was cornered by three Serbian men who ordered him to stop. “One of them pulled out a knife … He then punched me in the right ear,” Zernov, who fled his hometown of Kazan shortly after Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine, told the Observer.

After Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter on October 27, 2022, I wrote an article in which I warned, “We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened.”

Today, I have to issue an apology: I was wrong. Musk’s ownership of Twitter may well be — at least for people who manage to enjoy catastrophic human folly — the funniest thing that’s ever happened.

Let’s take a look back and see how I was so mistaken.