Democracy gone Astray: Monday, September 09, 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.]

Monday, September 09, 2024

Israel is using the same tactics in Gaza that al-Assad employed in Syria

As the humanitarian pause took effect in Gaza, footage of the massive destruction in the northern part of the enclave has started to trickle in.

Seeing these images of devastation, one cannot but think of Thomas Friedman’s reference to what he calls the “Hama rules” in an article he published with The New York Times on October 14.

A neologism he coined many years ago, it refers to then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad’s violent razing of the city of Hama in 1982 that killed more than 20,000 Syrians. Friedman argues that brute force commands legitimacy in the Middle East. This idea is deeply problematic, but the scale of destruction in Gaza suggests that the Israeli government and the military have embraced it.

The dramatic victory of the far right provocateur Geert Wilders in the recent Dutch elections is yet another extremely worrisome sign that Europe is shredding the veil of tolerance and becoming more brazenly exclusionary. Indeed, the spread of far right radicalization across the continent signals that Europe is engulfed in a profound political, social and moral crisis.

Wilders’s Party for Freedom, or PVV, which has been on a long ascent, took 37 of the 150 seats in the Second Chamber. This was 20 more seats than it won in the 2021 elections, while the other parties lost seats, making the extreme right the largest party in the national parliament. The radical left was hit the hardest, losing nearly half of its elected representatives.

The scene is one familiar from many conflicts. Soldiers line up to get food from an outdoor canteen, weapons slung haphazardly over their shoulders, boots muddy, shirts undone. An armoured personnel carrier clanks by, the roar of its engine temporarily drowning out the boom of artillery. Officers shout orders. Tired men jump down from dusty vehicles and swear.

Even during the recent ceasefire, the rear areas of the massive Israeli military offensive in Gaza were busy. So too was Hamas, which used the seven-day pause in hostilities to reorganise its battered forces and reconstitute some of its degraded capabilities.

Israel’s military ordered more areas in the Gaza Strip to evacuate on Sunday and stepped up its bombardment as it shifted its offensive to the southern half of the besieged enclave where it asserts that leaders of the Hamas militant group are hiding.

Sunday’s evacuation orders focused on areas in and around Gaza’s second-largest city of Khan Younis, the Associated Press reported.

Russian authorities are paying the wives of Russian soldiers not to protest against their long-running deployment after demonstrations in Moscow, the UK Ministry of Defence said.

The MoD said in its daily intelligence briefing that some women were being paid off while others had been discredited online.

It comes after protests from soldiers’ wives in November.

Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative from Wyoming, expressed deep concern in an interview about American democracy’s ability to survive another four-year presidential term for Donald Trump.

In clips shared Friday from the interview that will air on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” Cheney told host John Dickerson that Americans can’t entirely rely on Congress and the judicial system to rein in Trump ― the clear front-runner at this point for the GOP presidential nomination despite facing 91 felony charges linked to his 2016 campaign, his 2020 reelection loss and his mishandling of classified documents.

Well, we won’t have Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) to dunk on anymore.

Congress expelled Santos, the biographical fabulist turned congressman, on Friday, two weeks after a House Ethics Committee report backed up federal charges accusing him of using campaign funds for personal expenses. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and accused prosecutors of engaging in a “witch hunt” against him.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump is not immune from prosecution in his election interference case in Washington, a federal judge ruled Friday, knocking down the Republican’s bid to derail the case charging him with plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s decision tees up a legal fight over the scope of presidential power that could ultimately reach the U.S Supreme Court. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing in the case, is expected to quickly appeal to fight what his lawyers have characterized as an unsettled legal question.

Now that fighting has begun again, how strong is Hamas?

In military terms, Hamas is significantly weaker than it was on 7 October.

The Israeli offensive has undoubtedly damaged the group’s military infrastructure, and killed a significant number of militants. Quite how many is unclear. It is now known that Hamas needed to mobilise auxiliaries such as police into Israel for the attacks that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, on 7 October alongside better trained fighters, which suggests that estimates that Hamas has 30,000 or more combat troops are exaggerated.

Israel’s Defense Forces waited just four minutes after the truce expired at 7am before restarting bombing, according to one resident of Khan Younis. An hour later, its military set out its plan for the “next stage of the war”: a division of Gaza into dozens of numbered “evacuation areas”, a core part of the military’s plan to gradually take control of the southern part of the strip.

The military’s plan, canvassed privately this week, is to avoid a repeat of the blanket bombing of the northern Gaza in the crowded south, with sequential, targeted bombing campaigns. Under the plan, people in certain numbered districts of Gaza will be told to evacuate before bombing begins, although how much time they will get is not clear; homes in Khan Younis were among the targets struck on Friday hours after the truce expired, and residents were given little if any time to flee.

The House voted Friday to expel Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) from Congress, a historic and embarrassing end to his brief legislative career that was built on lies from the start.

The final vote was 311 to 114. A breakdown of the vote tally is here.

Valery Gergiev, the star Russian conductor and prominent supporter of Vladimir Putin, has been installed as general director of Moscow’s Bolshoi theatre, in the latest appointment of a Kremlin loyalist to a leading cultural institution.

The appointment means that Gergiev, who also heads the rival Mariinsky theatre in St Petersburg, will have artistic control over the two crown jewels of the Russian ballet and opera.

One of the very few things that still brings the Republican and Democratic political establishments together is their shared reverence for Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger’s death, at the age of 100, has served as a reminder that the frequent, wide-ranging and substantial allegations of war crimes against him never dimmed the admiration he inspired among the powerful in Washington.

Pennsylvania Republicans are going through a rough time. On the heels of losing open-seat races for governor and Senate in 2022, the GOP lost an important state Supreme Court election earlier this month by an unexpectedly wide margin.

One warning sign, in particular, should jump out to GOP leaders in Pennsylvania and Washington — the most recent results confirm that mail-in voting is becoming a deadly serious problem for the party.

This isn’t just idle speculation. From managing President George W. Bush’s Pennsylvania campaign in 2004 to running as the Republican nominee for Congress in suburban Philadelphia in 2022 to serving as Pennsylvania’s Young Republicans chair in the 1990s, I’ve been working to build and rebuild the GOP for decades. The newest data clearly tells us that we need to engage on mail-in voting. Now.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán regularly pushes the EU to the cliff edge, but diplomats are panicking that his hostility to Ukraine is now about to finally kick the bloc over the precipice.

A brewing political crisis is set to boil over at a summit in mid-December when EU leaders are due to make a historic decision on bringing Ukraine into the 27-nation club and seal a key budget deal to throw a €50 billion lifeline to Kyiv’s flailing war economy. The meeting is supposed to signal to the U.S. that, despite the political distraction over the war in the Middle East, the EU is fully committed to Ukraine.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has arrested a man with dual Russian-Italian citizenship for conducting sabotage operations for Ukrainian military intelligence.

Moscow said on Friday that the suspect had carried out bomb attacks on railways after being recruited by Kyiv earlier this year. Infrastructure and production facilities across Russia have been damaged in unclaimed attacks since its military forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, with investigators opening dozens of cases.

A lawyer for former President Donald Trump explained to him last year that retaining government documents beyond a subpoena order issued to him from the Justice Department would constitute criminal activity, according to a new report.

These revelations, as reported by ABC News, which cites numerous sources with knowledge of the conversations, detail how special counsel Jack Smith and his team may have concluded that Trump knowingly broke the law when it came to his stashing thousands of government documents, including hundreds marked as classified, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Progressive lawmakers, activists and advocacy groups voiced their outrage Thursday at MSNBC’s decision to cancel a show hosted by Medhi Hasan, claiming that the network was seeking to silence one of its most prominent Muslim on-air personalities.

“It is bad optics for MSNBC to cancel @mehdirhasan’s show right at a time when he is vocal for human rights in Gaza with the war ongoing,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) posted on X, formerly Twitter. “As a strong supporter of free speech, MSNBC owes the public an explanation for this decision. Why would they choose to do this now?”

It seems churlish for any member of the party of Donald Trump to single out George Santos for punishment as a liar, fraudster and fabulist. The 23 federal charges against the first-term member of Congress pale beside the Republican frontrunner’s 91 felony counts and civil suits over fraud and E Jean Carroll’s defamation claim, based on her allegation of rape. Republicans’ faux horror at the discovery of Santos’s extravagant spending of campaign funds on Botox, casino chips and OnlyFans belies their previous blithe tolerance of the red-dressed, gay-pride, Brazilian drag queen in their midst. Santos thrived as the symbol of the cultural contradictions of Republicanism. Did his sophisticated taste for accessories from Hermès and Ferragamo finally do him in with his anti-globalist colleagues?

A resumed Israeli military assault in the overcrowded south of Gaza may lead many of 1 million refugees – including 900,000 sheltering in UN buildings – to try to push over the border into Egypt, the head of the UN’s Palestine relief agency UNRWA has warned.

After a second overnight visit to Gaza where he met overwhelmed Palestinians, Philippe Lazzarini urged Israel to think through the consequences of an offensive in the south if the temporary truce in the fighting is not extended.

Donald Trump renewed attacks on the wife of the judge in the New York civil fraud trial of his business empire, before and almost immediately after an appellate court on Thursday reinstated a gag order against him in the case.

The New York appellate court decided to reapply the gag order that barred the former US president and his lawyers from making public statements about court staff in his civil fraud trial, court records showed.

During oral arguments on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court’s six conservative justices questioned the constitutionality of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s ability to take enforcement actions outside of the court system in a case that could have sweeping consequences for the power of federal agencies to enforce the law.

In SEC v. Jarkesy, the financial regulatory agency had charged conservative radio host George Jarkesy Jr. with securities fraud for allegedly misrepresenting and inflating the assets in two investment funds he ran. After an internal judicial proceeding, the SEC found Jarkesy guilty and fined him $300,000 in 2013. In response, Jarkesy brought suit against the agency, challenging not only the fine but also the SEC’s right to even conduct an administrative judicial process in the first place.

TEL AVIV — All eyes are on when retired general Benny Gantz is going to make his move against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since Hamas’ murderous attacks on October 7, Israelis have largely put partisan politics aside, but the strain for such a highly rambunctious nation is starting to show. With the first phase of action in Gaza coming to a close, the weeks ahead now look set to roll into a potential endgame for Netanyahu, as many Israelis blame him for last month’s catastrophic security blunder.

Republicans thought they were done with their Obamacare nightmare. Then Donald Trump read a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

It was an item by the paper’s editorial board that piqued the former president’s frustration — one focused on health care industry consolidation but touching enough on the Affordable Care Act to reignite grievances about failing to repeal the law. And so, he fired off a post on Truth Social saying he was “seriously looking at alternatives” and that 2017’s failed repeal and replace effort was “a low point for the Republican Party.”

Elon Musk has a message for advertisers who have left X en masse amid accusations of unchecked antisemitism on the social media platform: "Go fuck yourself."

“If somebody has been trying to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself,” Musk said during an animated interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday.

Musk has faced criticism over the spread of disinformation and hate content on X since he bought the company formerly known as Twitter. That culminated in an advertiser exodus in recent weeks, as posts about the Israel-Hamas war spread.

Spain’s prime minister has expressed doubts that Israel is abiding by international law in its war on Gaza, given the high number of civilian casualties there.

“The footage we are seeing and the growing numbers of children dying, I have serious doubt [Israel] is complying with international humanitarian law,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Thursday.

“What we are seeing in Gaza is not acceptable,” he said in an interview with Spanish state-owned broadcaster TVE.

BRUSSELS — Donald Trump has mulled naming Tucker Carlson as his vice president if he gets another term as U.S. president. But Carlson, the ex-Fox News journalist and polemicist, looks more like he’s auditioning to be Trump’s top international diplomat.

Since his ouster from cable TV, Carlson has been taking his new X show on a world tour, and his interviews with Argentina’s Javier Milei and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have racked up hundreds of millions of views.

Yet Carlson is also engaging in a sort of shadow diplomacy.

Standing inside the border station at Raja-Jooseppi – with leather gloves tucked into his fleece-lined hat on the table in front of him and snow falling in the darkness outside – Lt Col Ville Ahtiainen paused to reflect on the geopolitical drama that has descended on this remote part of the Arctic.

“Maybe this is over, or maybe this was just the beginning,” said the deputy commander of the Lapland Border Guard. “I hope this is over and we can back get to normal life, but we will see.”

Western governments are “actively encourag[ing] the killing of women and children” in Gaza, because they are not willing to challenge Israeli accounts of the war there, the father of a British peace activist killed by an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) sniper has warned.

Anthony Hurndall’s son, Tom Hurndall, was shot in the head in April 2003 in Rafah, while he was helping Palestinian children.

Elon Musk has issued a defiant and profanity-laced message for the advertisers who pulled money from X in recent weeks amid a backlash over his endorsement of an antisemitic tweet and reports of increased hate speech on the platform.

Video of the interview, which was widely circulated, showed that Musk said, “Don’t advertise,” on Wednesday during an on-stage interview at an event in New York. “If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.”

Shaadi, Isa and Mahmud Saleh look out across the valley, bite their nails, wring their hands and worry. There is no work locally and travelling to find any is almost impossible because of restrictions imposed by Israel on the occupied West Bank after the 7 October attacks by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 people. The main road into their village has been almost entirely blocked. Their debts are mounting up.

“There has never been anything like this,” says Isa, 73. “Life is not normal.”

Elon Musk told companies that have paused ad buys on X to “go fuck” yourselves, saying an ongoing boycott would likely “kill the company” but the world would judge who was at fault.

“If somebody’s going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself,” Musk said during the New York Times’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “Go. Fuck. Yourself.”

He then seemed to call out Disney CEO Bob Iger by name after the company was one of many to pause its ad spending.

Fully contradicting one of the most consequential outcomes of his entire presidency, Donald Trump reportedly believes that he can run as a “moderate” on abortion in 2024.

And Hillary Clinton herself is in disbelief.

“He thinks women are going to fall for this?” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee wondered aloud Wednesday, in response to a Rolling Stone report describing Trump’s apparent plan to pull the mother of all flip-flops.

Henry Kissinger — who as a top American foreign policy official oversaw, overlooked and at times actively perpetrated some of the most grotesque war crimes the United States and its allies have committed — died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.

Kissinger’s death was announced by his consulting firm on Wednesday evening. No cause of death was immediately given.

Kissinger served as secretary of state and national security adviser under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, positions that allowed him to direct the Vietnam War and the broader Cold War with the Soviet Union, and to implement a stridently “realist” approach that prioritized U.S. interests and domestic political success over any potential atrocity that might occur.

Four people, including two children, were reportedly killed during a major Israeli incursion into the West Bank city of Jenin that the Israel Defense Forces said was aimed at suppressing jihadist activity.

Adam Samer al-Ghoul, eight, and Basil Suleiman Abu al-Wafa, 15, were shot dead during the fighting, Palestinian officials said, while the IDF said a terror leader and his associate had been found dead after their building was attacked.

The Russian interior ministry has proposed introducing a “loyalty pledge” that foreigners would have to sign on entering the country as the government considers even more stringent controls on public dissent amid its war in Ukraine.

The new rules would include prohibitions on criticism of the Russian state and top officials including Vladimir Putin, Kremlin foreign policy including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, discussion of LGBTQ+ issues and support for same-sex marriage, and “distortion of the historical truth about the feat of the Soviet people in the defence of the Fatherland and its contribution to the victory over fascism”.

BRUSSELS — NATO's foreign ministers Wednesday agreed to step up work with Ukraine on a wide range of security issues, in a bid to show solidarity amid distractions from the war between Israel and Hamas.

In a statement, NATO allies vowed to "remain steadfast in their commitment to further step up political and practical support to Ukraine" and said they "will continue their support for as long as it takes," after a meeting with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Brussels.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it had filed charges against a man allegedly working for the Indian government to orchestrate the assassination of a U.S. citizen earlier this year. An Indian government official allegedly instructed Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, to coordinate the murder of a Sikh separatist living in New York.

BRUSSELS — Turkey has promised Sweden it will ratify its bid to join NATO "within weeks," Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström said Wednesday.

Referring to his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan, with whom he spoke on Tuesday, Billström said: "He told me that he expected the ratification to take place within weeks. And of course, we don’t take anything for granted from the side of Sweden, but we look forward to this being completed."

The Israeli-Hamas war has given Russia a golden opportunity to sow division among its Western enemies. It's a chance Vladimir Putin's disinformation machine was never going to miss.

Since the outbreak of hostilities on October 7, Kremlin-linked Facebook accounts have ramped up their output by almost 400 percent, with the Middle East crisis now dominating posts from Russian diplomats, state-backed outlets and Putin supporters in the West.

The lies spread by Moscow's digital propagandists now include claims that Hamas terrorists are using NATO weapons to attack Israel and that British instructors trained Hamas attackers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vehemently denied accusations he allowed Qatar to fund and strengthen the militant group Hamas in order to divide Palestinians into rival political camps, slamming the claims as “ridiculous.”

Netanyahu’s opponents in Israel argue his government spent years actively boosting Hamas in Gaza by allowing Qatar to channel hundreds of millions of dollars to the coastal enclave in a risky game of “divide-and-rule,” that was meant to play the Islamist militants from Hamas off against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

On Tuesday, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee rejected a request from Hunter Biden for his testimony in front of the committee to be made public — a move that committee member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said was made simply because Republicans are afraid of “getting humiliated” in the public sphere.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, sent a letter to Congress saying that he would only testify if the hearings were public in order to ensure that Republican lawmakers wouldn’t manipulate his words or selectively leak information to smear him.

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump filed a brief with the Colorado state Supreme Court this week arguing that a constitutional provision that would disallow him from being able to run for the presidency again in 2024 should be ignored because, as they put it, he never made an oath, as president, to “support” the Constitution.

The argument is one of semantics, as the president of the United States is sworn in through a different oath than members of Congress or other government officials.

While much of the world views the upcoming United Nations summit on climate change as a step towards reducing the global reliance on fossil fuels, Premier Danielle Smith is taking a much different approach.

Believe it or not, she sees her trip to the COP28 conference in Dubai as a marketing opportunity for Alberta’s “clean” fossil fuel industry.

There’s certainly an element of chutzpah to Smith’s approach — or maybe it’s just dangerously unhelpful, like showing up at a weight watchers convention with a box of doughnuts.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that it is “totally unnecessary” for Israel to abide by U.S. standards regarding conditions for military aid ― offering a rare high-level acknowledgment that the United States does not apply the law to Israel as it does to other countries.

Asked about conversations among Democratic senators about putting additional conditions on aid to Israel amid its devastating offensive in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, the Kentucky Republican told reporters: “I think it’s ridiculous.”

The Kremlin accused a prominent Russian-American writer of spreading “false information” about its invasion of Ukraine, filing another lawsuit meant to punish those critical of its ongoing assault on the country.

Masha Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was accused by Russia of the crime after sitting for an interview with a popular Russian YouTuber, Yury Dud. The pair spoke about Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, specifically the massacre of civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha in March 2022.

Donald Trump says he is still interested in repealing the Affordable Care Act, which means health care for tens of millions of people would be in jeopardy if he becomes president again next year.

Trump said Saturday on his website Truth Social that he was “looking at alternatives” to the 2010 health care law, also known as “Obamacare,” which has reduced the number of Americans without health insurance to historic lows and established basic guarantees of coverage for all Americans regardless of pre-existing conditions.

In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel, an international genocide debate has been unleashed. Some in the field of genocide studies, including Israeli historian Raz Segal and British sociologist Martin Shaw, have argued that Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza constitutes genocide. Palestinian and international legal academics, and increasing numbers of commentators (including Jewish voices), also claim that genocide is imminent or already underway, and the Center for Constitutional Rights is suing the U.S. government for failing to prevent genocide in Gaza. Before and after them, other international legal experts issued a statement condemning Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 Israelis as itself genocidal, and a group of scholars of the Holocaust wrote that the acts brought to mind “the pogroms that paved the way to the Final Solution.”

TEL AVIV — “Benjamin Netanyahu is not a brave leader,” says Tamir Pardo, a former director of the Mossad intelligence agency. “To make hard decisions for war or for peace, you have to be brave, and he isn’t, and he panics.”

That’s how Pardo views his former boss’ reaction to October 7 — as fitting a pattern of behavior he observed first-hand from 2011 to 2016, when Pardo led Israel’s vaunted external intelligence agency.

Saudi Arabia is driving a huge global investment plan to create demand for its oil and gas in developing countries, an undercover investigation has revealed. Critics said the plan was designed to get countries “hooked on its harmful products”.

Little was known about the oil demand sustainability programme (ODSP) but the investigation obtained detailed information on plans to drive up the use of fossil fuel-powered cars, buses and planes in Africa and elsewhere, as rich countries increasingly switch to clean energy.