Tag: gaza

  • Patrick Lawrence: Zionism on the Upper East Side

    Patrick Lawrence: Zionism on the Upper East Side

    The organization Park East sponsored, Nefesh B’Nefesh, also assists American Jews who wish to emigrate to Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. This is a legal matter and as such not inconsequential.

     

    Zionism on the Upper East Side

    By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News / December 4, 2025

    Park East Synagogue, New York. (Gryffindor/Wikimedia Commons)

    We watch in horror from afar as the Zionist terror state continues its genocide against the people of Gaza and escalates its slower-motion, lower-technology genocide against the 3 million Palestinians who reside in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, otherwise known as the Occupied Territories — illegally occupied, of course.

    As a few Israeli commentators have pointed out — those few who guard their integrity— the operative principle here is the limitless impunity the Western powers have long granted “the Jewish state.”

    This is the outcome, they say, when a people given to a culture of vengeance are told they will never suffer consequences however barbaric their conduct toward others, however many laws they break, however many their assassinations, however many their torture victims, however many exploding telephones they plant among civilian populations, etc.

    Maybe we need no reminders, maybe we do, that this presumption of impunity is not bound by sovereign borders and is not limited to the cowardly, condemnable savagery of apartheid Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. But we had one last week, and it is well we consider it carefully.

    Zohran Mamdani, the principled social democrat who is New York’s mayor-elect, is now under attack from Zionist Americans who insist Zionist Americans are above the law — American law and international law. You may look well on Mamdani and you may not, but as he is besieged by these objectionable people, so are we all.

    This story begins on Wednesday, Nov. 19, at Park East Synagogue, a grand edifice that sits on East 67th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues in the Lenox Hill section of Manhattan.

    Park East has been serving Modern Orthodox Jews since 1890. Its congregation, to be noted, is comprised of the great and good of the Upper East Side. These are observant but assimilated Jews, thoroughly plugged into, let’s say, secular public space.

    Except.

    Two Wednesdays back Park East hosted an organization dedicated to encouraging Jews to “make Aliyah,” the Hebrew term for emigrating to “the Promised Land.” O.K., you cannot find anything legally wrong in this, although it is unambiguously a moral wrong in that it expresses support for a genocidal state.

    But let us set aside the moral question for now. The organization Park East sponsored, Nefesh B’Nefesh, also assists American Jews who wish to emigrate to Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. This is a legal matter and as such not inconsequential.

    American Settlers

    Statistics on the settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are hard to nail down (and I can easily imagine why). The Times of Israel reported eight years ago that some 60,000 Americans were among the Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

    That was roughly 15 percent of the settler population then — not counting the considerable number residing in East Jerusalem. We have no precise figures now, but these populations — settlers and Americans among the settlers — are both higher.

    As has been well-reported, and well-recorded in several documentaries, the Americans among the West Bank settlers are frequently the most violent in their incessant attacks on Palestinians. They have also been at times the most readily inclined to murder.

    There is the infamous case of Baruch Goldstein, a freakshow Zionist from Brooklyn who killed 29 Palestinians when he attacked the Ibrahimi Mosque (tomb of Abraham and other patriarchs) in Hebron in 1994. Goldstein was not singular: He was and remains exemplary — and a hero among some Zionists. National Security Minister Ben Givr had a picture of Goldstein on his living room wall until 2020.

    I cannot name the precise statutes applicable here, but they must be several. Open and shut, just the facts, Ma’am, Nefesh B’Nefesh is an accomplice to the settler movement.

    Most immediately significant in the Park East case, Nefesh B’Nefesh — this translates as “soul to soul,” and who knows what that is all about — is directly implicated in the settlers’ breach of international law given that all the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal according to said law.

    There was no claiming surprise that blustery Nov. 19th when a group of roughly 200 vociferous demonstrators gathered in front of Park East to protest the promotional seminar Nefesh B’Nefesh was running that day.

    “Death to the IDF” was among the tamer of various chants; others encouraged violence against settlers. “It is our duty,” one leader of the demonstration said measuredly to those assembled, “to make them think twice before holding these events.”

    Inside the Park East building, people indirectly but unmistakably promoting violence against Palestinians, land theft and all the rest. And on East 67th Street, righteous indignation, anger in behalf of a persecuted people, some violent rhetoric, but no violence.

    It was obvious the mayor-elect would have to intervene. The event itself warranted this, and various Zionist constituencies, as well-reported before and since Mamdani’s election, have been attacking him as a radical jihadist, an anti–Semite and who knows what else, so attempting to poison his relations with New York’s Jewish community.

    Here is the ever-poised Mamdani’s day-after statement, his first on the incident:

    “The mayor-elect has discouraged the use of language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so. He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”

    A few days later, storms of protest from Zionist quarters having instantly erupted, Mamdani sent this statement to The New York Times:

    “We will protect New Yorkers’ First Amendment rights while making clear that nothing can justify language calling for ‘death to’ anyone. It is unacceptable, full stop.”

    I find these statements a little in the way of Solomon in their discernment, in Mamdani’s determination not to tilt his hand and to articulate the core truth of the matter:

    The more extreme language out on East 67th Street was wrong so far as it intimidated synagogue goers, but the principle of free speech is nonetheless to be honored; those encouraging breaches of international law are wrong, and a synagogue should not be used to promote illegalities.

    ‘A Hateful Mob’

    Maybe what has come back at Mamdani in the course of all this was predictable, more-of-the-same babble. “Mob” was the de rigueur term among those responding to the mayor-elect’s response.

    The demonstrators were “a hateful mob of anti–Israel protesters,” the New York Post reported, and it got worse from there. Mamdani sided with “an anti–Semitic mob,” eJP, or eJewishphilanthropy.com, declared. “Last week,” this outfit continued, “Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani failed the first test of his promise to protect all New Yorkers.”

    And from William Daroff, the chief exec of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations: “We are still judging him, and I’d say that at the moment he’s got a failing grade.”

    They sitteth in judgment, you see.

    O.K., we have heard all this before in one or another context, so has Mamdani. He is surely in for more of same once he assumes office Jan. 1. But we ought not miss the very much larger matters raised by the Park East incident.

    There is the First Amendment question, as Mamdani correctly noted, and there are the legal questions as pencil-sketched above. These are related at the not-too-distant horizon.

    People speaking for Nefesh B’Nefesh now deny they promote emigration to West Bank settlements — which, as the group’s website attests, is simply not true. It advertises Gush Etzion, an expanding sprawl of 22–and-counting settlements south of Jerusalem, Ma`ale Adumim, whose location makes it key to the Israelis final takeover of the West Bank, and various others.

    “Teaching about Aliyah and Zionism belongs in that space”: This is the aforementioned William Daroff. And from eJP again: “Mamdani condemned the synagogue’s choice of programming.”

    Choice of programming.

    You see what is going on here. Park East and Nefesh B’Nefesh are encouraging Americans to breach international law. And absolutely to a one, those defending the synagogue and the event-organizer do so by pretending this is not what is most pithily at issue.

    “We are deeply concerned by, and firmly condemn, the violent rhetoric and aggressive behavior that took place outside of the Park East Synagogue,” Nefesh B’Nefesh now declares on its website. Violent rhetoric and aggressive behavior on East 67th Street but not in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem.

    To go straight to the point, this is another assertion of Zionist impunity. And we should understand what has lately transpired in New York as a very, very direct extension of the impunity that encourages and also protects the Israeli terror machine in Gaza and the West Bank. Impunity: It is a blight under which Palestinians suffer, and none of us is immune to it.

    To put this another way, we witness an especially insidious case of chutzpah, the dangers of which I have considered elsewhere. You have your laws, the world has its, and we will ignore them before your eyes (and ostracize you as an anti–Semite if you object). This, in a sentence, is what Zionists now insist we must accept.

    I do not know what I would have chanted were I among the 200 outside Park East Synagogue the evening of Nov. 19.

    I know what I would have wanted to hear from those inside: I would have wanted every right-thinking congregant at Park East to emerge denouncing Zionism as a blight on the splendor of Judaism’s authentic traditions — this and loud denunciation of all that Israel’s impunity licenses it to do more or less everywhere.

    Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.

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  • “The Trillion Dollar War Machine”: William Hartung on How U.S. Military Spending Fuels Wars

    “The Trillion Dollar War Machine”: William Hartung on How U.S. Military Spending Fuels Wars

    “The Trillion Dollar War Machine”: William Hartung on How U.S. Military Spending Fuels Wars

    By William Hartung / Democracy Now! / November 14, 2025

    Democracy Now! speaks to William Hartung about his new book The Trillion Dollar War Machine and who profits from the United States’ runaway military spending that fuels foreign wars. Hartung says that U.S. policy is “based on profit” and calls for a rethinking of our foreign entanglements. “We haven’t won a war in this century. We’ve caused immense harm. We’ve spent $8 trillion,” he says.

    Transcript
    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González.

    As the U.S. expands its military presence in Latin America, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared earlier this week the Pentagon’s now on a war footing. In a major speech, Hegseth called for weapons companies executives to speed up production of weapons for the military.

    SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: Every dollar squandered on redundancy, bureaucracy and waste is a dollar that could be used to outfit and supply the warfighter. We must wage an all-out campaign to streamline the Pentagon’s process to unshackle our people from unproductive work and to shift our resources from the bureaucracy to the battlefield.

    Our objective is simple: transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing, to rapidly accelerate the fielding of capabilities and focus on results. Our objective is to build, rebuild the arsenal of freedom.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by William Hartung, coauthor of the new book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home. Bill Hartung is Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Bill, welcome back to Democracy Now!.

    How unprecedented is the Pentagon budget at this point and what the military’s doing? For example, even President Trump, in his executive order, renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War, although only actually Congress can officially do that.

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the Pentagon budget has never hit a trillion dollars before. Even its most ardent supporters kind of didn’t believe we would ever hit this mark. But now that they’re there, all bets are off.

    And speeches like that by Pete Hegseth are basically saying, “Not only are we going to spend a trillion, there’s not going to be rules. We’re not going to have independent testing of these weapons, we’re not going to vet them for human rights when we export them.” It was basically a gift to the arms industry. And they talk about speeding it up. When it comes to weapons, speed kills.

    AMY GOODMAN: So – yeah, go ahead, Juan.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Bill, I wanted to ask you about the increasing shift in the military machine of the United States from actually troops to machines, this shift of this new defense industry that has arisen from Silicon Valley that, I guess, dreams of being able to fight wars without losing any human beings and just depending on remote-control killing abilities, robots, AI. Could you talk about to what degree this has moved forward?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, it’s definitely moving. In Washington, the two ways to make money, if you mention China, if you mention AI, or if you mention both, even better. It’s part of a long myth that technology can win wars, which didn’t happen in Vietnam, it didn’t happen in Iraq, didn’t happen with Reagan’s alleged leak-proof missile defense.

    So, they’re selling kind of a bill of goods that’s kind of stale. It’s old ideology with new software. And they’re much more aggressive than the head of, like, Lockheed Martin, who might say to his shareholders, “Oh, this turbulence is going to create business for us.”

    Palmer Luckey’s saying, “We’re going to have war with China in two years. We’re going to bury them. We’re going to have more ammunition.” They’re sort of acting like they’re in charge of our foreign policy, and they view themselves as almost the new technological messiahs. So, I think their ideology and their political influence is almost as dangerous as the weapons they want us to use.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in your book, you have an extensive discussion of the War on Gaza and how the Gaza War became big business for U.S. companies. Could you talk about that?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah, well, there’s this mythology in the Pentagon that sending arms is better than sending troops because our troops aren’t at risk, and the countries will, quote, “Defend themselves.” But of course, Israel committed genocide in Gaza. It was not defense under any terms. And when you’re sending weapons, all the money goes to the companies. You’re not doing troops, you’re not doing logistics. It’s almost pure revenue.

    And when you say it’s military aid to Israel, it’s really military aid to Lockheed Martin and Palantir because the money rests in Israel, comes right back to them. Palantir even had its board meeting during the Gaza War and tried to get other companies profiting from the War to be more vocal in their support of Israel. Of course, they also gave them the software to accelerate the bombing.

    So, it’s one of the more shameful episodes in the history of an industry that, of course, is not based on morality, it’s based on profit. And I think unfortunately, a lot of people who are kind of into tech are like, “Oh, these are amazing people. They put rockets in space. It’ll be cheaper,” and so forth. But we’ll pay a big price if we put our trust in these companies.

    And of course, they’re very much into the Trump administration, including J. D. Vance, who was groomed in Silicon Valley, and is a creature of Silicon Valley and owes Peter Thiel, essentially, his career. When he was appointed VP, the champagne corks went off in Silicon Valley, and huge amounts of money came in behind Trump.

    So, they’re trying to basically displace these huge companies like Lockheed Martin, and what the government’s going to do is pay off both of them. Golden Dome is going to have hardware by Lockheed Martin, software by Anduril and other companies. So, that just means that trillion dollars is going to be in the rearview mirror in a few years if we don’t fight back and fight back hard, which means not accepting the myth of technological superiority.

    AMY GOODMAN: You have two fascinating chapters in this book, “The Militarization of American Science: Buying the Ivory Tower,” and, “Capturing the Media: How Propaganda Powers the War Machine.” Talk about both.

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, this move towards AI and advanced tech means they need the university folks more because Lockheed Martin doesn’t have those kind of people. They’re prized now. And so, they’re doing much more recruiting, sending much more money. Johns Hopkins gets a billion dollars a year to work on things like ballistic missiles, but the average student there wouldn’t know it. The lab is 40 miles away. They’re occupied with other things.

    Berkeley helps run a nuclear weapons lab. If you walked into a student on the quad, likewise, they would not know that. So, they’re accelerating that. And also, the pipeline from engineering students into the weapons industry. And the media, well, between vetting Hollywood scripts, spokespersons from think tanks funded by the weapons industry, just the framing.

    Very few outlets now really do deep critiques of the military. And then, on top of that, they’re not covering it. Some papers don’t even have a Pentagon reporter anymore, so they just print up the Pentagon press release. And then, paragraph 32, somebody like Bill Hartung makes a little quote so they can say they’re being balanced. But the whole framing is pro-military.

    And there’s this notion that if something happens in the world, if we don’t respond with the military, we’re, quote-unquote, “Not doing anything.” Of course, whenever we do it, it’s disastrous. You have members saying, “Oh, peace through strength.” Well, we haven’t won a war in this century.

    We’ve caused immense harm, we’ve spent eight trillion dollars, we’ve got troops with PTSD in the hundreds of thousands, who we’re not taking care of. And yet, that myth persists. So, I think there’s kind of a cultural educational task that has to happen as well as pulling back the amount of money we’re throwing at these companies.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill, you begin your book by citing Trump’s 2024 campaign speech in Wisconsin, where he pledged to end endless wars. But ultimately, as you point out, Trump wasn’t very different from Biden on many of these metrics. They both turned out to be staunch supporters of the U.S. war machine. Could you elaborate?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah, well, Trump uses that tool when needed. Like, when he beat Jeb Bush and Hilary Clinton over the head about Iraq, which, of course, he did not oppose when it was happening. And I think this stuff about war profiteering is a message to those parts of his base who are sick of corporate welfare, sick of war, some even voted for him because they believed this idea that he was going to be less interventionist.

    But here we are, blowing innocent people out of the water off of Venezuela, continuing to arm genocide in Gaza, giving away the store to these companies. “We’ll give you money, we won’t regulate you, you’ll get to do pretty much what you want.” In his first term, he did a similar thing, until he cozied up to Saudi Arabia to sell them record amounts of arms and then claimed they were job creators in the United States.

    So, he really views the arms industry as a political ally, and he’s not going to go after them in any big way. But every once in a while, he’ll lapse into that, or he says we have too many nuclear weapons. But there’s no evidence in his policy. In fact, they’re increasing spending on nuclear weapons. So, he’s erratic, but there is a political purpose, which is just to keep that part of his base that’s skeptical of war feeling like he maybe will do something about it.

    AMY GOODMAN: Before we end, I wanted to ask you about Axios yesterday reporting Israel seeking a new 20-year security agreement with the United States, while the past agreement promised Israel around $4 billion per year in military aid, and Israel’s likely to seek at least that much going forward.

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, yeah, they want to be kind of a permanent client of the United States and for us to pay for their aggression. And the current one that runs out had a few little things they didn’t like. Like, they used to be able to spend U.S. military aid to build up their own arms industry.

    That was supposed to come to an end. It certainly will be waived if it’s negotiated under the Trump administration. So, basically, they’re going to – if they do that, they’re permanently tying themselves to whatever Israel does in the region. For example, when Israel bombed Iran while the U.S. was supposed to be negotiating with them, Trump followed right behind with bombings and false claims about how they’d obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. He even chided some of his own people for acknowledging that that was not the case.

    STOP THE U.S. WAR MACHINE

    So, it’s one of the worst moves that could be made. It’s tying us to an archaic, damaging, destabilizing policy and egging on the worst forces in Israel. So, I’m hoping there’ll be some pushback. The problem is, these deals are often done behind closed doors.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill, one more question about this. In this trade war between the United States and China, the issue of rare earths has continued to come up as a major weakness of the U.S. military establishment, and also, obviously, in other industry as well. How big an issue do you think this is and a weakness for the United States?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, it goes against their notion that they can create this self-sufficient garrison state because it’s a global economy, and they can’t do everything here. They don’t have every resource, don’t have every technical kind of expertise. So, this idea that they’re going to have this perfect system all controlled by the United States is a pipe dream.

    Even at the most dominant moments of the United States in history, we were never completely self-sufficient. So, Trump is actually selling a bill of goods that is not possible to actually fulfill, which, of course, is happening in other spheres as well, but is more dangerous when you’re talking about peace and security.

    William D. Hartung (Bio from Quincy Institute  where he is Senior Researcher)

    William D. Hartung focuses on the arms industry and US military budget. He was previously the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the co-director of the Center’s Sustainable Defense Task Force. Bill is the co-author, with Ben Freeman, of the recently released The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home. He is also the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011) and the co-editor, with Miriam Pemberton, of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008). And Weapons for All (HarperCollins, 1995) is a critique of US arms sales policies from the Nixon through Clinton administrations.

    Bill previously directed programs at the New America Foundation and the World Policy Institute. He also worked as a speechwriter and policy analyst for New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams. Hartung’s articles on security issues have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the World Policy Journal.

    He has been a featured expert on national security issues on CBS 60 Minutes, NBC Nightly News, the PBS Newshour, CNN, Fox News, and scores of local, regional, and international TV and radio outlets.

    The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

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  • Glenn Greenwald Reacts to Netanyahu’s UN Speech

    Glenn Greenwald Reacts to Netanyahu’s UN Speech

    Netanyahu speaks to an empty UN chamber… 

    By Glenn Greenwald /  ScheerPost / September 28, 2025

    Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law. He broke the Snowden leaks in 2013. Greenwald currently hosts a political commentary show for Rumble called “System Update.”  Author Site

    RELATED 

    Netanyahu addresses empty UN chamber

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  • “Time to Cut Ties with Israel”: U.N. Expert Francesca Albanese on Gaza Hospital Bombing

    “Time to Cut Ties with Israel”: U.N. Expert Francesca Albanese on Gaza Hospital Bombing

    “There has been a tolerance of Israel’s impunity for decades,” says Albanese. “However, the United States is the single most important factor of crisis in the United Nations.”

    Israel’s war on Gaza is the deadliest conflict for journalists in recorded history. In an attack on Nasser Hospital in Gaza Monday, Israel killed five more journalists in addition to over a dozen others. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the hospital attack was a “tragic mishap,” but just hours later, Israeli forces killed a sixth journalist. “There is a pattern of targeting and killing journalists that lets us think that there is an intention,” says Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.

    As countries prepare for the U.N. General Assembly, Albanese notes the complicity of Western states in the genocide in Gaza, particularly the United States. “There has been a tolerance of Israel’s impunity for decades,” says Albanese. “However, the United States is the single most important factor of crisis in the United Nations.”

    Note: Video also included below: “Chicago Leaders Prepare to Face the Dictator Head On” Below the Chicago video is the full transcript of Franceca Albanese’s intertiew video with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

    “We Must Defeat Fascism”: Chicago Alderman on Trump’s Threat to Deploy Troops to City

    Transcript for Francesca Albanese

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: Human rights and press freedom groups are denouncing Israel’s attack on Nasser Hospital in Gaza Monday that killed at least 21 journalists — that killed at least 21 people, including five journalists. According to eyewitnesses, Israel carried out a double-tap strike on the hospital. In the initial strike, a drone hit Hussam al-Masri, a cameraman who worked for Reuters. Then another strike, minutes later, hit journalists and rescue workers who were responding to the initial strike.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the hospital attack was a, quote, “tragic mishap.” But just hours later, Israeli forces killed a sixth journalist, Hassan Douhan, a well-known editor at Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. He was killed when an Israeli tank shelled a tent sheltering displaced people in Khan Younis.

    Over the past 23 months, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from reporting inside Gaza, while systematically killing Palestinian journalists. According to one count, Israel has killed least 245 journalists. On Monday, Thibaut Bruttin, the director general of Reporters Without Borders, denounced Israel’s attack on journalists.

    THIBAUT BRUTTIN: When and where is it going to end? Are we going to let the Israel Defense Forces continue the repeated killing of journalists? There is international law. There are guarantees that should be granted to journalists covering conflicts. And none of that seems to be applying. So, we need to be very clear about the fact that none of the journalists that are allegedly terrorists are terrorists. They are professional journalists working for legacy professional media, like, for example, Reuters or, for example, AP.

    AMY GOODMAN: In other news from Gaza, three more Palestinians have starved to death, bringing the total to at least 303.

    We’re joined right now by Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. She’s joining us from Tunis, Tunisia.

    Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Francesca Albanese. Can you start off by responding to the killing of the, at this point, in the last day, six journalists, five of them in a double-tap strike on Nasser Hospital?

    FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Thank you, Amy. Yeah, of course.

    Look, in a situation of conflicts, targeting or killing journalists is unlawful. Journalists, like doctors and medical personnel and rescues, all those who have been killed in this attack, are civilians, so killing them is unlawful. They are protected under international humanitarian law.

    However, here, it’s not an isolated incident. Journalists have been killed in such high numbers. Some say 200 have been documented. Al Jazeera speaks of 270 journalists killed. So there is a pattern of targeting and killing journalists, that let us think that there is an intention behind it. There is a widespread and systematic attack against them, like there is a systematic and widespread attack against civilians. And this might qualify as also as a crime against humanity in and of itself.

    However, however, I want to remind everyone that we are on the 688th day of the assault against Gaza, which an increasing consensus denounces as genocidal. And there is famine, and there is this complete destruction of landscapes in Gaza. So, the question is: What are member states waiting exactly to intervene and stop this carnage?

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Francesca Albanese, you have said that there have to be response. You’ve called for sanctions against Israel. Could you talk about how those might work, especially, as you mentioned, the fact that state governments are not taking any action?

    FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Oh, absolutely. Look, I would like people to understand this in the broader context of international law. No later than last year, the International Court of Justice has confirmed that Israel’s presence in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem is unlawful, must be dismantled totally and unconditionally. And the General Assembly has also given Israel a very generous deadline of one year to do so, which will expire in a month from now. In the face of this, member states have an obligation not to aid and assist in any possible ways a state like Israel in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s unlawful presence. So, while it is abhorrent that they are not stopping Israel, this delay increases their level of responsibility, their violation of international law, and possibly their complicity with the crimes that Israel is committing.

    This is why my recommendations are for member states who do not want to incur in this legal — in their legal responsibilities, and also out of humanity, to break the siege. Member states who have a port in the Mediterranean Sea must absolutely send their navies, under their national flag, with humanitarian aid and doctors, with food and baby formula, because 500,000 people, according to the United Nations, are close to — are really close to starvation. But also, as we see the Sumud Flotilla, so ordinary citizens jumping on boats and trying to do what member states are not doing, I feel that it’s totally immoral and irresponsible to let individuals like this take this risk, when it’s a state obligation to break the siege.

    But also, it’s time to cut ties with Israel, to cut trade, because this is also what the ICJ has reminded member states they need to take all steps to prevent trade and investment relations that are assisting in the maintenance of Israel’s unlawful presence. And we must recall that while Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, it’s also advancing, as it was said in the beginning, annexation at an incredible, incredible speed. So there is no way out of this other than a firm, robust action from member states.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you — the Trump administration, instead of heeding your calls as the special rapporteur, have instead imposed sanctions on you, supposedly claiming that your naming of dozens of companies that are profiting from the Israeli occupation and genocide in Gaza. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, quote, “Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated.” Your response to these kinds of words from leaders of the United States?

    FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Well, first of all, as a non-American, but as someone who has lived in the United States, I wonder how American people understand this, because, of course, it’s a violation of the First Amendment, right? I mean, I’ve just done my job, which is a pro bono job. I’ve been requested by the United Nations to investigate and report on the most prominent violations of international law that occur in the occupied Palestinian territory. And I’ve simply stated facts, according due process to businesses, saying there is an economy of the occupation, and this is the reason why Israel has profited and has allowed private entities, arms manufacturers, even banks, pension funds, universities, really, to help and profit — to help it and profit from Israel’s maintenance of the unlawful occupation. Now, this occupation has also turned into genocidal over the past 688 days, and I’ve denounced it. I’ve said, “How come that Israelis were becoming — many Israelis were becoming poorer and poorer, and Israeli stocks exchange kept on going up?”

    Because of that, I’ve been sanctioned, which is something unprecedented, that no states in 80 years of life of the United Nations have ever attempted, had ever dared, because it’s absolute — it’s a violation of international law, of the U.N. Charter, of the Convention on Privileges and Immunities. And still, the United Nations — the United States maintains a sanction, which are now entering the second month. It’s abominable. And this is the situation. But you understand, against a person who has just written a report, I have been called a threat to global economy. It’s clear that I’ve hit a nerve, but this is not the way to react to this.

    AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the last story that the Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri filmed before he was killed by Israel on Monday at Nasser Hospital. On Saturday, just two days before, al-Masri shot this interview with Hikmat Fojo, a Palestinian woman whose relatives were killed in another Israeli strike.

    HIKMAT FOJO: [translated] While they were sleeping, they were hit by missiles. While they were sleeping, an entire family was lost. And he was praying. He was praying. He was praying. His children were gone. Two were martyred. They were born after 10 years of waiting. One was sleeping. And the woman’s hands and legs, but, God willing, it’s all right. God willing, it doesn’t matter. If my nephew’s hand remains amputated, it doesn’t matter, but may he stay alive, O Lord.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that was the — one of the last pieces of video that the Palestinian journalist, the Reuters journalist Hussam al-Masri filmed before he was killed Monday in that double-tap strike. He had — apparently was setting up a live stream at the fourth-floor balcony, which journalists used, when he was hit. So, now I want to go to Reuters reporter Steve Holland, who questioned President Trump about this in the Oval Office.

    STEVE HOLLAND: If we could get your reaction, sir? The Israelis bombed a hospital in Gaza, that killed 20 people, including five journalists. Are you —

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: When did this happen?

    STEVE HOLLAND: This happened overnight today.

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I didn’t know that.

    STEVE HOLLAND: Any reaction to this? Are you going to talk to Prime Minister —

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I’m not happy about it. I don’t want to see it. At the same time, we have to end that whole nightmare. I’m the one that got the hostages out. I got them out, all of them.

    AMY GOODMAN: That was President Trump. Francesca Albanese, can you talk about the responsibility of the United States? And tell us more about the mechanisms at the U.N., since it’s very clear they block any kind of action at the U.N. Security Council.

    FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, as I said, there are clear indication, clear instructions from International Court of Justice on how to deal with the situation. The only lawful thing that Israel can do in the occupied Palestinian territory is to withdraw, withdraw the troops, dismantle the settlements, stop exploiting Palestinian resources.

    In the face of this, any aid, any support, any exchange of commerce, military intelligence and others from the United States or others is a breach of the obligation not to render aid and assistance in maintaining the situation. However, on top of this, there are proceedings for genocide pending before the International Court of Justice, which trigger an obligation to prevent, which, as a minimum, as the ICJ has said in the case of Nicaragua v. Germany, entails the ban on transfer of weapons to a country, to a state which is committing violations of international humanitarian law, meaning even war crimes. You know, we don’t even need to go and bother the Genocide Convention. So, yet again, another layer of responsibility of the United States.

    And then there are proceedings against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation. Because of this, even if the United States is not a party to the ICC, it should be respectful of international law, international criminal law. And instead of giving — of receiving the ICC-wanted Netanyahu as if he was really a war hero, as is being defined, the United States should facilitate justice and accountability. Instead, they are waging a war against the ICC itself, not just me. All the judges of the ICC have been sanctioned, and so the prosecutor of the court. So, this is the situation.

    Of course, there are complicities on the side of this administration, and, in my opinion, even in the — on the previous one. But this is something that belongs to the American people. It’s the American people that need to, or the American — the American political landscape that needs to, take action on this.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Francesca Albanese, I wanted to ask you — in a few weeks, the U.N. — the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly will take place. Leaders from all over the world will come and give speeches to the U.N. General Assembly. Do you think this is a defining moment for the United Nations as an institution in its inability of the member states or the unwillingness of the member states to stop a genocide that the entire world has been witnessing now for —

    FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — two years?

    FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, I will take the opportunity to also answer the other part of Amy’s question, which I dropped, but it’s — yeah, I think that it’s a — it’s an historical moment, the one we live in, and it’s a defining one. We will not get out of this genocide with the same pretense of innocence that we had when we entered. The crimes of Israel against the Palestinians were already 56-plus years old when the assault against Gaza on the terrible — after the terrible day that October 7 was — and there is no question about that. So, there have been a tolerance of Israel’s impunity for decades.

    However, the United States is the single most important factor of crisis in the United Nations system at the moment, because the United Nations are clearly paralyzed in the face of a crisis which is political, legal and humanitarian, and the United States have contributed to that paralysis by also — for example, what are the mechanisms to impose sanctions or to dispose of coercive or noncoercive measures against Israel within the U.N. would be through the Security Council, and the United States have firmly and steadily sheltered Israel from most important instances of accountability. A rare exception is the 2016 Security Council resolution that recognized the illegality of the settlements under international law.

    So, it’s a catch-22 situation. But at the same time, I want to remind everyone that the international community is constituted by 193 member states, and the other 191, that does not — are not part of the Gaza genocide as much as Israel in the United States, should do the utmost not only to stop the genocide, but also to salvage what remains of the multilateral system, because so far it has protected — I wouldn’t say all of us, but most of us, especially in the West. And it seems that we are really giving it for granted. But we will miss human rights very much when we don’t have them anymore.

    AMY GOODMAN: Francesca Albanese, the International Criminal Court has said it deplores new U.S. sanctions on its judges and prosecutors. Last week, the U.S. State Department announced new sanctions on two judges and two prosecutors in the ICC for engaging in efforts to prosecute U.S. and Israeli citizens. The ICC statement said, “These sanctions are a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution which operates under the mandate from 125 States Parties from all regions. They constitute also an affront against the Court’s States Parties, the rules-based international order and, above all, millions of innocent victims across the world.” I’m wondering if you can comment on this latest development, the sanctions against the ICC prosecutors and judges, and also your own situation. You are the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, and the U.S. has sanctioned you. And if you can talk exactly about what that means?

    FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Look, the sanctions are very heavy and, frankly, an awful, awful instrument, when targeting, when directed at people whose job and whose efforts are in the — in the pursuit of justice and accountability. So, look at the absurdity of using an instrument, which is meant to protect U.S., U.S. interests and U.S. citizens, being used to punish people who are trying to stop and make account — make people responsible for crimes accountable. Where is the harm to the U.S. citizens? What is harmed — and this is why I often say these sanctions are a sign of fragility of those who use it — who use them. I mean, they are — what’s the harm that is done to the American interest, other than to the illegality that is denounced?

    Yes, the special rapporteur has put on notice 48 businesses. And what? Why didn’t they defend themselves? Why didn’t they interact with me, most of them, surely the American companies? Why did they went to complain to the American administration, who put me on notice not to continue this investigation already made? Again, look, I come from a place which has been plagued by Mafia-style logics, techniques, and I’m fully familiar with this way of behaving. And this kind of threats win only if they meet fear. But the people, united, must resist this. And this is why I’m not going to step back, and I’m not going to stop my work.

    AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted to ask a final question about the West Bank. As we went air, I think something like 24 people have been injured in Ramallah in an Israeli military raid. This is not Gaza. This is Ramallah. At the same time, you have the far-right ministers talking about starting to annex the West Bank this week. What does this mean?

    FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah.

    AMY GOODMAN: And what role does the U.N. have in this?

    FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yes, two things. First, when we say this is not Gaza, last week, the Israeli newspaper +972/Local Call issued a report based on a leaked document by the Israeli army, which admitted that only one of six of the people killed in Gaza were Hamas combatants. And I want to — I want to underscore that Israel’s definition of “combatant” is much broader than what is, in fact, afforded by international law. So, it confirms and actually aggravates the accusations of the U.N., independent experts and others that the death toll has steadily been 70 — at least 70% women and children, and therefore civilians. So, they are saying that, in fact, 80%-plus of the death toll in Gaza is made of civilians.

    The situation is not different from the West Bank, where Israel is advancing its ethnic cleansing agenda through annexation. This is not new. In February 2023, the coalition government passed an agreement that basically transferred to Bezalel Smotrich, so the minister of finance, control over large swathes of the West Bank. This was yet another act of annexation, but formalizing what Israel has been doing for 57 years, creating settlements, which are war crime, in occupied territories for Israeli Jews only that were on — were on stolen land and were resulting in forcibly — dispossession and forcible displacement of Palestinians. Of course, today, this has reached abysmal proportion, because there is — there is even that veneer of respect of international humanitarian law has gone. There are settlers and soldiers ravaging the West Bank, and the Jordan Valley is unprotected, other than from by a few Israeli activists who go there night and day and try to protect shepherds and pastoralist communities.

    But, look, the situation is abominable, abominable. And now the state of Palestine has requested an intervention from the international community. Some presidents, like some authorities, like the Irish president, has called for a military intervention. And I understand that everything must pass up, in accordance with international law, through the Security Council. And at the same time, because Israel has no sovereignty whatsoever over Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it’s about time that a protection — the deployment of a protection presence is considered, because there is no other way to stop what Israel is doing.

    AMY GOODMAN: Francesca Albanese, we want to thank you for being with us, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. We were hoping to reach a doctor at Nasser Hospital, but could not reach him today.

    Coming up, we go to Chicago as local and state officials push back against President Trump’s threat to send in the National Guard. We’ll also look at Trump’s new executive orders ending so-called cashless bail. Stay with us.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: The late folk singer-songwriter Michael Hurley performing “What’s Buggin’ You Baby?” at our Democracy Now! studio.

    The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

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    One place to begin is with reason and truth, and how fundamental they are to creating critically engaged citizens and communities. 

    —Henry A. Giroux

  • Democracy Now! interviews Francesca Albanese on the “Economy of Genocide”

    Democracy Now! interviews Francesca Albanese on the “Economy of Genocide”

    The Individual War Abolisher of 2025 award by World Beyond War goes to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, for her fearless, incisive, and eloquent reporting on the genocide in Gaza.

    RELATED

    Glenn Greenwald interviews Francesca Albanese.

    Information about Francesa and the 2025 War Abolisher Awards from World Beyond War.

     

    Please join World Beyond War for the presentation of the 2025 War Abolisher Awards to Ralph Nader, Roger Waters, and Francesca Albanese.

    The event is free and open to the public.

    War Abolisher Awards 2025

    The event begins on July 24, 2025, at 18:30 UTC, which is 6:30 a.m. in Auckland, 8:30 a.m. in Honolulu, 11:30 a.m. in Los Angeles, 12:30 p.m. in Mexico City, 2:30 p.m. in New York, 7:30 p.m. in Yaoundé, 8:30 p.m. in Berlin, and 10 p.m. in Tehran.

    World BEYOND War’s Fifth Annual War Abolisher Awards will recognize the work of individuals who directly support one or more of the three segments of World BEYOND War’s strategy for reducing and eliminating war as outlined in the book A Global Security System, An Alternative to War. They are: Demilitarizing Security, Managing Conflict Without Violence, and Building a Culture of Peace.

    The awardees for 2025 are Ralph Nader, Roger Waters, and Francesca Albanese.

    The Artistic War Abolisher of 2025 award goes to Roger Waters for his incredibly powerful combination of song-writing, singing, speaking, and performing against the horrors of war. During the event, we will play a new 8-minute song pre-recorded by Roger Waters called Sumud.

    The David Hartsough Lifetime Individual War Abolisher of 2025 award — named for the late co-founder of World BEYOND War — goes to Ralph Nader for his brilliant and relentless advocacy, educating, organizing, analyzing, and criticizing war and related crimes and abuses.

    The Individual War Abolisher of 2025 award goes to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, for her fearless, incisive, and eloquent reporting on the genocide in Gaza.

    Register for the award event July 24th:
    https://worldbeyondwar.org/war-abolisher-awards/?clear_id=true

    In this critical time in our country hearing the voices of truth is all the more important although censorship and attacks on truth-tellers is common. Support the WingsofChange.me website and Rise Up Times on social media. striving to bring you important articles and journalism beyond the mainstream corporate media. Access is alway free, but if you would like to help:
    Wings of Change FeatherA donation of $25 or whatever you can donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with the opinions and creative contributions by myself and others. 

    Sue Ann Martinson, Writer, Editor Wings of Change

  • Chris Hedges: Surrendering to Authoritarianism

    Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power.

    Stomp of Approval – by Mr. Fish 

    By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost / March 24, 2025

    I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

    Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.

    Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.

    The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.

    The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.

    These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turned on their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.

    Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.

    Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, recently lost her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.

    “Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education — committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.

    “Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:

    And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.

    You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.

    Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have called police to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long before the protests and encampments began.

    Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.

    The video — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

    The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.

    Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.

    “The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”

    James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhofer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.

    The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks after the Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along with the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.

    Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.

    “If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.

    And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.

    Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.

     

     

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