Sunday, January 14, 2024

‘It only takes one to be real and it changes humanity for ever’: what if we’ve been lied to about UFOs?


Stuart Clark
GUARDIAN
Sun, 14 January 2024 

Photograph: Observer Design

If you thought that we were about to finally get the truth about UFOs, think again. At the end of last year, a US government bill that would have mandated the controlled release of all classified documents and artefacts relating to UFOs was significantly watered down at the last minute so that it would get through Congress.

Interest in unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), the new term for UFOs, reignited in June 2023 when ex-US intelligence agency whistleblower David Grusch told the Debrief website that during his official duties he had discovered the US had indeed been retrieving spacecraft of non-human origin for decades. The claims led to a congressional hearing, in which Grusch and others described what they had gleaned of this super-secret project, or seen with their own eyes during military service. Their testimonies resulted in the new Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Disclosure Act, authored by a bipartisan group of five elected representatives, led by Democrat majority leader Chuck Schumer and Republican senator Mike Rounds.

While it is easy to focus on the extraordinary nature of the subject or the credibility of those witnessing UAPs, the prospect of alien spacecraft raises serious issues that go beyond whether we’re alone in the universe. Lots of scientific work is under way not only to look for signs of extraterrestrial life, but more recently to ask what it would mean psychologically for us if aliens really do exist, and – potentially worse – if the authorities have been lying to us about what they know.


When it comes to governments, the primary issue is trust. As Republican congressman Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin explained in his opening remarks on 26 July: “The lack of [government] transparency regarding UAPs has fuelled wild speculation and debate for decades, eroding public trust in the very institutions that are meant to serve and protect them.”

The Disclosure Act was meant to restore public trust and assure Congress that secret projects were not taking place beyond its oversight.

The legislation was modelled on the President John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. Frustrated with the growing public perception that agents of the US government had conspired with the military to assassinate the president – a belief that found its way into the mainstream through Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK – the act established a national archive of all records relating to the assassination, and declassified the vast majority of them. The process was overseen by an independent body.

Declassification of UAP records will be largely up to the same entities that have blocked their disclosure for decades
Chuck Schumer

The original text of the UAP Disclosure Act was similar in that it proposed the creation of a national archive, overseen by an independent panel of nine US citizens. Their job was to decide – free of military, political or corporate influence – when and how to disclose information from the archive. The act would have empowered the panel to hold more hearings, with witnesses afforded immunity from prosecution. It also proposed that: “The federal government shall exercise ‘eminent domain’ over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interest of the public good.”

In other words, the US government could commandeer any supposed artefacts held by private citizens or companies, and was then under a duty to disclose them to the public. In parallel, the act also called for the secretary of state to “contact any foreign government that may hold material relevant to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, or non-human intelligence and seek disclosure of such material”.

In short, it would finally have revealed the facts about UAPs. But most of these stipulations have now been struck out. All that remains is the archive, but it will not be administered by an independent body. Following the vote, Schumer described the archive as “a major, major win for government transparency” but then went on to say that it was “an outrage” that the proposed review board was not adopted. “Now it means that declassification of UAP records will be largely up to the same entities that have blocked and obfuscated their disclosure for decades,” he said.

Speaking to News Nation on 12 December, Grusch was unequivocal, calling the changes “the greatest legislative failure in American history”.

Not only has the act done little to improve transparency – it is already driving the suspicion that the US government really does have something to hide.

“If it is the case that there is no substance to the UFO/UAP issue beyond misperceptions, paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, gullibility and disinformation then the government, military and academic organisations need to openly and transparently look under every alleged rock in this topic,” says clinical psychologist Daniel Stubbings of Cardiff Metropolitan University. “But they have chosen to do the exact opposite, which increases the suspicion that there is something to hide.”

* * *

People have been seeing unexplainable things in the sky for millennia. While it is easy to dismiss them as hallucinations or flights of fancy, it is much harder to ignore photographs and videos from reputable sources. This is exactly what the office of the director of national intelligence in the US released in 2021. Its report Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena detailed that the US Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena task force was investigating 144 UAP reports made between 2004 and 2021, mostly by military personnel. It also released three declassified videos of some of these UAPs in action.

It was such material that helped persuade Stubbings to take the subject seriously. He interviewed people who believed they had seen something they could not explain, interested in identifying any underlying mental health needs, or common personality types among them. He found that all kinds of personality profiles see UAPs and many are left with unmet psychological needs.

“Initially I felt confident that the UAP issue could be explained by prosaic psychological and/or situational factors, but the more I looked into real cases the less sure I became,” says Stubbings.

“I started realising this is a very credible topic. If true, it’s a game-changer,” he says. “If it’s not true, it’s deeply concerning. How did we get to this point in society where we are thinking all this stuff is true, and we’re spending all this money looking into it?”

Traditionally, it is astronomers who look for evidence of other life in the universe. For example, Seti, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, uses telescopes to look for signals that could be coming from alien civilisations. While Seti was once on the fringes of astronomical science, it is now increasingly seen as mainstream.

Breakthrough Listen is the largest ever scientific research programme searching for evidence of civilisations beyond Earth. It aims to survey the 1m closest stars to Earth and 100 closest galaxies to our own. Running since January 2016 at the University of California, Berkeley, the project announced a new headquarters in Oxford last October.

“For the project it’s a big vote of confidence from one of the premier universities, astrophysics groups and physics departments in the world,” says Steve Croft, an astronomer at UC Berkeley and the Seti Institute, and also a senior researcher at the new HQ.

In early December, Croft and colleagues published results from the project from more than 140 terabytes of data (the equivalent of watching more than five years of continuous high-definition video) from 97 nearby galaxies. Although they found nothing that looked artificial in this particular run, Croft says: “It’s a start.”

Other astronomers, using different techniques, have seen things that warrant further investigation. Beatriz Villarroel, assistant professor of physics at Stockholm University, is leading a team of astronomers looking at photographic plates of the night sky that date from before the first artificial satellite was launched in 1957.



As satellites orbit the Earth, they can reflect sunlight causing bright glints to appear in the night sky. These leave streaks on astronomical images or spots of light that appear and disappear seemingly at random. Mysteriously, on one plate from April 1950, Villarroel found nine sources of light that appeared within a half-hour period and then vanished. Conducting observations using the Gran Telescopio Canarias, on La Palma in the Canary Islands, revealed nothing at the locations of the light sources that might have flared up.

“There is no astronomical explanation for this type of event,” says Villarroel.

More recently, her team found three bright “stars” on a plate dated 19 July 1952 that have since vanished. Provocatively, this is a date burned into the diaries of UFO enthusiasts around the world because it coincides with a famous incident in which pilots and radar operators saw lights they could not explain in the skies above Washington DC.

It only takes one account to be real and it changes the narrative of humanity for ever
Daniel Stubbings

“I think it’s very important to do this kind of [nearby] searching for extraterrestrial objects because the [astronomical] community mostly looks for things very, very far away. I think it’s time to do something new,” says Villarroel, who is now working to establish the ExoProbe project to look for anomalous objects among the vast number of human satellites currently in orbit.

But what happens if she – or anyone else – uncovers irrefutable proof that non-human intelligences have visited or are visiting Earth?

A few years ago, physicist John Priestland, who runs an engineering consultancy, found himself wondering what this would mean to us as individuals. “If there is something here to be disclosed then I’m very conscious that there are a lot of people who will be affected and there isn’t an entity out there, as far as I can see, that is putting people first,” he says.

So he set up Unhidden, a charity dedicated to decreasing the stigma associated with discussing UAPs, non-human intelligences, and the possibility that evidence is being covered up by governments.

It’s a mission that Stubbings agrees with. “There is still a stigma around this topic; people are so frightened about discussing it,” he says. “But it only takes one account to be real and it changes the narrative of humanity for ever.”

This is why the Disclosure Act was seen as important, and its altered version is such a disappointment, even potentially dangerous, says Priestland.

“These days it’s all about ‘my truth’, except for people who happen to see strange things in the sky. We don’t legitimise their truth.” He says they need help and support. “And we need to do that in the context of possible disclosure, because there might suddenly be 8 billion people who have to get used to the fact that they’re being told that there’s a very different worldview by exactly the organisations that they now realise have lied to them for the past 80 years.”

Cluster of ‘UFOs combining together’ appear in clear skies video

A cluster of flashing lights was video recorded hovering over Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A cluster of flashing lights was video recorded hovering over Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Pictures: Reddit/dnyolwaank)

A cluster of lights recorded above Philadelphia in clear blue skies have sparked rumors of UFOs hovering and merging together.

Several white, flashing dots can be seen high over trees and utility lines in a strange video recorded from a moving car and shared on Reddit on Thursday. The dots seem to flash at times.

‘Oh there they are,’ a person can be heard saying.

‘Oh yeah.’

The Reddit post, titled ‘Large cluster of lights above Philadelphia’, includes the witness’ description of what was recorded.

‘Just saw a cluster of multicolored lights flying very high above Philadelphia. They seemed to be combining with one another, spinning, and darting back and forth,’ the post reads.

‘My wife wouldn’t stop driving so it was hard to film them. Apologies for the Hozier.’

The witness goes on to comment that ‘they were blinking in and out, merging with each other, and zigzagging at a high rate of speed’. The witness also seemed to joke, ‘Please blame my wife for not pulling over because she is an alien and she doesn’t want the truth coming out.’

The video of the apparent UFOs was shared on Reddit on Thursday
The video of the apparent UFOs was shared on Reddit on Thursday (Picture: Reddit/dnyolwaank)
'They seemed to be combining with one another, spinning, and darting back and forth,' the witness wrote
‘They seemed to be combining with one another, spinning, and darting back and forth,’ the witness wrote. (Picture: Reddit/dnyolwaank)

In addition, the witness opined that the objects were ‘too high to be birds, too active to be balloons’. The witness claimed that the colors quickly changed from white to orange to green and that ‘I’ve never seen so many scattered lights in the sky, let alone move like they did’.

The witness said the observation was made in the Kensington neighborhood but that they were ‘so high’ they could probably be spotted from other parts of the city.

One Reddit user requested that the witness tell his wife to stop driving the next time they spotted UFOs, and another user agreed it would have been a sight if they had paused.

Another Reddit user shared a post from an alleged April 2022 UFO sighting in a rural area of South Africa that seemed to show multiple orbs filling the sky.

The video was recorded from inside a moving vehicle
The video was recorded from inside a moving vehicle (Picture: Reddit/dnyolwaank)

‘YES! It looked exactly like that,’ the Philadelphia witness replied.

The video emerged days after a former ministry of defense investigator revealed 2018 footage of a ‘jellyfish UFO’ that appeared to fly over a US military base in Iraq.

And on New Year’s Day, a video of a massive police response to a shopping mall in Miami set off a conspiracy theory that 10-foot aliens were roaming the scene.

MoD expert gives surprising verdict on ‘Jellyfish UFO’ hovering over Iraq

Newly-released military footage shows a UFO in the shape of a jellyfish
Newly-released military footage shows a UFO in the shape of a jellyfish (Picture: @MikeColangelo)

A ‘jellyfish UFO’ seen flying over a US military base in Iraq should not be dismissed as balloons or a faulty lens, according to a former ministry of defence (MoD) investigator.

Footage taken in 2018 shows a mysterious round object with what appear to be dangling legs floating across the Middle East, changing colour from white to grey to black.

The video was revealed by investigative filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, who said sources ‘risked getting it’ to him.

He also alleged the unidentified anomalous phenomenon, (UAP, the new term for UFOs) dived into a lake and stayed there for 17 minutes, before shooting back into the sky at a 45-degree angle.

Eyewitnesses allegedly said they were unable to detect the object unless using thermal imaging – the UFO’s changing colour suggesting it was also changing temperature.

However, some have argued they are simply seeing a balloon, or possibly even a smudge on the camera lens.

Jellyfish UFO captured over US base in Iraq
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But Nick Pope, who led the MoD’s UFO investigations desk in the 1990s, has said the answer is not that straightforward.

‘This intriguing footage is hard to categorise,’ he said. ‘Sceptical theories include this being a tangled mass of balloons drifting in the wind, or dirt on the lens or on the protective glass around the camera. 

However, if the allegation that there’s footage of this object entering a body of water, reemerging and shooting off at high speed with a change of direction is true, then this would rule out such prosaic explanations. 

Jellyfish UFO footage
The UFO appeared to change colour as it moved (Picture: @MikeColangelo)

‘We’ll have to wait and see if this further footage emerges, if it’s verifiably part of the same incident, and if the Pentagon confirms the authenticity of the footage.’

He added that Mr Corbell has previously obtained footage from the military that later turned out to be credible. In 2021, he released a video showing the moment a US Navy attack ship was swarmed by unidentified flying aircraft.

Nick Pope
Nick Pope has said the video is not easy to explain (Picture: Randy Shropshire/Getty for A+E Networks)

‘I’m fairly confident that this too is authentic,’ said Mr Pope. ‘But many questions remain, including whether this footage is in the database of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and what their assessment is. 

‘All this takes place against the background of congressional interest in UAP, so it’s to be expected that this latest story will increase interest, and lead lawmakers to ask the Pentagon some hard questions about this footage and wider US government research and investigation into UAP.’

Jeremy Corbell
Jeremy Corbell has previously released verified government footage of UFOs (Picture: Emily Manley)

Mr Pope and other current and former government officials around the world have been calling for greater transparency regarding exactly what information leaders have on UAP, not least due to increasing air safety concerns.

In November, a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that a Ryanair flight came within 20 metres of a UFO while taking off from Stansted airport.

In the US, former Navy pilot Ryan Graves has founded the organisation Americans for Safe Aerospace following his own experiences with UAP, which he says are an ‘open secret’ among fighter pilots

Speaking during a congressional hearing into UAP in September, he said ‘UAP are in our aerospace, but they are grossly underreported.

‘The government knows more about UAP than shared publicly, and excessive classification practises keep crucial information hidden. There’s a lack of transparency around UAP that’s unsettling. Since 2021, all UAP videos are classified as secret or above. 

UFO whistleblower describes 'grey cube' flying off US coast
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‘This level of secrecy not only impedes our understanding but fuels speculation and mistrust.’

On the ‘jellyfish’ UFO, Mr Pope added that the UK also has questions to answer.

‘The location where this footage was taken was apparently a multinational military base, so it would be interesting to know whether there was a UK presence, whether the MoD has any information on this incident, and whether UK military surveillance systems have captured UAP images in other locations worldwide,’ he said.

‘These are questions that MPs should be putting to the defence committee, not least because we know from the US government that the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance has discussed UAP, so the UK government must be involved at some level.’

At the opposite end of the scale, earlier this week Mr Pope called the widely-shared conspiracy theory about aliens in a Miami shopping mall as ‘bizarre’.

‘This story – and the reaction to it – is truly bizarre, he said. ‘There’s no credible evidence that anything UFO or alien-related happened, or that this was anything other than the police responding to reports of youths fighting.

‘But on social media in particular, this story has exploded, probably because it’s captured the zeitgeist of America’s current obsession with UFOs.’


Floating 'Jellyfish' UFO haunted US military base in Iraq for years, says former US Marine intelligence analyst shown infrared video by colleague

ex-Marine broke his silence on a 2017 UFO that became 'ghost story of the base'

The ex-intel analyst stated that 'the theories that we had ... didn't fully explain it'


READ MORE: Retired US Army Colonel says secret UFO projects should be made public by October 2030 - to beat US rivals and get ahead of a 'catastrophic' leak

By MATTHEW PHELAN FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 12 January 2024

A former intelligence analyst with the United States Marine Corps has revealed how a jellyfish UFO terrorized military personnel for years in Iraq.

Video emerged this week showing what looked looked like a craft with dangling appendages gliding invisibly over the secure facility, where it could only be seen on infra-red cameras.

It joins years of new military UFO cases including giant red cube-shaped UFOs, zipping Tic Tacs, and allegations made under oath about secret and illegal UFO crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs.

'It kind of just ended up being like the ghost story of the base,' Michael Concoski, then stationed at a base in Iraq, told cable channel News Nation last evening.

'It didn't seem to be posturing to threaten us at all,' Cincoski said, but added that the base was not taking any chances during this highly unusual nighttime encounter.

And, today, Cincoski revealed that he has heard from a fellow Marine 'team member' who saw 'multiple recordings of the 'Jellyfish UAP' with different durations' in Iraq.
UFO footage shows hovering jellyfish craft 'not visible' to naked eye



United States Marine Corps veteran Michael Cincoski (above), who had been an intelligence surveillance reconnaissance tactical controller in Iraq at the base where the 2017 'jellyfish' UFO sighting took place, came forward to discuss the incident with News Nation last night



Cincoski revealed today that he has heard from a fellow Marine 'team member' in Iraq about more cases - saw 'multiple recordings of the 'Jellyfish UAP' with different durations'





Classified UFO briefing 'moved the needle' congressman says

'Some of the Marines were tasked to try to find it on night vision,' he said. 'They were looking for it with their other sensors and everything else that we had.'

Cincoski also revealed that he had seen the full 17-minute version of the thermal imaging video which tracked the 'unidentified anomalous phenomena' (UAP), as UFOs are now more accurately known, as it appeared to glide over the base toward Lake Hibernia in Iraq's Anbar province.

EXCLUSIVEREAD MORE: Top secret UFO meeting in Congress set to reveal 'classified' details of illegal crash retrieval program TODAY - and a US intelligence insider tells DailyMail.com what they suspect will be revealed in the closed session


Top spy watchdog Thomas Monheim (above), the US Intelligence Community's Inspector General, is slated to brief the House Oversight Committee on UFOs today

'They were watching it to make sure that it wasn't a threat,' said Cincoski, who'd been an intelligence surveillance reconnaissance tactical controller at the base, in an interview with journalist Brian Entin of News Nation's Elizabeth Vargas Reports.

The former marine told Entin that the infrared video was captured in 2017 and had been shown to him by fellow USMC servicemen when he arrived at the base in 2018.

Cincoski told Entin that the leaked video had been taken with an aerostat, a blimp-like craft equipped with cameras and other sensors to look out for potential threats over the base.

Tethered Aerostat Radar Systems are used by the US military to hunt for drug traffickers, beam US television signals into Cuba, conduct reconnaissance and more, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

After 17 minutes, Cincoski said, the 'jellyfish' or 'spaghetti monster' UAP vanished over Lake Hibernia.

'They couldn't find it,' Cincoski told News Nation in a remote interview.

'They kept an eye out,' he said, 'but it wasn't like we were scrambling to our defensive positions or anything like that.'

From then on, as the story circulated across the US Marine base in Iraq, the ghostly sighting remained, as he put it, 'a big unknown.'

'The theories that we had [...] didn't fully explain it,' Cincoski confessed.

Senior national correspondent for News Nation, Brian Entin, reported that the cable network had reached out the Pentagon for comment multiple times over several days.

'We were able to confirm that that Marine is who he says he is,' Entin said.

'They [the Pentagon] acknowledge that we have been reaching out but have not responded with specifics about this video or confirmed the video in any way,' he told viewers


Shocking new UFO footage has revealed a 'jellyfish' craft that isn't visible to the naked eye, which was allegedly buried by the intelligence community


The UFO was supposedly submerged in water for 17 minutes in the footage - before it's launched out of the water at rapid speed, according to documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell


Two different angles of the Jellyfish UFO show the mysterious entity as it flies over the land and water of a military base, according to sources who Corbell reports 'risked getting it' to him

The leaked USMC footage of what some have called the 'jellyfish' craft, was first made public by UFO documentary filmmaker and cohost of the Weaponized podcast Jeremy Corbell.

Corbell said that the legitimacy of the footage was confirmed to him by sources who 'risked getting it' to him.

Two different angles of the apparent aircraft, according to Corbell's sources, show a mysterious entity as it flies over the land and water of a military base.

The 'jellyfish' craft, these sources said, could only be seen on thermal camera.

Corbell's bombshell revelations came as part of his exposé - TMZ Presents: UFO Revolution. In the documentary, Corbell spearheads the investigation which believes will 'lift the lid on the biggest cover-up in the history of the world.'

The filmmaker is 'passionate about getting to the bottom of what UFOs mean to humanity.'

TMZ's documentary is propitiously times, coming just ahead of House Oversight Committee members' plans for a classified briefing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) today in Congress.

The covert meeting, shrouded in mystery, underscores a surging interest among lawmakers from both ends of the spectrum that are demanding increased government transparency on the extraterrestrial front.

The briefing will be conducted by the Office of Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Thomas A. Monheim.




FLYING SPAGHETTI

INTERNET PUZZLED BY "JELLYFISH" UFO VIDEO
WHY IS IT MOVING SO SMOOTHLY?

JEREMY CORBELL VIA YOUTUBE

YESTERDAY
by VICTOR TANGERMANN



Jellyfish and Chandelier

A video of what has since been dubbed a "jellyfish" UFO is making the rounds online.

The footage, shared by journalist Jeremy Corbell earlier this week, shows a mysterious object that appears to have dangling tendrils, and which appears to smoothly float over the roofs of a military base in Iraq. According to Corbell, the UFO footage dates back to October 2018.

Naturally, the online UFO community had a field day, speculating what the object could be.

Two days later, Corbell followed up with a different image of a "chandelier" UFO, which was also reportedly filmed over the Persian Gulf.

The Pentagon has yet to weigh in on the footage, but the video comes after interest in "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAPs) has steadily grown, with members of Congress even receiving a classified briefing earlier this month.

Ultimately, despite plenty of speculation, we have yet to hear anything close to a confirmed report of extraterrestrials coming to visit us. And as you'd expect, there's already evidence that the latest video has a much more mundane explanation.

Ghost Story

This week, Marine officer Michael Cincoski opened up to NewsNation about the footage, telling the outlet that the "jellyfish" was actually nicknamed the "spaghetti monster" when it was collected, and that sightings started at the end of 2017, not 2018.

According to Cincoski, the footage was taken from an aerostat, a big balloon observatory that was floating over the base to detect any incoming threats.

"Toward the end, it seemingly continued off into the distance," he told NewsNation, but refuted Corbell's claims that it ever dropped "into the lake or shoot into the sky."

"It ended up being the ghost story of the base," Cincoski added.

Critics, however, say both the "jellyfish" and "chandelier" had much simpler explanations than some outlandish alien theories would suggest.

"The 'Chandelier' UFO appears to be a diffraction artifact," tweeted writer and noted UFO debunker Mick West. "Basically, a glare from a very bright/hot source, like a missile rocket/engine."

And the jellyfish was likely "two different balloon-like entities" moving about 12 kilometers apart, West added, that appear to be moving at the same speed as the wind — a strong clue that instead of an alien visitor, it's just a balloon.

More on UFOs: Congress Receiving Mysterious Classified Briefing About UFOs




'TMZ PRESENTS: UFO REVOLUTION
TO EXPOSE BIGGEST COVER-UP IN HISTORY!!
EXCLUSIVE


1/9/2024






TMZ PRESENTS: UFO REVOLUTION
TMZ Studios

TMZ's 3-part event -- "TMZ Presents: UFO Revolution" -- premieres today on Tubi ... and is set to lift the lid on the biggest cover-up in the history of the world.

A brave group of men and women, including Congressman Tim Burchett, are fighting for the truth -- telling us they're adamant the U.S. government knows a whole lot more about UFOs than they've been letting on to the public.

Play video content
 



WE DESERVE TO KNOW
TMZ Studios

Filmmaker and journalist Jeremy Corbell spearheads TMZ's investigation... unveiling shocking footage, captured by the U.S. military in Iraq in 2018, of a jellyfish-shaped object that was designated as a UAP -- unidentified anomalous phenomenon -- by our intelligence agencies.

The doc also features first-hand accounts from people who've spoken out about UFOs ... at a significant cost to their personal well-being.


Getty

Corbell also chats with David Grusch about the aftermath and smear campaign used to discredit his allegations from the landmark July 2023 hearing ... that saw Grusch, Lt. Ryan Graves and Commander David Fravor testify before Congress.


Getty

During testimony, Grusch alleged the U.S. owned 'non-human biologics' recovered from crashed craft.

The doc also examines all of the different scenarios for what we might be dealing with -- from anomalous activity deep in our oceans to other possibilities that are pretty dark.


Getty

Join us as we document the fight for disclosure ... of the truth.

The 3-part event "TMZ Presents: UFO Revolution" is available on Tubi starting Jan. 9, 10 & 11.


US government could be set to reveal it's been hiding real-life 30ft wide alien 'Tardis'

The US government may be hiding a real-life captured Tardis, according to an intelligence expert – who added some 10 UFOs have been retrieved after coming into contact with the Earth's surface


By Jerry Lawton
10 JAN 2024


A military expert reckons the government may be hiding a rather familiar spacecraft (file) (Image: BBC)


Politicians could be told on Friday (January 12) that the US government has been hiding a real-life captured Tardis.

Former intelligence officer David Grusch told a behind-closed-doors meeting of CIAFBI and Wall Street bigwigs the 30ft wide UFO is the size of a football field' inside, can manipulate space and time and is capable of harnessing enough energy to power 70,000 homes a year. The mystery craft – which mirrors the fictional time machine in legendary BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who – was said to have been recovered by bulldozer after being found embedded in the ground.

Grusch claims it is among 10 UFOs retrieved by the government after crashing on Earth. He alleges the authorities have secretly tried to reverse-engineer – or rebuild – the craft from debris in a bid to steal a march in the global arms race.


RELATED ARTICLES

The US Air Force veteran, a former member of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office, also claims the government has biological evidence of 10 aliens recovered from crash sites. Details of the secret UFO treasure trove could be revealed for the first time to US Congressmen at a classified briefing on Friday.

Members of the House Oversight Committee, the powerful US Congress body that oversees the efficiency, effectiveness and accountability of the federal government', have been told they will be given confidential information on unidentified anomalous phenomena – UAPS or UFOs. But even if they are told about existence of ETs they will not be allowed to go public.

An insider who heard Grusch's revelations before 60 VIPs in a New York penthouse summit said: "It was hosted by a Wall Street bigwig and his lawyer friend. It was sort of a small saloon-style talk. David also did it for free. Even went as far as to fly into NYC just for this.

Grusch reckons 10 spacecrafts have been captured by the US government (stock) (Image: Getty Images)

"He had arrived only a few hours beforehand and then left first thing the next day. The idea was to get a group of both skeptics and believers from all these different walks of life for a talk regarding David and the things he has said.

"Most of the people who left had left as believers."

Grusch told how multiple people involved not only in his investigation but also his fellow peers' in the UFO task force had been threatened not to go public. "He wouldn’t go too much into it since it’s an open investigation, but these people pretty much showed him that they could touch him or his family any time they wanted," the source added in a since-deleted post on social news website Reddit.

Grusch was formerly in the US Air Force (file) (Image: Getty Images)

Grusch has never claimed to have seen any UFO wreckage or evidence of the existence of aliens himself but is aware of up to 50 people who have. He told the New York meeting a US rival is poised to reveal their own evidence of non-human intelligence to beat America to the punch.

The source added: "He is extremely smart. I mean he has an almost unbelievable memory and knowledge about intel laws and other things that have to do with UAPs. My opinion is that he is the real deal.

"Almost everyone left that night fully believing what he was saying or, at the very least, that HE believed what he was saying as the truth."

Grusch is not the only one to discuss the alleged captured Tardis.

Could this finally prove the existence of aliens? 
(stock) (Image: Getty Images/Stocktrek Images)

Last June (2023) we told how attorney Daniel Sheehan, who represents whistleblowers giving evidence to the US Senate Intelligence Committee over their role in reverse-engineering crashed UFOs, has had learned of the mystery craft from someone who claimed they had been brought in to help reverse-engineer it. "It was freaking him out and started making him feel nauseous,'' Sheehan said.

"He was so disoriented because it was so gigantic inside. It was the size of a football stadium while the outside was only about 30ft in diameter.

"He staggered back out after being in there a couple of minutes and outside it was four hours later. There was all kinds of time distortion and space distortion."

Physicists have theorised that propulsion of an advanced craft could theoretically involve warping space-time around it to negate the effects of gravity.


SMOKERS’ CORNER: MIDDLE CLASS SENSIBILITIES

Nadeem F. Paracha 
Published January 14, 2024
DAWN
Illustration by Abro


If a rickshaw driver had an accident and was in trouble, some of the first people to reach out to help him would likely be other rickshaw drivers. They immediately sympathise and empathise with his plight.

In 1987, when I was still in college and often travelled on rickshaws, a rickshaw I was travelling in came across another rickshaw whose front wheel was stuck in a manhole. My driver immediately screeched to a halt and jumped out to help the four other rickshaw drivers who were all trying to pull the wheel out.

After they succeeded, the driver of the rickshaw I was travelling in returned to drive me to my destination. He seemed to know the person whose rickshaw had got stuck in the manhole because, during the rest of the journey, he continued to curse him, calling him a scoundrel.

Although he didn’t like the other driver, he couldn’t help but empathise with his predicament, because both belonged to the same social class. Both were working class folk who worked as rickshaw drivers.


According to the 19th century German political theorist Karl Marx, exchanges between different classes create differing interests. Therefore, classes unite with their own to protect their respective economic and political interests. Marx wrote that the creation of classes leads to “class conflict.” Later, many post-Marxian theorists added various nuances to this theory.


Occasionally the notion of ‘class solidarity’ kicks in within the middle class, despite the presence of intra-class tensions — as was seen following the outpouring of online support for the ‘middle class uprising’ on May 9 last year

For example, within a class, there can be differing political points of view that can hamper “class solidarity.” During the 2016 US presidential election, the bulk of Michigan’s working class that, since the 1990s, was considered to be a ‘solid’ Democratic Party constituency, voted for the more conservative Republican Party.

Even though the victory margin was just 0.23 percent, this showed that, within the state’s working classes, there was no clear consensus on protecting any mutually agreed class interest. Whereas many from this class had chosen to continue voting for the Democrats, many more flipped the equation by casting their vote for the Republican Party candidate, Donald Trump.

Those from this class who voted for Trump in Michigan might have voted against their class interest, but they related more to the manner in which Trump evoked the nostalgia of Michigan once being a mighty industrial state that was now in decay.

Just after the 2016 election, the Democratic Party senator Gary Peters lamented that his party ignored engaging with labour unions in Michigan. The party’s message was squarely formulated to attract urban middle class liberals and minority groups. Joe Biden won back Michigan for the Democrats in 2020, but by only a two percent margin. This suggests that the cleavages in the state’s working classes are still present.

However, there can be a lot more cleavages in the so-called middle classes. When populists such as Imran Khan in Pakistan and Narendra Modi in India began making deeper inroads in the politics of their respective countries, it was understood by various political economists that their rise was being largely facilitated by Pakistani and Indian middle classes. This is not incorrect as such.

But what often gets lost in this debate is that there were also many within this class who were vehemently opposed to both the leaders. In Pakistan, Khan’s middle class supporters were mostly located in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in Sindh’s capital city, Karachi.

In Punjab, though, tensions had been developing within this class. There was a clash between differing political and economic interests in this class, as was the case within Michigan’s working class. This intra-middle class clash in Punjab was manifested by the animosity between Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N).

In the 1970s, the American sociologist Erik Olin Wright posited that classical Marxian class theories needed to be evolved because within middle-class groups are large segments that are neither bourgeois (capitalists having the means of production) nor the proletariat (the working classes).





Wright called this “contradictory class location.” By this he meant that between the capitalists and the proletariat was not really a homogenous middle class, but segments within this class having contradicting characteristics of the classes above and below them. However, Wright was of the view that such groups are likely to support the political choices of the classes that control the means of production.

Therefore, in Punjab, one part of the middle class supported the PML-N (headed by an influential business family) and the other supported the PTI, a party that, rather visibly, was being financed by multi-millionaires.

But there are also occasions when the old Marxian notion of ‘class solidarity’ kicks in within the middle class, despite the presence of intra-class tensions. On May 9 last year, images of men and women destroying public and state property in Pakistan began to flood the electronic and social media. The rioters were PTI supporters and members.

These images seemed to excite a lot of middle class men and women. Many of them were not necessarily PTI fans. In fact, a lot of them had been critical of Khan’s fallen regime. Yet, they couldn’t help but applaud (on social media) this ‘middle class uprising.’ What they saw were (albeit riotous) people who were dressed like them, spoke like them, and could have belonged to their own social circles.

A year before, though, when hundreds of working class men from Punjab belonging to an Islamist party had gone on a rampage in Lahore, those who were applauding the May 9 ‘uprising’ were not impressed at all. Their criticism of that particular violence was scathing, whereas the violence committed by members of their own social class, on May 9 last year, triggered sympathy and even admiration in them for the rioters.

Additionally, thousands of mostly poor women are rotting in Pakistani jails for years. Yet it was only after some middle and upper class women belonging to the PTI were put in jail that many members of the middle class became sensitive about the ‘plight of women prisoners.’

Quite a few middle class men and women who opposed PTI politically are now likely to sympathise with this party’s ‘besieged’ top and core leadership. Their political motivations may be still different, but there is clearly an overarching sense of class compatibility at work here.

This has recently helped PTI attract sympathy from a wider circle of middle and upper income groups. Can one frame this as ‘middle-class-consciousness?’ I think one can, and these days it is on full display in Pakistan — at least on social media.

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 14th, 2024
Viva South Africa

Abbas Nasir 
Published January 14, 2024 


SOUTH Africa has shown the way to the impotent Organisation of Islamic Cooperation member-countries by taking Israel to the International Court of Justice in The Hague and presenting a robust case for a ruling against the Zionist state which has executed a genocide with impunity so far.

Given the composition of the ICJ, in the end any verdict given by the court may represent the compulsions of the 16 judges and the stance of their countries of origin on various issues rather than the merit of the arguments presented before it.

But as things stand this weekend, many independent legal experts are lauding South Africa’s preparation for and presentation before the court, and feel that the case stands established. The political compulsions referred to were listed very eloquently in a TV interview by US Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein, who vehemently opposes Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.

For example, he said that among the permanent members of the UN Security Council who have seats on the ICJ the position of the US and UK was very clear with slight ambiguity about France’s stance, given different Macron statements at different times.

True to Mandela’s spirit, South Africa has gone and stood in the corner of the oppressed.

Equally, Prof Finkelstein was unsure with Russia’s vulnerabilities on Ukraine and China’s on Uighurs, the judges from the two countries would vote against Israel for fear of opening the door to similar charges and cases against their own countries.

Ergo, notwithstanding the merit of the case by the excellent South African legal team, he suspected the decision may go in Israel’s favour by a small majority. For further details, look up his interview which is available online. This by no means is a foregone conclusion but his breakdown and analysis carried weight.

In any case, even a verdict calling for an immediate ceasefire may have amounted to naught. Israel lost the moral argument within weeks of its Gaza campaign after the Hamas attacks of Oct 7 last year, but has carried on relentlessly, egged on by unconditional support from the US and its Western allies and has been immune from global outrage at daily images of its slaughter in Gaza.

In Europe, Germany has been particularly active with its own government leaders and through the German EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to plead Israel’s case. Both have seemingly remained blind to the Gaza genocide, compelling some commentators to say Germany wants Palestine and Palestinians to atone for the sins of Nazi Germany by quietly submitting to the ongoing genocide.

True to Nelson Mandela’s spirit, South Africa has gone and stood in the corner of the oppressed. In doing so, it has tried to reciprocate how the Palestinians stood by it through the PLO during the African National Congress’s (ANC) long struggle against the apartheid regime when it was termed a ‘terrorist organisation’ by the US and other Western powers.

South Africa’s decision to move the ICJ reflected very badly on the member states of the OIC, the ummah, which have extended little support even rhetorically to the Palestinians in the face of a genocidal Israeli assault. To be honest, reflected badly is an understatement. It shamed them.

From Turkiye and Saudi Arabia to Egypt, UAE and Bahrain words have come to varying degrees but nothing more substantial. The less said about the Pakistani position the better. Despite each of these countries’ disagreements with the US in other areas, they seem helpless in taking a robust line for the Palestinians because, it seems, they fear annoying Washington.

After the 1973 Middle East flareup, the Ramazan War, (Israel called it the Yom Kippur war), when President Nixon asked Congress for $2.2 billion in emergency assistance to Israel, the Organisation of Arab Oil Exporting Countries imposed an oil embargo targeted mainly at the US.

This quadrupled the price of oil in the international market. Higher oil prices inevitably led to higher commodity prices and side by side with spurring inflation also slowed growth. The impact on Western economies was soon to be felt as energy shortages were also rampant.

Today the memory of those days is fast fading aided by the utter disinterest in, and apathy towards, the Palestinian victims of genocide among the US allies in the ‘Islamic’ countries in the Middle East with vast oil and gas reserves and immense wealth, mostly kept in US and other Western banks. All this as Biden pumps in bombs, military equipment worth some $15bn to facilitate Israeli atrocities.

The ‘Islamic’ countries/entities that are speaking up for the Palestinians such as Iran, Yemen and Lebanon’s Hezbollah and possibly Syria, which their supporters call the Axis of Resistance, have limited ability to do more as they have long suffered crippling US-led international sanctions.

While Iran was sanctioned on grounds of pursuing a nuclear weapons programme and supporting international terrorism and its own often poor human rights record, the others have faced isolation on not dissimilar grounds, apart from the nuclear arms charge.

Israel’s hugely disproportionate response to the Hamas attack on Oct 7 last year, during which the Zionist state has targeted women, children and all infrastructure in Gaza with the aim of rendering it uninhabitable and forcing the Gazans out, and the Western support to it, have opened up a huge divide between the Global South and the North with the latter backing the genocide in the name of right to self-defence.

For now, some countries in Latin America and most notably South Africa have taken concrete measures, so to speak, to put their money where their mouth is. The horror the rest of the world feels may be reflected in the UN General Assembly votes on a ceasefire but that is how far it is prepared to go. To so many, what South Africa has done is heroic, principled and ethical.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.


abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2024




Insurgency then and now: British India’s rebels and Israel’s Hamas

In the same way that the British cited terrorism as the reason why India was not ready for self-rule, so do the Israelis and their Western benefactors in denying freedom to Palestinians.
January 9, 2024

Videos released by Hamas’s media team towards the end of October and broadcast on Al-Jazeera showed the militant group releasing Israeli hostages captured on October 7. The videos also showed Hamas fighters behaving with unexpected kindness while doing so — they hugged and gave dap handshakes to elderly ladies, cared for puppies, held hands with children, exchanged terms of endearment with their captives in Hebrew, and made sure everyone had bottles of water.

The scenes looked like family farewells, but surreal, with the fighters saying goodbye from behind balaclavas and slinging kalashnikovs. Watching Hamas’s etiquette and decorum, I was reminded of a phrase gleaned from the archives by the historian Durba Ghosh — gentlemanly terrorists.

The words do not normally go together. The amalgam was coined in the context of British rule in India — a juxtaposing of the Bengali bhadrolok, roughly meaning “gentleman,” with “terrorists,” that which the Empire thought many of these gentlemen to be.

The gentlemanly terrorists are not considered terrorists in Bengal. In Bengal, once the cradle of the armed anti-colonial struggle in British India, they are simply biplobi [revolutionaries]. Their names adorn major intersections and railway stations, they are taught in schools as national heroes, and their biographies are the subject of television programmes.

Elsewhere, they are a largely forgotten chapter of the Independence story. It was because of their constant agitation, however, that the British moved the imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911 — a move that established a symbolic genealogy with Indian kingship (Delhi having been the Mughal seat of power), but also acquiesced that Bengal had become ungovernable.

In a way, Bengal was Britain’s Gaza.


Khudiram Bose — the boy revolutionary

Khudiram Bose was one of the most prominent of the gentlemanly terrorists. He was 18 years old when, in 1908, he attempted, along with his accomplice, Prafulla Chaki, to assassinate the Chief Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta in his carriage.

The operation was botched, and they instead killed two British women by bombing the wrong carriage. Prafulla took his own life while on the run, and Khudiram was arrested, tried in a show trial, and hung a few months later. Newspaper reports from the era state that he was “cheerful and smiling” both in court while receiving the verdict, and when his executioners drew the cap over his head.

Khudiram’s story does not end there. Alarmed that the assassination attempt was part of a larger insurgency, the British cracked down on other potential ‘terrorists’, including luminaries of the Independence movement like the brothers, Aurobindo and Barin Ghosh. The gentlemen were rounded up in Alipore Jail in Calcutta in 1909 and 36 were convicted. The event became known as the Alipore Bomb Case. The Ghosh brothers were both sentenced to death, although Aurobindo was subsequently acquitted and Barin later managed to escape from prison.

Others who publicly supported Khudiram were arrested for sedition, like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was jailed for six years on exactly this charge — a trial in which he was defended, albeit unsuccessfully, by a young Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Khudiram, thus, spooked the British in a way that arguably nobody had since the 1857 mutiny.

Khudiram had a kind of afterlife in the early 1940s. An anonymous Bengali artist illustrated Khudiram’s execution scene in the style of popular calendar art, depicting him childlike and in bright colours, smiling, and with a noose around his neck. The circulation of the image helped close the discursive gap between disparate acts of revolutionary violence across historical time and a cohesive revolutionary ethos that was an important component (among others) of the Independence movement.

It was, in a sense, what in Palestine would be a mulasaq shaheed [martyr poster], in which a political martyr is commemorated via easily reproducible print media.

But one individual who was unimpressed was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Gandhi denounced the assassination attempt against the magistrate, concurring with the British that revolutionary terrorism would only procrastinate the arrival of self-rule in the subcontinent: “The Indian people will not win their freedom through these methods.”

Gandhi’s steadfast commitment to nonviolence does not require an elaboration, but it does perhaps require a deconstruction. Recent studies of Gandhi have argued that even more than Gandhi’s long-term experimentation with ways to overcome the Empire — and, perhaps, imperialism generally — a more intimate and equally long-term enemy was the Indian armed resistance.

Hind Swaraj, Gandhi’s first major treatise, was published in 1909, during the fallout from the Khudiram event, and was written as a fictional dialogue between a naïve revolutionary and a sage-like Gandhi who imparts the apparent superiority of his nonviolent method.

There are two points to be made here. First, Gandhian nonviolence, based on the Sanskrit theological concept of ahimsa [non-injury] already precludes violence in so much as it is a negative definition that draws its essence from what it is not — there is no nonviolence without violence.

The second point is that although Gandhi trivialised the revolutionaries and, later, actively sabotaged large-scale military efforts to combat British rule, he held the highest esteem for those who had “the courage to die.” Possibly, he saw martyrdom as the logical maximal conclusion for the self-sacrifice and suffering that was the basis of his satyagraha [nonviolent resistance]. Regardless, it is precisely because of his hostility to local armed resistance that Gandhi never enjoyed the same reverence in Bengal that he did in other parts of India. Indeed, in certain circles even in contemporary Bengali society, Gandhi is not the Mahatama.

The Chittagong uprising


Another of the gentlemanly terrorists was Surya Sen, a schoolteacher from Chittagong in what is now Bangladesh. Inspired by the Irish republicans, he masterminded an uprising in 1930 designed to take control of two armouries, cut off communication lines between Chittagong and Calcutta, and take hostages from a colonial bungalow and social club.

Except for the miscalculation of having raided the club on a holiday — Good Friday, when there were no hostages to take — things went mostly as planned. Having taken control of the armouries, the insurrectionists proclaimed the inauguration of a Provisional Revolutionary Government.

The British caught up with them a few days later, and a shoot-out ensued in which 12 of Sen’s insurrectionists and 80 British soldiers were killed. Sen was able to flee and go into hiding, until the manhunt caught up with him after three years.

Legend has it that part of the excruciating torture inflicted on Sen in prison included smashing his teeth with a hammer. When he was hung in 1934, it is said that his tortured body was already practically dead, and that he could barely stand on his feet for his own execution. Perhaps because of the spectacular nature of the Chittagong uprising, Sen’s story is better known than those of the other gentlemanly terrorists. He has been the subject of various cinematic portrayals, including the 2010 film Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, starring Bollywood scion Abhishek Bachchan — one of the biggest box office disasters in Indian cinema history.

Scale aside, the parallels between Sen’s Chittagong armoury raid and Hamas’s uprising on October 7 are striking — both took control of military installations, cut off communication channels, sequestered hostages (or at least tried to), and killed many on the enemy lines. But the parallels do not end there.

In the same way that the hearts of Bengalis burst with pride when recalling our era of armed resistance, so do the hearts of Palestinians in their own revolutionary context. Also, in the same way that the British cited terrorism as the reason why India was not ready for self-rule, so do the Israelis and their Western benefactors in denying freedom to Palestinians.

Anti-colonialism and its perils


Colonialism and anti-colonialism work in sets of patterns, sometimes mismatches, and often comparable narrative arcs. One might easily find comparable situations in Algeria, South Africa, and across the darker continents that constituted the colonised world. Because British India was an exploitation colony and not a settler colony — meaning that its raison d’être was Britain’s monopoly over resources and not any kind of large-scale settlement project looking to replace Indians with Britons — perhaps some of the other colonies make even more compelling cases for comparisons.

But a latent pedagogy from a possible blood bond between the experiences of colonialism in Palestine and the subcontinent, however they might diverge or meet, is one that has not often been explored. The exception here is Kashmir, where the haemorrhage of Partition bled into further tragedies — those in which Kashmiris have long seen their own experience reflected in Palestine.

Not limiting themselves to “terrorists”, the British used a plethora of choice terms to describe the revolutionaries — fanatics, dacoits, thuggees, goondas, anarchists and bomb worshippers. Of this lexicon of slurs, the only one with any grounding in reality is anarchist, as some of the revolutionaries did indeed have personal ties to anarchist thinkers and philosophers in Europe, like Emma Goldman.

The British also widely speculated that the Bengali affinity towards bombs was cultish, and deeply rooted in Hindu religion, particularly the worship of Kali — the black goddess of death and rebirth. Consider here how it is Islam, rather than nation or the human spirit, that is often cited as the ideological basis for Palestinian resistance — that Hamas, in spite of everything, do not have any legitimate cause against Israel other than the stories of Bani Israel’s treacheries as revealed in the Holy Quran, or that the militant’s fearlessness before death is not driven by love of the homeland but by a libido for houris in heaven.

Freedom fighters, not terrorists


Khudiram Bose and Surya Sen — and, in Punjab, Baghat Singh and others — are part of the fibres of the protracted and multifaceted processes of Independence. Their contributions to this accomplishment is in no way minor to those brought about by the political work of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Ambedkar, and the other usual suspects.

In Palestine, there is a similar pantheon of names that coexist in spite of political and ideological divides — Yasser Arafat, of course, but also leftists like Abu Ali Mustafa, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi — the Islamist founders of Hamas —and dozens more. All were assassinated by Israel.

When Israel released Palestinian prisoners during the temporary truce with Hamas last month, jubilant crowds in Ramallah flew green Hamas flags alongside those of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — flags that denote distinct but interconnected movements that are integral to Palestinian society. It is because of such ecumenism that Israel’s psychotic war campaign in Gaza is not against Hamas but against all Palestinians.

It is only sensible, however, that Hamas — the only major Palestinian faction to have “resistance” enshrined in its name — is also the only one to have been born and taken shape in Gaza — always the most rebellious and ungovernable of the Palestinian enclaves. The first intifada began in Gaza in 1987. It was also in Gaza, in 2005, that the second intifada ended, when Israel was no longer able to provide security for its 9,000 settlers living there. The dismantling of 17 Jewish settlements in Gaza was a victory not only for Hamas but for the Palestinian people.

As is always the case for those who are militarily weaker but spiritually mightier, this victory came at an enormous cost — over 3,000 Palestinian lives lost, thousands more jailed, homes demolished, economic hardship, and the aggressive growth of Israel’s security infrastructure — to name only the material losses.

Whether it is the experience of the two intifadas, or the presently unfolding tunnel-guerrilla warfare with the Israeli military in Gaza — even under conditions of earth-shattering bombing; against all odds — Palestinians have shown the world again and again that they are willing to lose everything for their cause. The same cannot be said of their colonial masters. Were this to be otherwise, there might be new conditions for moral equivalency.

Politics, in many ways, is about subjective identification. I mean this in the Freudian sense — identification as a libidinal investment in a cause, idea, person, or public. It is perfectly admissible from the perspective of Western interests that Hamas, the vanguard of Palestinian armed resistance, at least in recent decades, are “terrorists.” Nobody expects this to be otherwise. It is because of this that I, unlike Gandhi, do not see the universal value in appealing to the moral compass of one’s enemy. Some enemies, especially those backed by colossal structures of power and capital, do not have a moral compass.

Back to Khudiram. Who would have thought that an 18-year-old “gentleman” would shake things up as much as he did? There was armed resistance in Bengal before him, but, perhaps because of the exaggerated British reaction to his case, after him, something changed.

In 1910, two years after his execution, it was estimated that 6,000 Bengalis were involved in resistance cells. In 1912, Bengali revolutionaries attempted to assassinate Viceroy Lord Hardinge in Delhi, narrowly missing, but leaving him wounded. In 1915 alone, there were 49 cases of terrorism in Bengal, including 10 assassinations. These days, we would probably call it an intifada.

Here there is another connection to be made. In present-day Kolkata — formerly Calcutta — there is a metro station in the Garia neighbourhood named after Khudiram, called ‘Shaheed Khudiram’.

This is another of Khudiram’s afterlives. In addition to being a gentleman, a terrorist, and a revolutionary, Khudiram is also a shaheed — and, in this, he is a node in a symbolic universe that narrows the distance between Palestine and Bengal, via Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and — to borrow from the great Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali — from our witnesses to our beloveds who sacrifice their lives not in vain.


Arpan Roy is an anthropologist researching in Palestine and currently based in Berlin. His book Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference will be published in 2024 by University of Toronto Press.





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