Friday, March 22, 2024

Gaza: Blocking the Aid Trucks, Letting the Tanks Roll

As I write this, more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and, as Aya Batrawy reported for NPR, thousands more are “unaccounted for – either missing under the rubble, buried hastily in side streets, or decomposing in areas that can’t be safely reached.” Significant numbers of the dead are women and children, and aid for those living, thanks to an Israeli blockade, is barely entering that 25-mile strip of land. Yet the future promises mass famine, grotesque disease, and death, death, death for even more Palestinian civilians, most of them refugees who have done nothing to deserve such a fate, as TomDispatch regulars Stan and Priti Gulati Cox suggest all too vividly today.

Now, the Biden administration has finally decided to act. And no, I don’t mean forcing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wildly right-wing government to reverse course, even though his military remains significantly dependent on American armaments. Instead, President Biden has ordered the U.S. military to build a floating pier in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza with a causeway to the shore. From there, aid would theoretically be delivered to that embattled land.

Forget that it will take weeks, if not months, to build such a structure, and that not enough aid could possibly be transferred to Gaza via that single pier to matter greatly. Focus instead on one thing: the Israelis, as the Coxes note today, have already radically cut the number of supply trucks entering Gaza, so remind me, how in the world will the supplies from that pier even be delivered once they hit land? As Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden administration senior aid official and now president of the Refugees International aid advocacy group, put it recently: “You need drivers that don’t exist, trucks that don’t exist feeding into a distribution system that doesn’t exist.”

So, as planning for that pier proceeds, madness and horror reign in Gaza and the strangeness of it all remains hard to take in. As New York Times reporters Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt wrote recently, “It is rare for the United States to try to provide such services for people who are being bombed with tacit U.S. support.” Now, let the Coxes take you deeper into the world of horror that is Gaza today. ~ Tom Engelhardt

Armed by Washington, Israel Trashes the Genocide Convention

by Stan and Priti Gulati Cox

It’s been almost two months since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop killing Gazans and destroying their means of subsistence. So let’s look back and ask (1) how Israel has responded to its “orders,” and (2) how hard the Biden administration has pushed Israel to abide by those orders. Spoiler alert: the short answers are (1) not well and (2) not very.

The American government has provided most of the armaments and targeting technologies being used to kill Gazans by the thousands while turning many of the rest of them into refugees by destroying their homes, offices, schools, and hospitals. Nor did the Biden administration threaten to withdraw that support when Israel blocked shipments of crucial food and fuel to the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip. It also keeps vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions that would hold Israel accountable. And President Biden, despite an increasing amount of rhetorical shuffling, continues to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), even though they have ignored the International Court’s orders and continue committing atrocities.

Flouting the Order to Stop the Killing

On January 26th, the International Court of Justice handed down a ruling in a case brought by the Republic of South Africa accusing Israel of genocide. It ordered that Israel must “ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described” in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The court’s first order prohibited “killing members” of the Palestinian population or “causing serious bodily or mental harm” to them. How did Israel respond? Consider that, between late December 2023 and January 21st of this year, the IDF had killed about 5,000 Palestinians, already pushing the death toll in the Gaza Strip past 25,000. The court’s order, issued days later, would have essentially zero effect. Another 5,000-plus Palestinians would be killed by late February, raising the death toll to more than 30,000.

During the month after the ruling, Israeli troops repeatedly killed or injured civilians fleeing to, or taking shelter in, areas the IDF had advertised as “safe zones.” Typically, when, on February 12th, Israeli aircraft attacked 14 homes and three mosques in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, killing 67 Palestinians, some of the survivors told reporters that they’d been inside tents in a refugee camp. Similarly, on February 22nd, Israeli warplanes struck a residential area in central Gaza, killing 40 civilians, mostly women and children, and wounding more than 100.

Worse yet, the Biden administration has enabled that ongoing killing spree by approving 100 separate military sales to Israel since the conflict began in October. As a former administration official told the Washington Post, “That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S. support.”

In other words, the backbone of the war on Gaza comes with a label: “Made in USA.” In the decade leading up to October 7th, as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has reported, two-thirds of Israel’s arms imports came from the United States. (From 1950 to 2020, the U.S. share was a whopping 83%!)

In just the first couple of months of the war, the Biden administration sent 230 cargo planes and 20 ships full of military goods to Israel, a trove that included 100 BLU-109 bombs (2,000-pounders designed to penetrate hardened structures before exploding), 5,400 MK84 and 5,000 MK82 bunker-busters, 1,000 GBU-39 bombs, 3,000 JDAM bomb-guidance kits, and 200 “kamikaze drones.”

Such powerful bombs, reported Al Jazeera, “have been used in some of the deadliest Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, including a strike that leveled an apartment block in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing more than 100 people.” And yes, such bunker-busters were widely used in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in places as densely populated as Gaza’s cities. Israeli sources tried to justify that particular death toll by insisting it was necessary to kill one of Hamas’s leaders. If so, we’re talking about a 100-to-1 ratio, or a kind of collective punishment being supported by our tax dollars.

Worse yet, our military seems to have been participating directly in the IDF’s operations. According to the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein and Matthew Petti, the Defense Department has been providing satellite intelligence and software to help the IDF find and hit targets in Gaza. An “Air Defense Liaison Team,” they report, even traveled to Israel in November to offer targeting help, adding that “for the first time in U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza.”

And even then, some members of Netanyahu’s government felt it wasn’t enough. Far right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put it this way when it came to President Biden’s warning not to send the IDF into the southern Gazan city of Rafah where hundreds of thousands of refugees were gathered: “American pressure or fear of harming civilians should not deter us from occupying Rafah and destroying Hamas.”

The Israeli hostages held by Hamas are the excuse for so much of this, but the way to free them would be to negotiate, as Israel did successfully last fall, not try to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.” The Israelis are mostly bombing civilian sites in that campaign, because they’re reluctant to fight their way through the vast fortified network of tunnels from which the military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, mounted a formidable resistance to the invasion, largely with weaponry they manufactured themselves, along with ammunition recycled from unexploded ordnance dropped in past Israeli attacks.

Conditions of Life (and Death)

In the second of its orders, the International Court of Justice prohibited “deliberately inflicting… conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part [or] imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

The Netanyahu government and the IDF blew off this directive as well. In the month that followed the ruling, Israeli troops continued to besiege hospitals across Gaza, thoroughly crippling, if not destroying, its healthcare system, especially two of its most important facilities: al-Shifa Hospital in the north and Nasser Hospital in the south. Before it was put out of service in mid-February, Nasser was one of the last hospitals still operating there in any capacity whatsoever. Not surprisingly, the World Health Organization has since reported a striking rise in respiratory infections, diarrhea, chickenpox, jaundice, skin rashes, and scabies, among other horrors.

Israel’s military has also been making conditions unlivable by restricting the food aid entering the territory and destroying local fishing boats, greenhouses, and orchards. It’s a formula for mass starvation. As Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, told the Guardian in late February, “The speed of malnourishment of young children is also astounding. The bombing and people being killed directly is brutal, but this starvation – and the wasting and stunting of children – is torturous and vile.” Around the same time, UNICEF announced that 90% of children under five in Gaza were consuming “two or fewer food groups a day,” the functional definition of “severe food poverty.” About the same percentage were suffering from infectious diseases, most commonly diarrhea, which only exacerbated their malnutrition.

The world’s top group tracking food emergencies reported on March 17th that famine “is now projected and imminent” in northern Gaza within six weeks, and that “half of the population of the Gaza Strip (1.11 million people) is expected to face catastrophic conditions,” with starvation and death expected to be widespread. Keep in mind that, under the Geneva Conventions, it’s a war crime to starve civilians or “attack, destroy, remove, or render useless any items necessary for civilians’ survival.” Attacking a hospital can also be a war crime. In that context, here’s a thought experiment: What would President Biden and his top officials do if they suspected any other country of committing acts it knew could potentially lead to mass civilian deaths from starvation and disease? Would they shower it with more weaponry?

In defiance of the International Court’s orders – and undeterred by mild tut-tutting from Washington – the Israeli military is also inflicting intolerable “conditions of life” with its approach to Gaza’s water supply. With fuel shipments blocked by the Israelis, Gazans are unable to keep running the desalinization plants that produce a significant amount of the Strip’s water. As a result, by late February, the water supply had dropped to 7% of its prewar level. In desperation, many Gazans, especially children, have been forced to turn to polluted water sources, putting them at risk of severe gastrointestinal disease with no functional hospitals to help them.

Israel is also, in effect, violating the International Court’s bar on “measures intended to prevent births,” since pregnant women are considered especially vulnerable to the food deprivation that is now the essence of life in Gaza. At the Deir al Balah clinic in central Gaza, one out of five maternity patients were being treated for malnutrition in February, causing doctors deep concern, since any malnourished mother will be carrying a malnourished fetus (with awful health prospects for both of them). Meanwhile, the U.N. Population Fund reports that women are miscarrying at a higher rate than before the war, while doctors are being forced to perform emergency caesarian sections without anesthetics, posing a high risk to both mother and child.

Smoke and Parachutes

The International Court of Justice’s third order was to “enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Israel’s leaders are ignoring that as well – or maybe they’ve just reinterpreted “enable” to mean “thwart.”

In January, before the court order, the IDF had been allowing approximately 140 aid trucks through their checkpoints into Gaza daily, instead of the 500 of the prewar period. If Gazans’ needs were to be fully satisfied, that flow of aid should have been steeply increased. Instead, the Israelis reduced the number of trucks allowed into Gaza to only 96 per day in February, all too literally feeding fears of starvation.

To make matters worse, groups of Israeli civilians have been blocking aid convoys, some by lying on the ground in front of the trucks. On a single day in February, 130 trucks were blocked and the IDF made no effort to deter the demonstrators. The Association of International Development Agencies reported that, even when their trucks were getting through the southern border crossings, most of them weren’t managing to reach the central or northern parts of the Strip, including Gaza City, because they were “hindered by Israeli military operations, including constant bombardment and checkpoint closures.”

The most notorious aid-denial incident occurred on February 27th, when at least 118 Palestinians were killed after Israel forces opened fire on a crush of people in Gaza City trying to get food from a truck convoy. Most of the victims of this “Flour Bag Massacre” seem to have been killed either by IDF troops firing from tanks or to have died in the crush of people desperately trying to escape being shot.

The Biden administration did not respond to such incidents as it should have – by threatening to cut off war funding and supplies to Israel, as it had earlier suspended financial support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Gaza’s biggest prewar supplier of food, water, and shelter. The reason: allegations that some Palestinian UNRWA staff had, in the past, aided Hamas. Now, however, Reuters and the Times of Israel suggest that several agency staff members released from Israeli detention were coerced into falsely “admitting” to Hamas affiliations through physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats to their family members. (U.S. aid is still being withheld from UNWRA.)

Instead of pushing the Netanyahu government ever harder to allow more aid, the Biden administration decided to put on an airshow by dropping pallet-loads of packaged food into Gaza from military aircraft. Aid organizations panned the airdrops as little more than empty “gestures,” or a “theater of cruelty.” Even a hulking C-130 cargo plane can carry only the equivalent of one or two aid trucks. And despite similar expenditures, such airdrops can deliver only one-eighth to one-tenth as much food as a truck convoy. Worse yet, tons of cargo dropped from the sky can itself prove deadly. During an airdrop over a refugee camp along the northern Gaza coast on March 8th, a parachute failed to open, and the heavily loaded pallet attached to it plummeted into a group of adults and children who had been watching the drop from a rooftop. Five of them were killed, and 10 injured.

To Netanyahu & Co., the orders issued by the International Court of Justice have had about as much impact as a mosquito bite. And the United States, which could put more pressure on Israel than any other nation, has shied away from substantive action of any sort. President Biden and other officials continue to act largely as if they were just bystanders and the carnage in Gaza was being caused by some random natural disaster.

We aren’t policy experts, but it seems to us that any national leader with a strong sense of justice, of right and wrong, would do whatever was necessary to stop a genocide like the one now unfolding in Gaza. He or she would at least threaten to end all military support to Israel and press other supplying nations to do the same. He or she would put real effort into forcing Israel to let the aid trucks roll in and allowing Palestinians to decide their own fate.

Sadly, those aren’t our leaders. For now, Palestinians remain trapped in a nightmare vividly evoked by a recent photo that shows pallets of food aid parachuting earthward into Gaza as plumes of smoke from Israeli airstrikes rise to meet them – with both the food and the munitions courtesy of the United States of America.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Priti Gulati Cox, (@PritiGCox), a TomDispatch regular, is an artist and writer. Her work has appeared in Countercurrents, CounterPunch, Salon, Truthout, Common Dreams, the Nation, AlterNet, and more. To see her art please visit occupiedplanet.com.

Stan Cox, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, and the current In Real Time climate series at City Lights Books. Find him on Twitter at @CoxStan.

‘It’s Not Just Misguided—It’s Unconscionable:’ Congress' Spending Bill Could Ban Funding to U.N. Gaza Aid

Yasmeen Serhan
Fri, March 22, 2024

Palestinian families take refuge under harsh conditions at a school affiliated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza City, Gaza on February 6, 2024. Credit - Dawoud Abo Alkas—Anadolu/Getty Images

The fate of the U.N. agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees hangs in the balance as U.S. lawmakers prepare to vote on a batch of spending bills that, if passed, would suspend direct funding to the agency for at least a year.

The U.N. agency, known by its shorthand UNRWA, was first established in 1949 to serve Palestinians displaced from their homes and native villages amid the war that led to Israel’s creation the previous year. In the interim decades, the U.N. body has served as a quasi-state for the stateless, providing schooling, healthcare, and other social services for Palestinian refugees in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza, and across the region. Since Israel began its bombardment of the Strip in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, UNRWA’s role kicked into overdrive, providing not just vital food and medical aid, but emergency shelter for thousands of displaced Palestinians across the Strip.

Providing between $300 million and $400 million annually, Washington was the largest donor to UNRWA—at least until January, when the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries froze their funding amid Israeli allegations that 12 of the agency’s 13,000 employees participated in the Oct. 7 attack. Israel has yet to supply evidence to back its claims, according to the U.N., investigations into which remain ongoing. While several countries—including Canada, Australia, and Sweden—have since resumed funding, the U.S. is the only one that has moved to make its suspension of aid more permanent. The Congressional spending bill stipulates that a ban on U.S. funding for UNRWA will last “until March 25, 2025,” meaning the Biden administration will be unable to reverse the pause until that time.

However, should former President Trump secure victory in November’s presidential election, the decision on whether to reinstate funding would fall to his new administration. The prospects of such an outcome would bode poorly for UNRWA. During Trump’s first term, he cut all U.S. funding to the agency, which his State Department deemed “irredeemably flawed.”

Demonstrators stage a protest during a hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability of House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 30, 2024 in Washington, DC. The subcommittee held a hearing titled “UNRWA Exposed: Examining the Agency’s Mission and Failures.” Alex Wong—Getty Images

President Biden has already pledged to sign the $1.2 trillion spending bill—which includes billions in funding for several federal agencies, including the Departments for Defense, Homeland Security, and Labor—voting on which must take place today in order to avert a government shutdown. Should it pass, it will leave a huge hole in the agency’s operating budget, which amounts to roughly $800 million a year, according to UNRWA Communications Director Juliette Touma. “Such an outcome will make it harder for UNRWA to assist starving Gazans,” she tells TIME, “and potentially further weaken regional stability.”

It also stands to place further scrutiny on the Biden administration, which has faced mounting criticism at home and abroad over its unfettered support for Israel and its lackluster efforts to deliver vital food aid to Palestinians in Gaza. After all, it was only this week that the IPC, the international community’s authority on hunger crises, warned that famine may already be unfolding in Gaza. “Denying funding for UNRWA is tantamount to denying food to starving people and restricting medical supplies to injured civilians,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a leading Democratic lawmaker on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “To punish over 2 million innocent people in Gaza and UNRWA beneficiaries throughout the region for these actions is not just misguided—it’s unconscionable.”

In the House, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian American in Congress, told her colleagues on Thursday that passing this bill would mean “contributing to the starvation of Palestinian families.”

What remains to be seen is whether the U.S.’s decision to withhold funding until 2025 prompts other countries to restore, or even increase, their own contributions. On Friday, Finland announced that it will resume its annual funding of 5 million euros ($5.4 million) to UNRWA, a portion of which will be earmarked for strengthening the agency’s risk management. In the U.K., the opposition Labour Party (which polls project will form the next government) has called for the British government to follow the E.U. and others in resuming its payments to UNRWA—which amounted to $21.2 million in 2022— alongside increased emergency funding to Gaza.

But it may not be enough. According to Touma, UNRWA’s budget is based on contributions from member states that provide financial support to the Agency over and above their regular U.N. dues. In 2022, the agency received $1.17 billion in funding by governments. The U.S. was the single biggest donor, contributing more than a quarter of that amount.

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Write to Yasmeen Serhan at yasmeen.serhan@time.com.

Which Came First, the Child or the Embryo?

by Vern Loomis / March 19th, 2024

In high school biology class, students learn that when egg and sperm cells unite, a zygote is immediately formed. The zygote splits into two cells, and those two cells each split again in a process that keeps repeating itself. A few days later, when the zygote is still less than the size of the period at the end of this sentence, it begins its travel down a fallopian tube to the uterus. At the start of its little journey, the zygote is relabeled a “blastocyst.” It retains that label until implantation in the uterus, where it is again relabeled to become an “embryo.” Eight weeks, and many cell divisions later, the embryo gets relabeled yet again, and is called a “fetus.” If all goes well, after about a nine-month period of fetal growth, a healthy human baby is born and finally receives an individualized moniker like “Jonathan” or “Marianne.”

With in vitro fertilization (IVF) the traditional labeling becomes obscured. Egg and sperm cells are “harvested” and then united outside of the human body. The fertilized egg is lab-nurtured and surgically implanted directly into the uterus. It makes no journey down the fallopian tube, so there is no “blastocyst” stage to label. Perhaps because growth occurs in a Petri dish rather than in a fallopian tube, the “zygote” label is also dropped and the “embryo” tag is commonly applied as soon as egg and sperm cells are united. When it all occurs within the human body, the process is continuous and the stage labels simply offer convenient developmental markers. When the process begins in the lab, it might not be continuous; extra embryos may be formed and cryogenically frozen for back-up or future use. The frozen embryos may be kept in that suspended state for months or even years.

Procreation sentiment can be morally complicated and controversial: When do cells, zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, or fetuses become human beings? The cells are alive from the very beginning, and they are human cells, so does that make a cell or an assemblage of cells a human being? A fertilized human egg certainly has the capacity to grow, develop, and become recognized as a human being, but is it irrefutably a human being when still just one cell, or two cells, or four cells? It’s complicated; it’s a controversial issue over which many people earnestly disagree.

The Alabama Supreme Court tried to “uncomplicate” a complicated issue when it authoritatively ruled that all human embryos are children. To bolster its authority in the matter, chief justice Tom Parker cited God’s word, or at least his interpretation of previously interpreted translations of some pragmatically chosen words commonly attributed to God. He’s a judge, a Christian judge, so many Christians and perhaps even some nonsectarians might assume his interpretation to be correct, or the faithful and learned judge wouldn’t have interpreted it that way. Perhaps the faithful and non-faithful alike should be thankful for the judge’s judicial insight and his willingness to guide us all to the correct meaning of God’s conveyance. Really though, what else could the words mean? When God says (Jeremiah 1:5) “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations,” God is obviously not just citing his omniscience; he is clearly stating that embryos are children – it’s right there between the lines.

So, thanks to the perceptive judge, it was uncomplicated for at least a few days: the court’s ruling made it clear; embryos don’t become human beings, they are human beings from the very first moment of conception (just as God so clearly and unequivocally informs us through his prophet Jeremiah). Pro-Choice advocates were thus put on notice: every abortive procedure, no matter how early, must come to be seen as an act of murder because every human embryo is a human child. Logically, the ruling’s impact could not be limited to just surgically abortive procedures; it must also apply to birth control measures that prevent the implantation of an embryo, and then of course to IVF procedures that produce extra embryos stored (at least temporarily) for future use. Doctors and staff at IVF clinics suddenly found themselves in a dangerous predicament: continuation of normal medical practice might conceivably result in discarded or irreparably damaged embryos, so IVF personnel could henceforth be charged with malpractice and/or murder.

It was a severe, but uncomplicated ruling, and then it got complicated again. Alabama’s Republican Governor and its Republican legislature realized that the consequence of the Supreme Court’s ruling wasn’t confined to just degenerate Pro-Choice advocates; many of their own Republican and Pro-Life voters also utilize birth control measures and favor accessibility to IVF treatments. They surely didn’t want to alienate that part of their constituency. But they also didn’t want to alienate their most righteous Pro-life constituents that would likely be firmly supportive of the court’s “embryos are children” ruling. So, Alabama’s governor and its legislature chose a course of action that would hopefully keep all their constituents in the fold. To that end, Justice Tom Parker’s interpretation of God’s word would not be assailed. Going forward, Alabama would continue to criminalize and prosecute abortive acts, because embryos are children and children must be protected. But in IVF settings, Alabama would assume the “three wise monkeys” position (see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil) and hold that nothing regarding clinical embryonic treatment appeared to be amiss. In blissful concurrence, Governor Kay Ivey signed a bill that will “provide civil and criminal immunity for death or damage to an embryo to any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.”

It really is complicated, isn’t it? In one setting, the state will hold that discarding an embryo is murderous and subject to criminal prosecution (with a penalty of up to 99 years in jail), but in another setting, the state will hold that discarding an embryo, while it might be murderous, will not be seen as murderous, and therefore not subject to criminal or civil prosecution.

Alabama’s legislative initiative and the governor’s signature adroitly addressed a court’s ruling that could have held negative political consequences for their Republican Party. Their quick reaction to the court’s decision averted that outcome, but also provided a behind-the-curtain reveal: no one really believes that embryos are actual living children. The Alabama legislative body doesn’t believe it, Governor Kay Ivey doesn’t believe it, and chief justice Tom Parker doesn’t believe it. They all certainly want to appear as if they believe it, and as an abstract argumentative position, they fervently avow that they believe it, but in the real world of physical reality, they don’t actually live like they believe it. They don’t truly believe that embryos are real children, and it’s likely that neither do most of the Pro-Life advocates who avidly say that they do.

If the Alabama legislators actually believed that embryos are real children, would they so nonchalantly have legalized the possible mutilation and murder of children at IVF clinics? If Governor Ivey truly believed that a proposed bill would legalize the culling and killing of real children, would she so eagerly have signed it? If Judge Parker truly believed that real children were being discarded (killed) in IVF clinics, would he then have been able to sit back after announcing his ruling and calmly watch it continue? If ardent Evangelical Pro-Life proponents actually believed that embryos are real children and a gift from God, wouldn’t there be thousands now stepping forward with available wombs to warm and rescue the frozen children held captive in IVF clinics?

“Embryos are children,” offers a definitive stance in Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate. It’s meant to stifle any consideration that a transformative process might be involved in becoming a human being. Recent events in Alabama show the stance to be a pragmatic linguistic cudgel rather than a truly held actionable belief. “Embryos are children,” is figuratively accepted by those who espouse it, but literally applied to those who don’t. It thus allows for a “three wise monkeys” allowance towards those discarding an embryo in one setting while calling for a 99-year prison sentence for those doing the same thing in another. The allowance is acceptable because the avowal of belief is real, but the belief itself is not.FacebookTwitter Reddit

Vern Loomis lives in the Detroit area and occasionally likes to comment on news and events that interest him in whatever capacity available. Besides Dissident Voice, his other musings can be found at Transcend Media Service, ZNetwork, CounterPunch, The Humanist, and The Apathetic Agnostic. Read other articles by Vern.

Rethinking Liberalism and Fascism

by Yanis Iqbal / March 19th, 2024

Liberalism thinks of fascism as the domination of extremist precision, the suppression of some creative vitality. The deliberative character of parliamentary democracy – the inconclusiveness of dialogue – is contrasted with the absolutist closure of fascism. What if we reversed the liberal value judgement regarding fascism? What if fascism consisted not of dogmatic fixity and sharp lines but of the mesh formed by a kind of democratic openness?

Francis Bacon, “Landscape with Pope/Dictator,” 1946

Francis Bacon’s “Landscape with Pope/Dictator” can be of help in such rethinking. The face of the pope/dictator is blurred – it is a smudged brown shape held together by the centrality of the mouth. The mouth is the intermediary of fascist demagogy. Parliamentary liberals foreground the mouth as the democratic source of “voice,” as the harmonious stream of sound that never stops contributing to the richness of the political fabric. Fascism also foregrounds the mouth, but no longer as the source of a creative voice but as the organ of commanding speech, so much so that the mouth comes to define the face itself. Bacon exaggerates the liberal logic of creative vocality by dissolving the stable face of democrats into a disfigured container for the mouth. The shape of the face – this is what allows liberalism to join together the discordant, divisive polyvocality of class struggle into the seamlessness of the parliament. Fascism merely extends the liberal logic by freeing the vitalism of the mouth from the bounds of the face. This shows that the creative openness of liberal democracy functions as a hegemonic project built through the forced integration of social fractals. The reality of class divisions is buried beneath the integrationism of the democratic voice, which demands peaceful dialogue instead of militant struggle. Fascism completes this agenda – any pretense of an actual dialogue among distinct persons is thrown away as the differentness of faces is submerged in the oceanic force of the mouth. Communism, on the other hand, stages the eruption of differences, namely the primary difference of classes. It shatters all images of faux wholeness in the intensity of hostile struggle.

The pope/dictator has hazy hands. In the present-day liberal-capitalist architecture, hands are the nodes unifying citizen-individuals. Oneness courses through the hands. The hand may not be used for throwing Molotov cocktails against the government. It is best preserved within the procedures of electoral legitimacy. Thus, hands merge, dissolving into the general will of the nation. The hazy hands of the fascist reveal the truth of liberal unity: the indisctinctness of hands reduces it to the flowness of the body, the body that is directed towards the metallic protuberance of the mic. The mic functions as a nucleus for the fascist spectacle: it sucks out and concentrates the fluid vitality of the fascist body into the amplified sound that pervades the ears of the audience. The liberal paradigm of individual freedom – the flexibility and openness of the individual – turns into its seeming opposite: the frozenness of the mic. However, there is no opposition here. Liberalism already contains the architecture of imaginary unity found in fascism. The mic of the fascist leader merely foregrounds the regressive foundation of liberal democracy: the bourgeois-democratic suppression of real antagonisms under the pretense of dialogue is bound to lead to the fascist behemoth whose certitude of absolute comprehensiveness unleashes violence against the Other.

Bacon paints flowers beneath the podium where the pope/dictator is speaking. Liberal political theory considers nature as the site of dynamism, as the domain in which force can be observed in its exuberant purity. Nature reflects back to human beings their living potentialities that they are born with. Flowers are a symbol of life’s beauty, the way in which a beneficial order emerges from the free exchange of natural elements. From seeds to flower – this is a journey of beauty that encapsulates the liberal insistence on the value of peaceful coexistence and dialogue. What, then, are flowers doing in a fascist landscape? Bacon’s flowers appear very congruous – their compact groupness resembles hands that are clapping at the dictator’s speech. This, again, brings to the fore the repressed presupposition of liberalism: the beauty of flowers is rooted in the commonality of the soil, the organicist interlinkage of elements with each other. The peaceful poise of the flowers, their growth from the ground of co-existence, positions them in front of the fascist, whose speech they are silently absorbing. When there is too much democratic talk, the end result is silence. The voice of democracy exists within the same frame as the enraptured silence of fascist storm troopers. When the beauty of flowers is all that is visible to the eye, the ugliness of fascism is not far. We have to imagine flowers not in the landscape of peaceful, co-existential synthesis but in the distortedness of their internal assemblage.

Georgia O’Keeffe, “Black Iris,” 1926

“Black Iris” by Georgia O’Keeffe stages this heterodox imaging of the flower. Here, the flower is shown not as part of a scenic landscape but as a magnified collection of different components. The folds and curves of the petals show the manufacturedness of the flower, the labor of undulating intersections that holds it together. When seen closely, the flower reveals itself not as a spontaneous, peaceful synthesis of elements but as the stitch that solders the petals so they don’t fall off. Petals are not just smooth surfaces but specifically shaped materials whose contingent stitch creates crevices, depth, and unevenness. This unevenness is what is needed for a revolutionary politics of class struggle.FacebookTwitter Reddit

Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India. Read other articles by Yanis.

Please Ignore Our Subversion There

Focus on their "interference" here

by Yves Engler / March 19th, 2024

You’ve read, heard and seen countless stories about supposed Chinese interference in Canada, but how many times has the dominant media mentioned Canadian subversion in other countries?

Don’t believe that Canada does that? Here are a few examples of Canada contributing to leading international stories:

There is a direct line between the downward spiral in Haiti’s security situation and Canadian interference. In 2004 the US, France and Canada invaded to overthrow Haiti’s elected government. René Préval’s election two years later partly reversed the coup, but the US and Canada reasserted their control after the 2010 earthquake by intervening to make Michel Martelly president. That set-in motion more than a decade of rule by the criminal PHTK party. After president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in mid 2021 the US- and Canada-led Core Group selected Ariel Henry to lead against the wishes of civil society. In a sign of Haiti’s political descent, 7,000 officials were in elected positions in 2004 while today there are none.
Last Friday former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) was convicted of drug charges by a jury in New York. Pursued by the Southern District of New York against the wishes of US diplomats, the case documented JOH’s role in a murderous criminal enterprise that began under his predecessor. JOH became president after Ottawa tacitly supported the military’s removal of the social democratic president Manuel Zelaya. Before his 2009 ouster Canadian officials criticized Zelaya and afterwards condemned his attempts to return to the country. Failing to suspend its military training program with Honduras, Canada was also the only major donor to Honduras—the largest recipient of Canadian assistance in Central America—that failed to announce it would sever aid to the military government. Six months later Ottawa endorsed an electoral farce and JOH’s subsequent election marred by substantial human rights violations. JOH then defied the Honduran constitution to run for a second term, which Canada backed.
There’s also a direct line between the 2014 Canadian-backed coup in Ukraine and Russia’s devastating invasion. As Owen Schalk and I detail in Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy, Ottawa played a significant role in destabilizing Victor Yanukovich and pushing the elected president out. Yanukovich’s ouster propelled Moscow’s seizure of Crimea and a civil war in the east, which Russia massively expanded two years ago.
In an episode symbolic of Canadian influence and interference, Peru’s Prime Minister Alberto Otárola Peñaranda cut short his trip to the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada conference in Toronto last week to resign. Implicated in a love affair/corruption scandal, Peñaranda became prime minister after the December 2022 ouster of elected leftist president Pedro Castillo. Ottawa supported the ‘usurper’ government that suspended civil liberties and deployed troops to the streets. Global Affairs and Canada’s ambassador to Peru Louis Marcotte worked hard to shore up support for the replacement government through a series of diplomatic meetings and statements.
Canada’s intervention to undermine Palestinian democracy has also enabled Israel’s mass slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza. After Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, Canada was the first country to impose sanctions against the Palestinians. Ottawa’s aid cut-off and refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government was designed to sow division within Palestinian society. It helped spur fighting between Hamas and Fatah. When Hamas took control of Gaza, Israel used that to justify its siege of the 360 square kilometre coastal strip and series of deadly campaigns that left 6,000 Palestinians dead before October 7.

While the media reported the above-mentioned stories, they refuse to discuss Ottawa’s negative role. Instead of holding our governments to account and describing Canadian subversion the media sphere focuses on foreign interference by our designated ‘enemies’ that’s had little demonstratable negative impact. In war and politics this is called distraction.

Starting Thursday in Ottawa I’ll be speaking on Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy in Ottawa, Waterloo, Hamilton and Toronto. The information is here.

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Yves Engler is the author of 12 books. His latest book is Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People's History of the Canadian Military . Read other articles by Yves.