Tuesday, January 14, 2025


Mexico’s ‘Yes to Disarmament, Yes to Peace’ Program
January 14, 2025
Source: Pressenza


Image by Presidencia de México

The Mexican government of Dr.. Claudia Sheinbaum has launched the National Voluntary Disarmament Plan ‘Yes to disarmament, Yes to peace’, a program that aims to get the population to surrender their firearms in exchange for financial compensation.

The President, accompanied by the Secretaries of the National Defense, Navy, Security, National Guard, Interior and several local and religious authorities presided over the official act this Friday in the esplanade of the Basilica of Guadalupe. “Weapons are a symbol of violence and death. We do not want any family to have a gun in their home,” declared Sheinbaum, seeking to address the causes of violence in the country from early childhood

Several gun collection points will be installed in churches of all faiths, to then destroy them The campaign begins in Mexico City and from there it will move to other states heavily affected by violence such as Guanajuato, Baja California, State of Mexico, Tabasco and Guerrero. It is the first time that such a plan will be carried out on a national scale, after it was implemented in the capital, when Sheinbaum was head of government. Sheinbaum now seeks to take it to other particularly problematic municipalities.

The aim is to contribute to the prevention and reduction of homicides and femicides, but also of injuries and accidental deaths by firearms, mostly involving minors.
It’s Time For Africa to Join the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty

From governments to scientists and unions, momentum is growing behind a demand for a clean energy transition and climate justice.
January 14, 2025
Source: African Arguments


Image by World Vision

My grandmother Wangechi was a star. Stout, strong, and weather-beaten from tilling the land for days on end, we revered, feared, and loved her in equal measure. She was born when Kenya was a colonial state and married during the struggle for freedom, her role in which is a story for another day.

My siblings and I, and even our friends, thought my grandmother was all-knowing and could read the weather. No matter how hot it was, she would always drink hot tea. The only exceptions were the rare occasions when she came back from the farm and said rehe gikobe nywe mai (“bring me a cup to drink water”). Then, we knew it was definitely about to rain heavily.

We thought she was a magician, but she wasn’t. She had grown up at a time when the seasons were predictable. Her parents, ancestors, and everyone who came before knew what the weather would be by looking at the clouds, feeling the wind, and watching how the birds and animals behaved. It was the good old days before human greed and capitalism destroyed the balance of life and nature.

In West Africa, there is a beautiful country called Nigeria, a land of giants who walk with swag and speak animatedly. In the Niger Delta, where Shell has been drilling oil since 1956, the way of life of farmers and fisherfolk has been destroyed by fossil fuels. A community of over two million people has had their land, air, and water contaminated. Writer and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged in 1995 for fighting for the environmental protection of the region.

30 years later, Shell spills about 40 million litres of oil every year across the Niger Delta. The land has been poisoned by heavy metals such as chromium, lead, and mercury, and many young people have turned to crime to survive. Nigeria produces 1.5 million barrels of oil per day, contributing to Shell’s enormous profits, but that hasn’t helped the people of the Niger Delta, where life expectancy is 45 years. The country is poor, and 87 million Nigerians live below the poverty line — the world’s second-largest population of poor people after India.

These patterns are replicated across Africa, where oil and gas have destroyed our way of life, turned young people into militias, and brought more misery, tears, and death to our continent. In Angola, the second largest oil-producing country in sub-Saharan Africa, people live in abject poverty. 1.55 million barrels of oil per day has not turned the people into millionaires. Instead, Angola has one of the highest mortality rates associated with air pollution in the world.

The curse of fossil fuels can only be stopped if we cease the drilling, and transition to clean energy. All African governments should support the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls for an end to new coal, oil, and gas projects and demands a justice-based energy transition. It is a bold proposal grounded in global justice and equity that is premised on the basic fact that fossil fuels are fuelling climate breakdown. Coal, oil and gas are responsible for nearly 90% of the carbon emissions driving the climate collapse this decade. The world’s wealthiest countries have brought our planet to her knees.

For any lasting solution, we must go to the root. The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative does this by proposing an international mechanism to drive three big shifts: an end to fossil fuel expansion globally; a fair phase out of existing extraction, with the richest nations who have driven the climate catastrophe phasing out first and fastest and providing technical and financial support to developing nations; and a financed just transition that facilitates energy access, economic diversification, renewable energy deployment, and alternative development pathways.

Momentum is growing. The push for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty is spearheaded by a bloc of 16 Global South nations — including two fossil fuel producers — from the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. It is high time for African countries to join this growing coalition. The global network also includes 120 cities and subnational governments, over 3,500 organisations and institutions including the European Parliament, 3,000+ scientists and academics, 101 Nobel laureates, the World Health Organisation, thousands of religious institutions, 10 Amazonian Indigenous nations, thousands of youth activists, more than 800 Parliamentarians across the world, hundreds of trade unions representing over 30 million workers in more than 150 countries, and almost a million individuals.

This proposal for justice is more necessary than ever for our people. As a continent, our carbon emissions have been negligible, yet we suffer the cyclones, floods and droughts that have been driven by the greed of fossil fuel corporations while more than 600 million Africans struggle through energy poverty every day. The effects of climate breakdown on our continent have left farmers and pastoralists destitute. The experience of Angola, Nigeria, and many more countries are evidence that fossil fuels only benefit multinationals while destroying communities, culture, and food security. If we don’t join the fight to stop this fossil fuelled climate crisis, the next big conflicts in Africa will be over water and food.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most fertile countries in the world. The Congo River has the highest hydroelectric potential in Africa. And the Congo Basin, known as the “lungs of Africa”, is the largest carbon sink in the world, absorbing more carbon than the Amazon and providing a critical habitat for endangered species. But if the DRC continues oil drilling, the beauty and the carbon sink will be destroyed and more wars and famine will follow.

I’m elated to become a champion to stop the proliferation of fossil fuels, foster a fair phase out of existing fossil fuel extraction, and achieve a global just transition to renewable energy. I also look forward to seeing the roaring waters of the Congo River light up Africa with clean energy. It’s possible. I encourage you to join the coalition to tackle the climate emergency head on by endorsing the #FossilFuelTreaty today.

Boniface Mwangi is an award-winning photographer and human rights activist. He is the author of Unbounded, a poignant and riveting memoir that captures his incredible journey.

The Empathy Inequality Index



 January 14, 2025
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There is something of a loose, informal social contract inherent to a successful human society, and that is the condition of reciprocal empathy. When one experiences misfortune, others in a healthy society care and assist, despite there being no contractual obligation. Others care when catastrophe falls upon their neighbors. It’s basic empathy, not a complicated interaction. Yet we have been immersed in a society that simply wants us to feel empathy in one direction, and that is towards those who have ample resources and power but, for whatever reason, have hit a bump in their golden paved road. The empathy our power structures want us to feel is not the kind that extends downward; the narrative is that we should only feel a concern for the already powerful when they face misfortune.

An example of this would be the recent magnification of the loss of housing for individuals like actor James Woods (well, I say “actor” but who knew he was playing himself in Casino?). He has been appearing on all the major “news”–(again, the quotes) channels, weeping and wailing over the loss of his mansion. I ask you this—have any of you ever seen an interview on such media from the homeless who have had every single one of their possessions taken, not by wildfire, but by police sweeps—sweeps often conducted to remove the unsightliness of poverty prior to big game events and concerts and such? I’m guessing no. They wouldn’t even want the homeless in their studio. But of these groups –who is more likely to be able to build back their possessions? I am guessing James Woods is not sleeping below an overpass without a sleeping bag or tent at this time.

The lack of empathy is, of course, what brings people to these dire straits in the first place. As I often say, it’s a feature, not a bug, in late-day capitalism that instead of the carrot dangling like it did in the 50’s (a home, a boat maybe, money to send the kids to college), we are firmly in stick territory. If you do not participate successfully in this parasitic economy, you may end up without any safety net at all in your life. Never mind that we have ample resources to deal with any and all of these problems (for example, Elon Musk’s net worth is 416 billion and the estimated current cost of the LA wildfires from an Accuweather calculation is at 135-150 billion). Can you wrap your head around that? One man, a weird man, has enough money to take care of this problem and still have a majority of his wealth left over. How can things not be completely wrecked in such a scenario? Yet said man spends so much time demonizing those who have nothing to their names by saying things like “in most cases, the word ‘homeless’ is a lie, it’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness”. Now, that quote I would use maybe for James Woods now that he is mansion-less, but all those other souls out there that Musk was referring to—not so much. Again, can you imagine having all that wealth and power and you use it……to denigrate people so down on their luck that they don’t even have a roof over their heads or a way to get one? It’s a massive tell that Musk has some sort of internal rot in need of healing. He seems to want love so badly, to the point that it is painful to witness, but avoids all the obvious ways that it could truly come his way (mainly extending out kindness and empathy, not being a part of the overall problem that makes worldwide misery index soar). Of course, it’s not ideal to rely on billionaire largesse, but he truly could have more love than he would know what to do with and could try to fill that internal void if he made any attempt at just being kind. It’s as simple as that.

Look at MacKenzie Scott—she is genuinely cared about by an enormous number of appreciative individuals. It’s not normal to amass that much wealth, but the real evidence of decency is what you do with that wealth if it finds you. Musk chooses to shit-tweet about the homeless; Scott is handing out no-strings-attached grants to make the world better. This is speaking to individual-level behavior, of course. The answer is not to have a society that allows for such disparity, but her behavior is a path of attempted decency, his—not so much.

It’s in this setting that it has become completely acceptable that the concern is for the oppressors of the world, but almost never for the oppressed. The situation in Palestine exemplifies that. You can have people fighting to stay alive and to keep their land and it is labeled terrorism. They get no sympathy, but those colonizing and taking it—well, they get all the sympathy should they have that push-back. Americans with the comfort of time seem to understand Little Big Horn, but in the current era can’t see similarities where they exist, mainly because of the spoon-fed narratives of the media—even in the setting of real-time documentation. Up becomes down, sideways becomes straight, so many words lose their meaning. The disproportionate (by that I mean genocide) response is considered normal, but the act of fighting the powers that be is not. It’s never considered to look back at root causes and to rectify inhumane living conditions—it’s just accepted that the powerless are to die off and the powerful need to continue enriching themselves.

It’s like the homeless having their possessions taken along with their make-shift shelters…..instead of seeking humane answers, we criminalize homelessness. We ensure that housing markets are unaffordable by allowing entities like Blackrock to buy up massive amounts of real estate. We limit the possibilities available to claw out of terrible situations and then bemoan the fact that said individuals become unable to participate in what we consider normal society.

Yet, with all of this going on, we allow James Woods and Mel Gibson to whine on television. Ghouls like Laura Ingraham, whose own brother disavows her lack of empathy, amplify their stories. The empathy is to flow upward, never down, much in contrast to the Jesus fellow they all seem to love to align themselves with.

Unless industrialized late-stage capitalism has factories producing needles with camel-sized passage possible, they are screwed if any of that dogma is true.

But I’m not here to Christian-shame—I think we know (and even they know) that they use the label as a shield. Also, I don’t believe in the supernatural of it–that book of theirs is at odds with itself. But I do think that we aren’t here to continue to punch down and use our empathy for those least in need of it, those who definitely exhibit no reciprocity. I’m not going to be shaming those who would make jokes if it makes them feel better to say, “Well, James Woods, maybe you did need a ceasefire.”–do what heals you; he’s going to be fine.

I do think of something I heard once from (okay, keep with me—I’m not going completely woo on you, but I do like to listen to accounts from those who have had near-death experiences; it fascinates me). But anyway, one of those accounts came from a man who came back and said he was told “it’s not a courtroom, it’s a classroom” in regard to his questions about following religious dogma. His entire worldview was changed and opened up post “death” to levels of love and understanding beyond the standard guidelines of individual religions. So let us look at that statement, and for me, for some reason it resonates like no other. In that one sentence, it offers more than atheistic materialism or the rule-based religions of the world. If this is a classroom, what are we learning—how are we trying to do better? Look at a MacKenzie Scott and an Elon Musk for two different paths to take.

There is one thing that I am sure of and that is the fact that we need to normalize the empathy we are capable of and the actions that can stem from actually caring about others. For far too long we have normalized vapid self-infatuation and we hold individuals like Musk up as an example of success, not a cautionary tale. Those with wealth need to come down and join the rest of us in decent human society. You can’t continue to use your damaged soul as the springboard for the philosophies you choose to embrace. It’s as if some use it as the starting point. Gee, I’m rich, healthy, and good-looking (or at least with the money, I was able to make myself look good)……where can I shop around and find something that allows me to continue feeling awesome about that with absolutely no responsibility to others? I know, maybe Ayn Rand or similar rubbish. This is not the way. This is not learning in the classroom of life– this is being the bully, the asshole with no hint of self-awareness. And I’m fairly certain that is not why we are here.

Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.

Do Boycotts Against Israel Work? Fatima Bhutto & Omar Barghouti | Reframe

By Omar Barghouti, Fatima Bhutto
January 13, 2025
Source: AlJazeera


Omar Barghouti is co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, a grassroots Palestinian movement inspired by the South African anti-apartheid struggle. One of the most prominent Palestinian human rights defenders, Omar has been recognized internationally for his campaigning. In 2017, he received the Gandhi Peace Prize for his work.

In the first interview of Al Jazeera’s new series Reframe, author and journalist Fatima Bhutto speaks to Omar about the history of Palestinian non-violent resistance and its legacy and effectiveness in defending Palestinian rights. Omar also speaks about how the unprecedented international solidarity with Palestinians is affecting BDS as Israel continues its war on Gaza.

When Israeli Warplanes Rain Death on Gaza, the Copilot Is Uncle Sam

By Stan Cox
January 14, 2025
Source: Tom Dispatch


Image by Creative Commons 2.5

In recent weeks, political soothsayers have speculated about a wide variety of odious new policies the incoming Trump administration and its allies in Congress may or may not pursue. No one can predict with certainty which of those measures they will inflict on us and which they’ll forget about. But we can make one prediction with utter confidence. The White House and large bipartisan majorities in Congress will continue their lavish support for Israel’s war on Gaza, however catastrophic the results.

Washington has supplied a large share of the armaments that have allowed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to rain death and destruction on Gaza (not to speak of Lebanon) over the past year and a quarter. Before October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other groups attacked southern Israel, that country was receiving $3.8 billion worth of American military aid annually. Since then, the floodgates have opened and $18 billion worth of arms have flowed out. The ghastly results have shocked people and governments across the globe.

In early 2024, the United Nations General Assembly and International Court of Justice condemned the war being waged on the people of Gaza and, in November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and Médecins Sans Frontières all followed with determinations that Israel was indeed committing genocide.

This country’s laws and regulations prohibit aid to military forces deliberately killing or wounding civilians or committing other grave human rights abuses. No matter, the U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline has kept right on flowing, completely unchecked. A cornucopia of military funds and hardware for Israel in the early months of the war came from just two nations: 69% from the United States and 30% from Germany.

Were it just about any other country than Israel committing such a genocide, Washington would have cut off arms shipments months ago. But U.S. leaders have long carved out gaping exceptions for Israel. Those policies have contributed mightily to the lethality of the onslaught, which has so far killed at least 52,000 Palestinians, 46,000 of whom are believed to have been civilians. And of those civilian dead, five of every six are also believed to have been women or children. Israeli air strikes and other kinds of bombardment have also destroyed or severely damaged almost half a million housing units, more than 500 schools, just about every hospital in Gaza, and large parts of that region’s food and water systems — all with dire consequences for health and life.

Bombs Leave Their Calling Cards

From October 2023 through October 2024, reports Brett Murphy at ProPublica, 50,000 tons (yes, tons!) of U.S. war matériel were shipped to Israel. A partial list of the munitions included in those shipments has been compiled by the Costs of War Project. The list (which, the project stresses, is far from complete) includes 2,600 250-pound bombs, 8,700 500-pound bombs, and a trove of 16,000 behemoths, each weighing in at 2,000 pounds. In January 2024, Washington also added to Israel’s inventory of U.S.-made F-15 and F-35 fighter jets. Naturally, we taxpayers footed the bill.

As Abigail Hauslohner and Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post noted in late October, “The pace and volume of weaponry have meant that U.S. munitions make up a substantial portion of Israel’s arsenal, with an American-made fleet of warplanes to deliver the heaviest bombs to their targets.” When confronted with solid evidence that Israel has been using U.S. military aid to commit genocide, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters, “We do not have enough information to reach definitive conclusions about particular incidents or to make legal determinations.”

Really? How much information would be enough then? Isn’t it sufficient to see Israeli forces repeatedly target clinics, homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools with massive, precision-guided bombs? Isn’t it enough when the IDF targets the very “safe zones” in which they have commanded civilians to take shelter, or when they repeatedly bomb and strafe places where people have gathered around aid trucks to try to obtain some small portion of the trickle of food that the Israeli government led by Netanyahu has decided to allow into Gaza?

If the U.S. State Department’s analysts really were having trouble making “definitive conclusions about particular incidents,” then Stephan Semler was ready to lend a hand with a report at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft entitled “20 Times Israel Used U.S. Arms in Likely War Crimes.” Worse yet, his list, he points out, represents only “a small fraction of potential war crimes committed with U.S.-provided weapons,” and all 20 of the attacks he focuses on occurred at locations where no armed resistance forces seemed to be present. Here are a few incidents from the list:

When warplanes bombed a busy market in northern Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp, killing 69 people in October 2023, U.N. investigators determined that U.S.-made 2,000-pound GBU-31 air-dropped munitions had been used. A couple of weeks later, the U.N. found that “several” GBU-31s were responsible for flattening a built-up area of more than 60,000 square feet within Gaza City, killing 91 people, 39 of them children. A weapon dropped on a residential building last January, killing 18 (including 10 children), left behind a fragment identifying it as a 250-pound Boeing GBU-39. An airstrike on a tent camp for displaced people in Rafah in May, killing 46 people, left behind a GBU-39 tailfin made in Colorado. The next month, a bomb-navigating device manufactured by Honeywell was found in the rubble of a U.N.-run school where 40 people, including 23 women and children, had been killed. In July, more than 90 people were slaughtered in a bombing of the Al-Mawasi refugee camp, an Israeli army-designated “safe zone” near the southwest corner of Gaza. A tailfin found on the scene came from a U.S.-built JDAM guidance system that’s commonly used on 1,000- or 2,000-pound bombs. Also in July, fragments of the motor and guidance system of a Lockheed-Martin Hellfire missile fired from a U.S.-made Apache helicopter were found in the remains of a U.N.-run school where refugees were sheltering. Twenty-two had been killed in the attack.

“Everyone Knew the Rules Were Different for Israel”

In December, a group of Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the State Department of violating a 1997 act of Congress that prohibits arms transfers to any government that commits gross human rights violations.

As the Guardian reported, a large number of countries “have privately been sanctioned and faced consequences for committing human rights violations” under the act, which is known as the “Leahy law” after its original sponsor, former Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. But since 2020, a special committee, the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum (ILVF), has decided whether payments or shipments destined for Israel should be permitted. According to the Guardian, Israel has “benefited from extraordinary policies inside the ILVF,” under which arms transfers get a green light no matter how egregiously Israeli occupation forces may have violated human rights. In the words of a former official, “Nobody said it, but everyone knew the rules were different for Israel.”

According to the Post‘s Abigail Hauslohner and Michael Birnbaum, the process of determining whether Israel is using U.S.-supplied weapons to commit war crimes “has become functionally irrelevant, with more senior leaders at the State Department broadly dismissive of non-Israeli sources and unwilling to sign off on action plans” for disallowing aid. A midlevel department official, once stationed in Jerusalem, told Post reporters that senior officials “often dismissed the credibility of Palestinian sources, eyewitness accounts, nongovernmental organizations… and even the United Nations.” So, the arms have continued flowing, with no letup in sight.

In January 2024, Jack Lew, the Biden administration’s ambassador to Israel, sent a cable to top State Department officials urging that they approve the IDF’s request for thousands of GBU-39 bombs. Lew noted that those weapons were more precise and had a smaller blast radius than the 2,000-pound “dumb bombs” Israel had been dropping in the war’s early months. Furthermore, he claimed, their air force had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding civilian deaths when using the GBU-39.

That was, unfortunately, pure eyewash. At the time of the cable, Amnesty International had already shown that the Israeli Defense Forces were killing civilians with GBU-39s. The State Department nevertheless accepted Lew’s claims and approved the sale, paving the way for even more missiles and bombs to rain down on Palestinians. In reporting on the Lew cable, ProPublica‘s Brett Murphy wrote, “While the U.S. hoped that the smaller bombs would prevent unnecessary deaths, experts in the laws of war say the size of the bomb doesn’t matter if it kills more civilians than the military target justifies.” That principle implies that when there is no military target, an attack causing even one civilian casualty should be charged as a war crime.

During 2024, with its unrelenting bombardment of Gaza and then Lebanon, too, Israel chewed rapidly through its munition stocks. The Biden administration came to the rescue in late November by approving $680 million in additional munitions deliveries to Israel — and that was just the appetizer. This month, ignoring Israel’s 15 months of brutal attacks on Gaza’s population, the administration notified Congress of plans to provide $8 billion worth of additional arms, including Hellfire missiles, long-range 155-millimeter artillery shells, 500-pound bombs, and much more.

Big Death Tolls Come in Small Packages

International bodies have accused Israel of using not only bombardment but also direct starvation as a weapon, which would qualify as yet another kind of war crime. In early 2024, responding to pressure from advocacy groups, Joe Biden signed a national security memo designated NSM-20. It required the State Department to halt the provision of armaments to any country arbitrarily restricting the delivery of food, medical supplies, or other humanitarian aid to the civilian population of an area where that country is using those armaments. But the memo has made virtually no difference.

In April, the two top federal authorities on humanitarian aid — the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department’s refugee bureau — submitted reports showing that Israel had indeed deliberately blocked food and medical shipments into Gaza. Under NSM-20, such actions should have triggered a cutoff of arms shipments to the offending country. But when the reports touched off a surge of outrage among the department’s rank and file and demands for an arms embargo, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top brass steamrolled all objections and approved continued shipments, according to Brett Murphy of ProPublica.

Another dimension of Israel’s war-by-starvation has been illustrated and quantified in a spatial analysis published by the British-based group Forensic Architecture. See, for example, the maps and text on pages 252–258 of their report, which reveal in stark detail the extent to which Israeli forces have ravaged agricultural lands in Gaza. Alongside bombing, shelling, and tank traffic, bulldozers have played an outsized role in the near-obliteration of that area’s food production capacity. The model D-9 bulldozers that are used to demolish Gaza’s buildings and lay waste to her farmland are manufactured by Caterpillar, whose global headquarters is in Texas.

In the early months of the war, Biden administration officials also took advantage of federal law, which doesn’t require that military aid shipments whose dollar value falls below certain limits be reported. They simply ordered that the huge quantities of arms then destined for Israel be split up into ever smaller cargoes. And so it came to pass that, during the first five months of the war, the Biden administration delivered more than 100 loads of arms. In other words, on average during that period, an American vessel laden with “precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid” was being unloaded at an Israeli dock once every 36 hours.

Israeli pilots have used U.S.-built fighter jets for the lion’s share of their airstrikes on Gaza and, by last summer, even more aircraft were needed to sustain such levels of bombing. Of course, jets are too big and expensive to be provided covertly, so, in August, Secretary of State Blinken publicly approved the transfer of nearly $20 billion worth of F-15 jets and other equipment to the IDF. The aircraft account for most of that sum, but the deal also includes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ground vehicles and tank and mortar ammunition.

In September, Bernie Sanders, who served in Congress alongside Patrick Leahy from 2007 until the latter’s retirement in 2023, further enhanced the good reputation of Vermont senators by introducing three resolutions that would have blocked the State Department’s $20 billion Israel aid package. But when the measures came up for a vote in November, all Republicans, along with two-thirds of Sanders’s fellow Democrats, joined forces to vote them down. So, as always, Israel will continue to get its jets, tanks, and ammo.

With scant political opposition, the new Republican-controlled Congress and Trump White House will undoubtedly only double down on material support for Israel’s war crimes. And they are already threatening people who demonstrate publicly in support of an arms embargo with investigation, prosecution, deportation, or other kinds of attacks. Citing those and other threats, Ben Samuels of Haaretz anticipates that Trump’s promise “to crack down on pro-Palestinian sentiment in America will be a defining factor of his administration’s early days” and that “the fight against the pro-Palestinian movement might be one of the only things that has a clear path across the government” — that is, the suppression could be bipartisan. For the people of Gaza and their American supporters, 2025 could turn out to be even more horrifying than the ghastly year just passed.



Stan Cox began his career in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is now the Ecosphere Studies Research Fellow at the Land Institute. Cox is the author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) and Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine.
Newborns Freeze to Death in Gaza Tents
January 14, 2025
Source: +972 Magazine

Image by Ruwaida Amer

When Yahya Al-Batran’s wife gave birth to healthy twins at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah on Dec. 6, 2024, he felt lucky. “The birth was good, and they did not suffer from any diseases,” he recalled. “I named them ‘Ali and Juma’a.”

Although Al-Batran, 40, wanted his newborn sons to stay in the hospital’s nursery, the severe overcrowding at the facility forced him to bring them back to the tent on the beach where he had been sheltering with his parents, his wife, and their six children.

In November 2023, fearing for the safety of his elderly and disabled parents, Al-Batran and his family fled their home in Beit Lahiya to Al-Maghazi camp in Deir Al-Balah. When Israeli forces bombed the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school where they were sheltering 10 days later, killing Al-Batran’s cousin, the family moved to Deir Al-Balah, where extreme overcrowding forced them to join other families on the beach.

“We have been living this difficult life for more than a year and two months,” Al-Batran told +972. His appeals to humanitarian institutions to provide him with a better tent — or anything to protect his children from the cold — have gone unanswered.

After returning to the tent with the newborns, heavy rainfall began. Soon, Al-Batran’s tent was flooded with water, leaving nothing to keep his children warm. “When I woke up in the morning on Dec. 28, I found [Juma’a] had died from the cold; his heart had stopped,” he recalled.

‘Ali, Juma’a’s brother, barely survived. He is currently being treated in the hospital nursery, but doctors have warned Al-Batran that his condition is critical, and he may die at any moment.

“Every moment I fear losing another one of my children; I stand helpless in front of them,” Al-Batran lamented. “The tent insults human dignity, and the world is silent in the face of this insult.”
No shelter or food

As Israel continues its campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, 2.3 million Palestinians concentrated in the center and southern parts of the Strip are desperately trying to survive the harsh winter in makeshift shelters and tents.

In December and January, average low temperatures in Gaza can drop to as low as 9 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit), accompanied by strong winds and heavy rains. In these conditions, Palestinian parents are in a constant state of anxiety about losing their children to winter illnesses and hypothermia.

In addition to Juma’a Al-Batran, at least five newborns and infants have reportedly died this winter from the extreme cold, according to Dr. Ahmed Al-Farra, head of pediatrics and obstetrics at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis: Seela Al-Faseeh, 14 days old; Youssef Kloub, 35 days old; Aisha Al-Qassas, 21 days old; ‘Ali Saqr, 23 days old; and ‘Ali Azzam, 4 days old. In addition, two adults have died from exposure: Ahmad Al-Zaharneh, 33, who worked as a nurse at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, and Afaf Al-Khatib, 55, who suffered from chronic illness. All of the victims died in tents on the beach, either in Al-Mawasi or Deir Al-Balah.

Jagan Chapagain, the secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, underscored the danger posed to Palestinian children living in Gaza’s tent encampments during winter without proper shelter or food. “I urgently reiterate my call to grant safe and unhindered access to humanitarians to let them provide life-saving assistance,” he wrote in a statement on Jan. 8. “Without safe access, children will freeze to death, and without safe access, families will starve.”

His alarm was echoed by Dr. Al-Farra: “The situation in the tents is catastrophic,” he told +972. “There is no means of heating and protection from the cold in light of the lack of electricity, fuel, and gas.” Even using scrap materials to start a fire can be extremely dangerous: the tents are flammable and the smoke, ashes, and debris can exacerbate respiratory illnesses.

While children of all ages are vulnerable to hypothermia, it is premature newborns who are most at risk. “We had large numbers of [premature infants] born during the war,” Al-Farra said. “[That is] due to the malnutrition of mothers and the severe lack of vitamins and nutrients.” Premature infants cannot properly regulate their body temperature and thus require incubators and respirators — of which there is only one in the Nasser Hospital nursery.

In one particularly disturbing though not uncommon case, Al-Farra encountered a mother and her malnourished six-month-old child, who weighed less than eight pounds. As it turned out, the baby’s mother had not eaten in three days; her previous meal was a can of peas that she had split with her family. “That is why she did not have enough milk to breastfeed her child and protect him from hypothermia,” Al-Farra recounted.

The rise in hypothermia cases comes as the children’s department at Nasser Hospital already faces collapse, treating upward of five times as many patients as average with regular cases of hepatitis, intestinal infections, pneumonia, and skin diseases.

But beyond the physical toll of this work, Al-Farra stressed that doctors in Gaza also grapple with a psychological burden as a result of the violence Israel has unleashed on their colleagues, most notably the recent arrest of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya of Kamal Adwan, and the torture and killing of Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh by Israeli authorities in Ofer prison earlier last year.

“Doctors are living in a war zone just like the rest of the people in Gaza,” Al-Farra affirmed. “The doctor treats patients, but their thoughts are also with their families in the tent, wondering whether or not they have food — and whether they are safe or exposed to bombing.”
‘I do what I can as a mother to warm my children’

The death of Seela Al-Faseeh on Christmas Day — just 14 days after she was born — sent shockwaves through the Al-Mawasi tent camp, which has become home to many infants under six months. Samar Al-Ras, a 40-year-old mother of five, could hear the cries of Seela’s mother from a nearby tent.

“She woke up screaming in the middle of the night that she could not warm her daughter, and camp residents helped [by bringing] her blankets,” Al-Ras recalled. “But in the morning, we woke up to her screaming that [the baby] had died.”

Al-Ras and her family have been living in a tent in Al-Mawasi since the beginning of the war, after being displaced from their home in Khan Younis. This winter, she told +972, was even hasher than the last. With the tents’ condition deteriorating, they are less capable of trapping heat and withstanding the rain.

“We can hardly warm ourselves — we don’t have enough blankets,” she told +972. “Nothing separates us from the surrounding environment except for some fabrics and nylon. Sleeping in the tent is as if we were sleeping on the street.”

Al-Ras explained that the sea air is particularly cold at night. “My children come to my lap and ask me to cover them more. Sometimes I have to tell them to put on more layers of clothing or a jacket to make them a little warmer. [Their] bodies are unable to bear this severe cold.”

On sunny days, Al-Ras tells her children to sit outside all day long “so that their bodies warm up and store heat, so the night will be less cold for them,” she said, adding that she tries to put them to bed as early as possible before the temperatures drop. But despite her best efforts, all of Al-Ras’s children, as well as her elderly mother, are currently ill with coughs and the flu. “I do what I can as a mother to warm my children and protect them from the cold. I [can only] hope that this war will end.”
A cycle of displacement

Before the war, 59-year-old Maryam Abu Lahia used to love the winter, praying for the rain “to cleanse the air of diseases and water the crops.” But now, rather than hoping for rain, “whenever I see a cloud in the sky, I pray that it moves north and doesn’t stay here,” she told +972. “We do not have the means, shelter, clothes, or blankets [to deal with the cold and the rain].”

Abu Lahia and her six children have been displaced five times since the beginning of the war. Originally from Bani Suhaila, east of Khan Younis, she and her family evacuated to Rafah in October 2023, where they stayed until May 2024. After returning home, the family was displaced several more times, finally finding themselves back in a tent in Al-Mawasi. “We never felt comfortable due to the repeated displacements,” she said grimly.

Last winter, Abu Lahia and her family did not even have mattresses, and were forced to sleep on the ground in their tents. But even the mattresses they were able to eventually secure are of little consolation in piercing winter cold. “There is no money to buy wood to warm ourselves, and there is no water,” she said. “I hold my children in my lap and cover them with my blanket, but it does not protect us from the cold.”

Like Al-Ras, Abu Lahia acknowledged that she and her children gain some warmth during the day from the sun, but at night the situation is dire, forcing her to compromise her own health for the sake of her children. “Previously, I gave my own blanket to my son, and then I got sick for two months.”

But while she and her family continue to suffer, Abu Lahia is still sensitive to the plight of those around her. “My neighbor has eight children and her husband is a martyr,” she noted. “She has a very bad mattress and no one looks at her with humanity.”

Now, she pleads for aid organizations to do whatever possible to help those languishing in makeshift tents survive the winter — before it is too late. “[Humanitarian] institutions should provide blankets for people now,” she affirmed, “instead of asking how to help only after someone loses their child.”


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Ruwaida Kamal Amer is a freelance journalist from Khan Younis.

How U.S. Media Hide Truths About the Gaza War
January 13, 2025
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


These words were written by Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila on October 20th, on a whiteboard normally used for planning surgeries. He was killed by a strike on Al Awda Hospital on November 21st in Gaza The same strike killed another MSF doctor, Dr. Ahmad Al Sahar, as well as a doctor working with Al Awda, Dr. Ziad Al-Tatari. Other medical staff were severely injured. “Remember us."



A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”

The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972 — in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media — has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.

+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information” — which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.

Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:

· Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.

· The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.

· Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.

· Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.

· Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”

· Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.

The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.

During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to Palestinians (77 percent) than to Israelis (23 percent). The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), pointed to an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably in the same groove; “the lopsided rate at which ‘brutal’ was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories.”

Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza — what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed and traumatized — remained almost entirely out of view. Gradually, surface accounts reaching the American public came to seem repetitious and normal. As death numbers kept rising and months went by, the Gaza war diminished as a news topic, while most talk shows seldom discussed it.

As with the slaughter via bombardment, the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem. Along the way, official pronouncements — and the policies they tried to justify — were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.

The propaganda approach was foreshadowed on October 8, 2023, with Israel in shock from the atrocities that Hamas had committed the previous day. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told reporters in New York, and he repeated: “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS News Weekend interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States declared: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self-protection, and, of course, the “war on terror.”

As Israel’s war on Gaza persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events. Reverberation was in the air from late 2001, when the Pentagon’s leader Donald Rumsfeld asserted that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.” After five weeks of massacring Palestinian people, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “any civilian loss is a tragedy” — and quickly added that “the blame should be placed squarely on Hamas.”

The licenses to kill were self-justifying. And they had no expiration date.

This article is adapted from the afterword in the paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press).


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Norman Solomon is an American journalist, author, media critic and activist. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director. Solomon's weekly column "Media Beat" was in national syndication from 1992 to 2009. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Since 2011, he has been the national director of RootsAction.org. He is the author of thirteen books including "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” (The New Press, 2023).
Multipolar Mythmaking, Mixing Western Degeneracy and BRICS Expansion Chaos

January 13, 2025
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


BRICS: Talk left, walk right. | Graphic by The Analysis News



Early 2025 is already a tough time for those expecting the consolidation of a multipolar alternative to polycrisis-riddled, Western-dominated, neoliberal multilateralism. It was especially dispiriting given the hype – or at least hope – invested by many geopolitical dissidents in the fast-growing BRICS grouping. What began as Brazil-Russia-India-China in 2006, added South Africa in 2010 and four other members in 2023 – Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates – and then over the past two weeks, another full-fledged member, Indonesia, and also eight ‘partners.’

Yet it’s utter chaos when it comes to BRICS composition, and it won’t be easier to meld the 18 governments which Brazilian President Lula Ignacio da Silva inherits as he chairs the bloc in 2025. And this condition of undirected chaos is also rampant at the global scale, witnessed in repeatedly-failing multilateral institutions always in need of (rarely-specified) ‘reform.’

The most important fail was at the Baku United Nations climate summit in late November, an event that will be remembered most for the furious walk-out protest by the most vulnerable countries – without any BRICS solidarity, even from impoverished Ethiopia. From non-Western and BRICS elites, there was near-universal disgust expressed about the final outcome. (Without a pause, South Africa’s ultra-neoliberal environment minister – a white, former apartheid soldier and later Member of Parliament representing Johannesburg’s financial district – predictably ‘welcomed’ the catastrophe).

That was just one indication of the urgent need for imaginative, visionary alternatives to forcefully address world crises. And on climate, Lula will again attempt to pick up the pieces when hosting the next UN climate summit in December, deep in the fast-decaying Amazon, in Belem.

Moreover, even a cursory examination of how the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, United Nations Security Council and other international regulatory bodies continue to conduct themselves, confirms that global-scale crisis management remains weak, incompetent and often malevolent.

Baku was preceded by the November 5 Trump election victory and an inconsequential G20 Rio de Janeiro summit on November 18-19, also hosted by Lula. In early December, accompanied by robust self-backslapping, South Africa’s rightward-moving Government of National Unity then took the G20 hosting reigns from Brazil. The G20 site then shifts to the U.S. in 2026.

The other core BRICS have also played host to the G20: India in 2023, China in 2016 and Russia in 2013 – and Indonesia did in 2022. So within the last dozen years, all five original BRICS – and six of the current ten members (not including invitee Saudi Arabia which in 2020 during Covid-19 was the virtual chair) – have hosted the G20.

But all the world’s problems have been amplified since then, with nary a word to suggest progress via the imperial-subimperial G20 alliance. Two war zones remain brutally hot, with the daily murder of hundreds of working-class and poor Ukrainians and Palestinians, and as a result of their illegal invasions of neighbours, the leaders of both Russia and Israel facing International Criminal Court arrest warrants for war crimes. Both Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu dismiss these warrants, although their travel plans have been severely curtailed.

And after Bashar Al-Assad’s Damascus regime collapsed on December 8, a moment celebrated by the apparent vast majority of long-oppressed Syrian citizens, there came next the predictable resumption of U.S., Turkish and Israeli opportunism. Benjamin Netanyahu land-grabbed further into the Golan Heights, backed by the Western Axis of Genocide and accompanied by Tel Aviv’s carpet bombing of ex-dictator Al-Assad’s military equipment.

The West is at least consistent here, at the cost of permanent reputational damage to their claims of liberal internationalism, human rights and rule-of-law values. In contrast, the BRICS – especially South Africa – talk left about Israel halting genocide, but walk right when it comes to greed: nine out of ten of the 2024 BRICS have leading corporations now enjoying lucrative trade, investment and privatization management deals with the genocidaires.

The new full member, Indonesia – the world’s most populous Islamic society – profits from palm oil exports to Israel and has imported Tel Aviv weaponry. President Prabawo Subianto has played a central role in normalization talks with the Netanyahu regime from 2021 when he was still defense minister. After he won the presidency, Israeli sources offered support for Jakarta’s membership in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development so long as those negotiations resumed.

Back in Syria, regime change was also praised by Hamas, perhaps due to what Palestinian writer Jamal Kanj termed “Al-Assad’s abandonment of the Resistance in Gaza and Lebanon. Since October 8, Assad has behaved more like other impotent Arab dictators as mere observers of the genocide in Gaza and the war in Lebanon.”

The main foreign losers of Syria’s regime change are Iran and Russia, but since November 2023, there has been no specific BRICS meeting to address the crisis, illustrating the bloc’s worsening internal incoherence when it comes to West Asian geopolitics.

Trump’s degenerate disruptions

Trump, meanwhile, felt sufficiently empowered in December to threaten the sovereignties of Panama, Mexico, Canada and Greenland, using as a weapon his regularly-threatened tariff increases on imports. (He did the same to the BRICS in the event they offer a currency alternative, which is worth exploring in more detail on another occasion, to expose de-dollarisation hypocrisies.) If major tariffs are activated by Trump’s team, that will denude the World Trade Organisation of any self-respect.

Internal U.S. resistance to a proto-fascist government will need to be as creative as Jeremy Brecher has outlined so well, but is expected to be quashed by executive orders against ‘terrorist-supporting’ activists (e.g. in solidarity with Palestine) and climate defenders, plus a compliant Republican Congress and Supreme Court.

Calls for Boycott Divestment Sanctions against U.S. state and capitalist institutions are sure to follow, when Trump pulls out of UN climate negotiations (as he did in 2017) or commits other major human rights abuses such as mass deportations or the promised McCarthyism: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

On the other side of the class struggle, there may be fractions of U.S. capital which arise in brief dissent to what could be open fascism. Some businesses had cohered with Clinton-era neo-liberalism, others to Bush-era neo-conservatism, others to the Obama-era neo-con/neo-lib fusion, and still others to Biden’s promised Inflation Reduction Act with a green-Keynesian ideology.

But among those whose needs extend beyond expected corporate tax cuts, Big Data stands out for its leaders’ recent groveling to Trump, identifying sufficiently fluid opportunities, and welcoming the techno-feudal surveillance, social-control potentials, and AI-dystopias that will inevitably emerge. These corporates will thrive, whether through the dominant neo-cons and neo-libs, or via aspiring paleo-conservative forces. Trump will continue to insist that they find a way to fuse, even if the H-1B visa controversy illustrated how quickly the Tech-MAGA alliance would be strained. Elsewhere, unprecedented financial and ideological outreach to the European hard right by the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Bannon ensures the cancer will spread, e.g. in Germany’s February 23 election.

Hence against obvious Western degeneracy and Trump’s insane belligerence, the BRICS bloc will continue to attract interest and even a kind of perverse admiration, especially given the group’s rapid expansion since mid-2023.

An expanding club without coherent entry rules

Still, extreme caution is needed, when reminded of how poorly the group’s onboarding process is managed. In mid-October, the Russian-hosted Kazan summit unfolded with some discomfit among diplomats, following an ‘impasse’ at a session of new BRICS foreign ministers the month before, on the sidelines of the annual UN leaders’ summit.

There, the two new African members from Cairo and Addis Ababa objected to the way the UN Security Council’s half-hearted expansion of permanent members appeared to exclude them, instead implying that South Africa and Nigeria would be the (non-veto-power) invitees. That BRICS session ended bitterly, called off early without an anticipated formal statement. (But the problem is likely to be disappear, now that Trump will sabotage any loosening of U.S. reigns, in the Security Council or anywhere else.)

That incident would have influenced the first-generation BRICS not to immediately expand full membership – but instead offer ‘partner’ status. The BRICS now has ten members given Indonesia’s surprising promotion last week from partner, a category that now includes eight countries: Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Thailand and Uganda. Their leaders were invited into this new status – similar to a NATO ‘aspiring member’ – at the 2024 Kazan summit, and may attend meetings this year hosted by Brazil (with the leaders’ summit in Rio in July).

Not all countries which applied are following the BRICS process through. The Russian meetings included one extremely recalcitrant member-invitee, Saudi Arabia. And four partner-invitees are, at the time of writing, still deciding whether to accept: Turkiye, Vietnam, Algeria and Nigeria.

The difference between 18 and 23 is crucial given the weight of these last five in terms of geopolitics, population and fossil fuel supply. It appears Western political pressure – as well as bruised egos – are to blame for the chaos of who’s in, who’s not and who’s fence-sitting.

For as one journalist reported on the world’s fourth-most populous country, “Indonesia’s candidacy was first approved by BRICS leaders at the Johannesburg Summit in August 2023. However, as Indonesia was preparing for general elections in February 2024, the nation formally communicated its intent to join the bloc only after the new government was formed.”

But if so, why was Indonesia first called a partner-invitee last October? Already in mid-2023 it was apparent that the thuggish Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto would win the presidency. Amnesty International had warned of Prabowo’s past:

“As a general during the country’s occupation of East Timor in the 1980s and 1990s, Prabowo organized gangs of hooded killers to terrorize and subdue civilians associated with the independence movement. And he allegedly participated in one of the bloodiest events of the Timor war: the Krakas massacre, in which 300 Timorese – mostly civilians – were hunted down and killed by Kopassus units.”

Moreover, BBC reported, Prabowo’s military “unit tortured several democracy activists during the dying days of the Suharto regime in the late 1990s. Of the 23, some survived, one died and 13 remain missing.” Prabowo was “banned from entering the US and Australia at this point, on a blacklist for his human rights record. That ban was lifted only in recent years.” Prabowo “was fired from the army following this and went into self-exile in Jordan in the 2000s. But he returned to Indonesia a few years later, building up his wealth in palm oil and mining before making the jump to politics.”



The tendency among multipolar advocates (e.g. the Geopolitical Economy Report) is to uncritically celebrate Indonesia’s ascent into the BRICS without any acknowledgement of Prabowo’s history of repression – in a context of rapidly decaying civil rights – and his pro-Israel orientation, not to mention the country’s status as the world’s largest supplier of coal and ecologically-destructive palm oil.

Pepe Escobar was characteristically ebullient that Indonesia was

“admitted as a full BRICS member. What does that mean? You have southeast Asia barking at the heart of BRICS. Without even a pit stop they went straight to the top. Now one of us… one of the biggest economies of the 21st century by PPP, the seventh economy, soon it’s going to be the fifth, it’s going to overtake other Europeans. The powerhouse of Southeast Asia. Good relations with China. Good relations with Russia. Good relations with India.”

Um, also great relations with U.S. militarism, as Prabowo bragged to Trump while congratulating him on November 11: “All my training is American, sir.”

Angst in Algiers and Caracas

And then there are the mysterious Algeria and hapless Venezuela. In the latter case, the Maduro regime’s foreign ministry expressed fury back in October: “The Venezuelan people feel indignation and shame at this inexplicable and immoral aggression.” The cause: a BRICS membership-veto by Lula, who stayed in Brasilia instead of going to Kazan due to a head injury and instead participated via video feed (the way Putin did to avoid arrest in Johannesburg in August 2023).

Caracas specifically attacked Lula’s long-standing foreign policy adviser, Celso Amorim, who explained the veto on BRICS membership: Maduro had “breached the trust” of the Latin American left by not releasing detailed vote records after the unsatisfactory 2024 election. So according to Venezuelan diplomats, Amorim was “acting more like a messenger for North American imperialism.” The country’s genuine socialist activists know all too well this talk-left walk-right dance move.

As for Algeria, last September the manager of the Algiers nationalist newspaper El Moudjahid, Brahim Takheroubte, reported his country’s BRICS application fiasco in a jilted-lover tone of voice:

“When, in August 2023, the Johannesburg summit concluded with the accession of six new members (Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Iran), absolutely no plausible argument was put forward to justify the elimination of Algeria. To everyone’s surprise, the Algeria file was withdrawn at the last minute. There is a blatant inconsistency, both in substance and form. This organization, which is supposed to challenge an established world order represented by the IMF and the World Bank, should act with a more inclusive approach. Yet it adopts an absurd selection logic, limiting both its impact and its reach. Instead of casting a wide net and providing global solutions, it takes a restrictive approach. Doesn’t this contradiction weaken its credibility?”

After the rant against BRICS hypocrisy, came Takheroubte’s juvenile sniping from a very different direction:

“Indeed, how can we be in any doubt about its true intentions when we know that Algeria is far better off than several of the countries admitted to the organization of this famous summit. A country with no foreign debt, the largest land area in Africa and abundant mineral and energy resources, Algeria’s infrastructure is the envy of the entire continent. Even more surprisingly, the IMF and the World Bank, usually stingy with compliments, have publicly hailed Algeria’s economic performance, going so far as to call it a ‘model of success’. Yet, ironically, it was the BRICS, the self-proclaimed champions of the global economic alternative, who chose to ignore such a feat.”

The final grievance was blaming the UAE for bullying another BRICS member – likely South Africa – into vetoing Algeria’s mid-2023 application:

“But there’s nothing mysterious about this blindness; in fact, it’s an open secret. The truth is that a BRICS member country, obeying petty interests far removed from economic rigor, has vetoed Algeria’s membership with almost theatrical insistence. And to top it all off, this country is acting, not out of conviction, but under the orders of a modest Gulf emirate, which is orchestrating behind the scenes pressure as devious as it is ‘strategic’ on the rest of the members, ensuring that Algeria is eliminated. This just goes to show that, behind the scenes at the BRICS, geopolitics is a well-oiled comedy. Is there any reason left, just one, to respond to the BRICS’ call to action? The case of Algeria, whose exclusion stems less from economic criteria than from political maneuvering, is a striking example… This incoherence will no doubt eventually reveal the limits of a bloc that claims to be reshaping the world economic order but is in reality itself a prisoner of its own calculations. Beyond the slogans, BRICS integration is based on logic far removed from economic excellence alone.”

Yet at Kazan, Algeria was still invited to be a partner. What has become of that invitation, remains a mystery. And there’s more confusion about similar reluctance to accept partner status from Türkiye, Vietnam and Nigeria, where leaders also appear to be stuck between Western pressure points and their BRICS partner invitations – and are scared to issue any decisive official statement, just as was the case over the past year in Saudi Arabia.

A rebuff from Riyadh

The hype that the Saudi Arabian ruling class would leave the U.S. orbit, ditch half-century-old Petrodollar arrangements (mainly pricing oil in the U.S. currency) and do more deals with China and Iran has risen and fallen dramatically over the past few years. As a residual example, Escobar argued this week that Trump “doesn’t understand that now, for instance, Iran and Saudi Arabia are sitting at the same table inside BRICS and they discuss geopolitics as well.”

Nor have Russian state media outlets Pravda and TASS processed, or even figured out, Saudi Arabia’s status, for in recent days both incorrectly claimed, “On January 1, 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, became its full-fledged members.” Yet in late December, there was actually a ‘freeze’ of Riyadh’s role in the BRICS, according to Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Yuri Ushakov.

(Some of us were predicting this for weeks here and here and here and here; namely, that a Trump victory would drag his ally Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, back firmly onto Western turf, instead of allowing Saudi Arabia to continue wallowing in the multipolar quicksand.)

A typical interpretation of Riyadh’s reluctance, on Firstpost, was this cause: “Trump’s 100% tariff threat” in early December. But the illogicality there is that vast Saudi Arabian exports to the U.S., amounting to $24 billion in 2022, were made up of 70% crude oil, 20% refined oil and 2% fertilizers, with 8% other miscellaneous products. Trump simply cannot put a painful 100% tariff on imported goods from Saudi Arabia, given the status of oil in the world economy and inflationary fears in his electoral base.

So what’s really at play in the Saudi retreat from BRICS? Consider four choices from various spin-doctors across the spectrum. First, the view from geopolitical pragmatists Oliver Stuenkel and Margot Treadwell at the Carnegie Council in November:

“Saudi Arabia has chosen a tricky balancing act of an ambiguous approach to BRICS that leaves it room to adapt to changing global conditions, including the coming U.S. leadership change. Although Saudi Arabia’s strategy represents an extreme approach to hedging, such a balancing act is not unique to Saudi Arabia. In the context of BRICS alone, analysts have focused on the balancing acts of Brazil, India, Kazakhstan, and Türkiye, among others – reflecting the growing concern around the world about how to navigate an increasingly multipolar and unpredictable global environment.”

Second, from the neo-con perspective, the National Interest is one of the main U.S. outlets, and hence gleeful whenever there’s successful divide and conquer traced to U.S. manipulation. So on December 28, unaware of Russia’s confirmation of Riyadh’s retreat five days earlier, Rimon Hossain surmised,

“the recent inclusion of Middle Eastern states like Iran, Egypt, and the UAE after the 2023 BRICS Summit raises questions about BRICS cohesion, given the regional rivalry such a big tent would now inherit. Saudi Arabia’s recent inclusion also draws doubt, given its ongoing endemic security rivalry with Iran. Riyadh made this point clear during the 2024 BRICS Summit in Kazan, where the Saudi foreign minister only attended the last day, making clear that it is hedging its commitment to a club it perceives as a hedging club for middle powers.”

But that stage is now well past, and no doubt at some stage after Trump takes office, the Saudis will move forward with an official normalisation of relations with the genocidaires, as appeared imminent in early October 2023.

For a third version of spin-doctoring, the pro-BRICS multipolarists appear reduced to silence, as their preferred narrative-of-retreat, aside from Escobar who has been drawn much further down the three predictable stages of geopolitricks-psychosis – from hype to hope to helplessness – in the particular case of mighty Saudi Arabia joining the mighty BRICS.

There’s still hope, as Escobar put it in Sputnik on January 9: “Imagine China-India-Russia-Iran-Indonesia-South Africa-Brazil-Egypt-Saudi Arabia as the transcontinental pearls of the emerging multi-nodal world. Huge populations; massive natural resources and industrial might; myriad development possibilities.”

But helplessness also sets in, because not only are contradictions extreme, with “Iran, UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia (when the Saudis show up for meetings) struggling to reach consensus on the same table.” And after all, “Saudi Arabia, wary of its wealth parked in London and New York financial markets, is still cautiously hedging its bets: theoretically Riyadh is a BRICS member, but in practice not really.”

Moreover, there is a “war against the BRICS,” Escobar insists, because:

“In the absence of long-term strategic vision, and amidst the progressive imperial expulsion from Eurasia, all that’s left for the Hegemon is to unleash chaos from West Asia to Europe and parts of Latin America – a concerted attempt to Divide and Rule BRICS and thwart their collective drive affirming sovereignty and the primacy of national interests… US Think Tank had already floated a year and a half ago the notion of swing states. Not the parochial American electoral version, but its transposition to geopolitics. All six candidates at the time were BRICS members (Brazil, India, South Africa), or potential BRICS members or partners (Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye). The code for ‘swing states’ was unmistakable: all these are targets for destabilization – as in if you do not abide by the ‘rules-based international order,’ you’re going down.”

A fourth narrative would logically be to celebrate that a regime appearing impervious to humane and ecologically-sustainable values does not further degrade the subimperial power bloc, one that it will take many years for social, labour and environmental movements to clear out as it is.

As argued in a new essay by Janine Walter of Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Johannesburg office, it’s obvious that the BRICS bloc “does not represent an anti-capitalist alternative. It is much more a matter of seeking to secure more influence within the capitalist world-system: ‘neoliberalism with a Southern Face,’ as it were. Progressive forces ought instead to concentrate on identifying — and also making use of — strategic spaces for alternative political approaches.”

And were Saudi Arabia a member, MBS would certainly contribute to closing down such spaces; he didn’t get the nickname Mr Bone Saw for nothing.

For others, the Saudi membership-invitation quagmire continues, with odd new claims about Riyadh and the BRICS, e.g. that the world’s most surreal city – NEOM, whose extreme-luxury tourist island was recently launched with full-on hedonism and which is seen as a model for collaboration with Israel’s high tech sector – is a model for a sustainable, diversified economy. BRICS myth-making in this case comes from Murad Sadygzade, President of the Middle East Studies Center:

“Saudi Arabia has taken a pause in the process of becoming a full BRICS member, reportedly due to having to complete unspecified ‘internal procedures.’ The kingdom participates in the group’s activities that are of interest to Riyadh, but refrains from taking part in drawing up joint documents or decision-making… The Kingdom actively invests in large-scale infrastructure and technological projects, such as NEOM and various innovation hubs under the ‘Vision 2030’ program. These projects are aimed at building a sustainable, diversified economy less reliant on oil, which aligns well with the goals of BRICS nations to develop high-tech and environmentally sustainable industries. Saudi investments could support the economic modernization of countries like Brazil and South Africa, which also seek to strengthen their industrial and technological capacities. For BRICS, this opens a unique opportunity to create an integrated economic space capable of attracting new capital flows and accelerating the shift to green energy and digital technologies.”

Hope springs eternal, but it merges with surreal hype like this far too often within multipolarism to be taken seriously, given that BRICS members, partners and invitees include the world’s leading CO2 annual emitters in 2022 (the last available consistent data): #1 China (10.5 Gigatons), #3 India (2.3Gt), #4 Russia (1.5Gt), #6 Iran (0.73Gt), #7 Indonesia (0.59Gt), #12 Saudi Arabia (0.47Gt), #13 South Africa (0.44Gt) and #14 Brazil (0.41Gt).

Moreover, additional ‘Scope 3’ emissions come from fossil fuel exports of coal, gas and oil burned elsewhere but nevertheless are vital to factor in as ‘national’ interests for these BRICS economies: Russia (1.7Gt in 2021), Indonesia (1Gt), United Arab Emirates (UAE) (0.3Gt), and Brazil, Iran and South Africa (0.2Gt). Saudi Arabia would have added much more for decades to come (0.9Gt). New BRICS partner-invitees include other major fossil-fuel exporters, including Kazakhstan, Nigeria and Algeria. But as witnessed in Baku, these countries’ ruling elites have certainly not joined – and won’t in future – a lobby to ‘shift to green energy.’

Fossil fuel emissions measurements: domestic (2022) and exported (2021)

BRICS seen with scorn – for bad and good reasons

All these narratives continue to float around, waiting to land upon some version of reality. The same problem of sustained confusion exists in Western ruling elite circuits, as illustrated by the imperialist-whispering agenda of Tony Carroll (from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), recently interviewed by a conservative South African business ezine, National Security News:

“South Africa’s in trouble… The Trump Administration are going to be more critical about South Africa for many of the same things that have been for many of those things that have been cited in the past: its relationships with Russia, its stance on Ukraine, its leadership in the BRICS agreement, its relationship with China and most pointedly I think the issue of the International Criminal Court (ICC) case in Gaza, which is the one that I think drove most of those signatures in Congress… South Africa is a large issue that I think transfers across all of our national relationships I think that the issue on the ICC case in Gaza is the one that specifically has gotten the interest of those signatures in Congress, and the incoming people that will be populating both the trade and the diplomatic teams within Congress and the White House… Mr Trump has signaled also that you know he’s very much, the BRICS movement is in his crosshairs. I think South Africa waving the flag and recruiting other countries to join the BRICS agreement is not going to play well. And I think that’s a threat or fear that I would take on board.”

Striking fear – in this case, potential denial of Africa Growth and Opportunity Act ‘benefits’ (which in any case mainly accrue to multinational smelters and car companies) – is one part of the corporate agenda.

Another is dismissal of the BRICS as a force worth taking seriously, as witnessed in a new essay by Joseph Nye, one of the most influential political scientists in history, a Democratic Party neoliberal. Most of Nye’s brief analysis of the BRICS provides banal, conventional wisdom; but here are two examples of the negativity one hears all too often, not from the BRICS’ leftist critics, but from the imperialist right, annoyed at the new pretenders to the throne of U.S. Empire:

“Rather than making the BRICS stronger, the admission of new members merely imports more rivalries. Egypt and Ethiopia are locked in a dispute over a dam that Ethiopia is building on the Nile River, and Iran has long-standing disputes with the UAE and prospective member Saudi Arabia. Far from making the BRICS more effective, these new intra-organizational rivalries will hamper its efforts… the group’s stated intention of avoiding the dollar and clearing more of its members’ bilateral trade in their own currencies has made only limited headway. Any serious attempt to replace the dollar as a global reserve currency would require China to back the renminbi with deep, flexible capital markets and the rule of law – and those conditions are nowhere close to being met.”

True enough, these are serious problems, it’s fair to admit – while continuing a debate someone like Nye would avoid like the plague: aren’t the BRICS actually subimperial amplifiers of Western imperialism, and if so, why not advocate resumption of Barack Obama’s strategy of assimilation, e.g. through the G20? It’s revealing that Nye has no such agenda in mind, what with an incoming paleo-con Trump regime expected to tear down not fatten up imperialist multilateral institutions.

Another prominent ruling-class site – the mirror opposite of the Council on Foreign Relations which Nye has chaired – is Russia’s Valdai Club. Its Programme Director Oleg Barabanov has recently analysed all the UN votes of old BRICS, new BRICS and new partners, to see whether General Assembly resolutions against Russia and Iran gained support from the various members. It’s a hodgepodge of results, with very few clear patterns aside from an evolution from early resolutions against Putin’s Ukraine invasion which were characterised by more abstentions, evolving towards an increasing anti-Russia bias in voting, in contrast to steadier solidarity with Iran. In the first case,

“Russia is supported, first of all, by two countries: these are Belarus and Cuba. Then there is a group of countries that abstain in most cases, but sometimes can support Russia. These are Algeria, Bolivia, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Uganda has always abstained. The next group of countries opposed Russia in about a third of cases. These are Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria and Thailand. Turkey stands out here, having voted for all 10 anti-Russian resolutions. Moreover, Turkey was the only country here that spoke out for the resolution after being invited to become a BRICS partner.”

Barabanov’s second case is Iran:

“None of the 13 countries voted for anti-Iranian resolutions during the same period of 2022-24. Six countries have always supported Iran (Belarus, Bolivia, Vietnam, Cuba, Indonesia, Uzbekistan). Two countries (Algeria and Kazakhstan) either supported Iran or abstained. Five countries (Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda) always abstained or did not vote. This situation correlates to a sufficient degree with the results of voting on these resolutions by BRICS members. With regard to anti-Russian resolutions, there was also a difference in approaches. And with regard to Iran, there was also more open solidarity with this state on the part of the ‘old’ BRICS members.”

Again, this cursory consideration of intra-BRICS diplomacy suggests utter intra-subimperial chaos. Barabanov’s summary, sounding like Nye, is that:

“If there is no internal unity based on ‘all for one and one for all’, then all prospects for strengthening the BRICS as a new pole of world politics will remain unfulfilled. One of the most obvious, albeit not the most important, indicators of this internal political consolidation is the example of voting in the UN General Assembly… The level of internal consolidation of a particular structure is also determined by a unified approach to voting on international platforms. This is clearly seen in the example of NATO and the EU, whose member countries in the UN General Assembly, as a rule, vote in the same way.”

Chaos or not, the trajectory is again clear when it comes to BRICS operating as a geopolitical bloc: from hype to hope to helplessness.

To Brazil, with trepidation

What, then, does Lula inherit when hosting the BRICS leaders in Rio in July? In Modern Diplomacy, Kester Komegah writes,

“Now awakening from its slumber to the global development realities, BRICS+ together with its partner states, as an informal non-western association, ultimately seeks to participate actively in the economic system and reduce the influence of uni-polarity, the dominance of the United States.”

That’s a generous way to say that simply, BRICS elites want a bigger seat at the existing table, eating the same pie, cooked the same way, and not an alternative to imperialism. That was precisely what has been learned for at least 15 years – since Copenhagen in 2009 – when Barack Obama barged in to a private room at the UN climate summit, to thrash out a pathetic deal with leaders of Brazil, South Africa, India and China (the ‘BASIC’ bloc).

To illustrate this desire to be subimperialist not anti-imperialist, consider an interview last week with BRICS ‘sherpa’ Eduardo Saboia in AgenciaBrazil:

“Brazil will also be hosting the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Pará state, this year. How can we take advantage of the BRICS presidency to build an understanding that can help make COP30 a success? The BRICS countries play a central role when it comes to energy, which is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions.”

The ‘success’ the BRICS elites have shown they want since 2009 is that Lula change nothing in the UN climate-negotiations alliance. This is especially poignant after climate catastrophe hit Porto Alegre extremely hard last May, with floods killing more than 200 and displacing 430 000. Lula has subsequently given the notoriously corrupt parastatal oil corporation Petrobras thumbs up to:

· drill for oil at the confluence of the Amazon River and Atlantic Ocean, and

· in the spirit of intra-BRICS collaboration with the West, allowing Petrobras to explore offshore the western coast of South Africa near where the Orange River hits the Atlantic Ocean, allied with filthy-corrupt TotalEnergies of Paris.

That says it all: that central role for energy dashing hopes for those who believe BRICS will offer an alternative to the climate-fouling Western imperialists.

And what to expect may arise from the chaos of BRICS expansion in 2025? The official Russian hope is a proliferation of new partner-applicants to be announced six months from now in Rio: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Chad, Colombia, Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Honduras, Laos, Kuwait, Myanmar, Morocco, Nicaragua, Senegal, Pakistan, Palestine, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

Dictatorships are prolific on this list. Multipolarists aiming for a genuinely progressive BRICS may notice the names Colombia, Senegal and Sri Lanka, whose new leaders do come from the left – but Nicaragua, Venezuela and Zimbabwe certainly no longer qualify.

All this expansion myth-making reminds of what the imperialist West and subimperial BRICS have in common: wars, violations of sovereignty, worsening inequality, poverty, exploitation, unemployment, pandemic mismanagement, looting of poor countries’ resources, extreme contributions to climate change and ecocide, violence against women, abusive high technology, censorship, surveillance, austerity, neoliberalism, false ‘de-dollarisation’, human rights abuses, LGBTQI+ repression, venal corruption and tyrannies.

Can we not add to the unipolar and multipolar options a third, a non-polar, anti-imperialist and anti-subimperialist politics – given the chaos overwhelming both Empire and the BRICS?


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Patrick Bond is a political economist, political ecologist and scholar of social mobilisation. From 2020-21 he was Professor at the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-2019 was a Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance. From 2004 through mid-2016, he was Senior Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies and was also Director of the Centre for Civil Society. He has held visiting posts at a dozen universities and presented lectures at more than 100 others.