Amid Legacies of Colonial and Anti-Trans Harm, Two-Spirits Struggle for Safety

This Trans Day of Remembrance, we are holding Nex Benedict and all Two-Spirit people in our hearts.

By Desiree Kane & Jen Byers , 

Truthout

November 20, 2024

People gather outside the Stonewall Inn for a memorial and vigil for Oklahoma teenager, Nex Benedict, who died after being bullied in a high school bathroom, on February 26, 2024, in New York City.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Nex Benedict was a Tulsa-area teen of Choctaw descent. His friends described him as an “adventurous little thing” who had a flair for creating art with a sense of ease. They called him “Roachie,” and he was loved.

After Nex’s death in February 2024, his portrait splayed across international news, vigils and social media posts. The picture shows Nex with deep brown eyes, short, loose brown curls grown out a little bit and a gentle smile. Nex has a crisp white shirt and black vest on. He looks like he’s dressed up for a dance or recital, at that cusp age of 16, when pre-teen clothes are out and quality vintage clothes become of interest.

On February 8, 2024, Nex collapsed and died at his home. The day before, he sustained a head injury during severe bullying at his school, Owasso High. The medical examiner ruled Nex’s passing a suicide after finding an antidepressant and an allergy medication in his system. This finding has been questioned repeatedly by local community members and national organizers.

“Regardless if it was caused by the fight or suicide, Nex died from bullying. Period,” said Olivia Carter, administrative coordinator for Oklahomans for Equality.

Nex’s death did not happen in a vacuum.

Related Story

Op-Ed |
LGBTQ Rights
Our Mourning for Nex Benedict Calls Us to Action Against Transphobia and Fascism
Nex Benedict, a gender-expansive teen in Oklahoma, died the day after enduring a beating in their high school bathroom.
By Kelly Hayes , TruthoutFebruary 23, 2024

In the immediate wake of his passing, a discourse erupted about anti-trans legislation, social neglect and health care inequity. But, in order to fully understand Nex’s death by bulling, this present history needs to be analyzed alongside histories ofthe boarding school system and the Indian Removal Act — policies that resulted in land theft, warfare, cultural genocide and widespread propaganda campaigns that stoked fear, dehumanization and colonial violence against Indigenous and Two-Spirit peoples.

Both the anti-trans campaigns and the boarding school system share a key component: the attempt of the far right United States political body to enforce a heteronormative, Christian identity on the public. And both the boarding school system and the anti-trans campaigns have yielded lethal results.

Since the introduction of anti-trans bathroom bills in 2015, anti-trans rhetoric and policy have been on the rise throughout the U.S. The increased vitriol against trans people has resulted in over 650 anti-2SLGBTQ+ (Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and additional sexual orientations and gender identities) policies being introduced in 2024 alone. As a high political watermark, the Heritage Foundation’s Christian nationalist Project 2025 paints a picture of the U.S. where transgender ideas are codified as “pornographic” and are thus minimized, if not eradicated, from public life.

Despite the majority of the U.S. population believing that trans people should be protected from discrimination, trans identities, culture and medical care have been used by the far right as an effective wedge issue in U.S. politics. This tactic of engaging a “hot-button” or controversial topic to drum up political fervor often includes pushing bigotry against a perceived mortal threat of “the other.”

This bigotry, often stoked by moral panic and misinformation, has been used to create support for policies that marginalize members of the public and restrict basic bodily autonomy. When enacted, othering policies limit, or even remove, the demonized community’s ability to get their basic needs (like gender-affirming care or a safe abortion) met above ground. Thus, these life-supporting services become less and less publicly available — especially to poor, Black, Indigenous, undocumented and/or rural communities.

This pattern (of social and political othering that results in the denial of material resources)is a key tactic of the violence that underpins settler colonialism in the U.S., and public institutions (like schools) are key enforcers of settler values. Thus, the history and impact of the settler-led school system on LGBTQ and Indigenous communities must be understood in order to fully unpack the broader circumstances surrounding Nex Benedict’s death.

Just Because It’s Legal Doesn’t Make It Right

Starting in 1819, the U.S. government instituted a sprawling schooling system consisting of 408 federal Indian boarding schools meant to “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Made possible by legislation such as the Indian Removal Act, these schools aimed to assimilate Native children into settler society by forcibly removing them from their families and raising them in group homes.

These schools were often run by abusive, state-funded Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox Christian religious groups, and they operated for over 150 years. Shortly after this, many of the religious schools became state-run. Structurally, these schools enforced cultural genocide via the tactic of assimilation, which continues to severely and negatively affect young people — especially (but not exclusively) Native children.

“This suppression … is linked to the claiming and the colonization of space. I see a direct link,” said Taté Walker, a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, a Two-Spirit storyteller and co-founder of the Phoenix Two Spirit Community group. Walker is a well-respected Two-Spirit teacher and parent who educates on tribal issues, including how the modern U.S. school system is built on tactics from the boarding school era.

“Everyone who attends these schools is not receiving community wellness teachings, elder care, lessons about protecting the air and water,” Walker told Truthout. “We are not receiving information about how our past continually cycles itself. We’re not given information on how to prevent violent events from recurring — such as a kid [whose death] is deemed a suicide. It’s left at that ridiculously simplistic reasoning, when in fact it’s hundreds and hundreds of years of stochastic terrorism, transphobia, homophobia — all set up to make a violent environment for someone like Nex Benedict.”

Indigenous residential schools, whether run by the state or religious groups, were quite literally designed to strip away the languages, cultures and community structures of non-Christian peoples in order to make them more like European settlers. Children were forced to speak English, follow the Bible and live in church-sanctioned, cis-hetero, nuclear families. This forced assimilation is a key component of cultural genocide, and it is a clear violation of international law.

“It benefits the folks in power to keep down people with their own sense of power and medicine. They see beyond the status quo. They’re fighting for a society that recognizes justice and fights injustice, that all classes are able to exist,” Walker explained.

According to Native scholars, an estimated 40,000 Native children died in the boarding schools. In these schools, the administrators subjected children to consistent abuse, malnutrition, sexual assault, manual labor, beatings and neglect. Many children’s bodies were never returned to their families and were instead buried in unmarked, sometimes mass, graves. Hundreds, potentially thousands, of deaths were never reported at all, and innumerable family records were lost or destroyed. These graveyards can be visited all over the continent openly today.

In a 2022 report, the Bureau of Indian Affairs acknowledged that there is “inconsistent Federal reporting of child deaths, including the number and cause or circumstances of death, and burial sites.” Burial grounds at the boarding schools epitomize this deadly system. The bureau describes “The intentional targeting […] of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children to achieve the goal of forced assimilation of Indian people” as “both traumatic and violent.”

A recent 2024 Department of the Interior report confirmed that at least 973 Indigenous children died at the boarding schools in the United States and were buried in one of at least 74 mass graves. The schools cost the public the equivalent of $23 billion in today’s dollars.

This report, and a similar investigation in Canada, highlight the scale at which settler governments and religious groups used these institutions as tools of cultural genocide and violent relocation efforts. Through assimilation-centered education and punishment, paid for by public funding and encouraged by federal policy, school officials enforced settler culture. All of this happened at the expense of Indigenous children’s lives and safety.

President Joe Biden acknowledged the scale of these harms in October 2024 when he issued a formal apology on behalf of the U.S. government for the violence of the schools.

Many survivors of these schools argue that, historically, there has truly never been a culture of care and commitment to the survival of Indigenous, especially Two-Spirit, youth in settler-led schools. Many believe the violence of the boarding school era still resonates today.

A Living History of Violence

Nex Benedict was an Indigenous trans youth, and the settler system appears to have not changed much since 1819. Oklahoma, where Nex Benedict lived, had 95 Indigenous boarding schools — the most known of any state in the U.S. There were at least five in the Tulsa area near where he lived.

So, when the public asks, “How did this happen?” The answer is that lawlessness, forced assimilation and Indigenous death have always been critical facets of the settler school system.

In Nex’s case, this history manifested in 2024 through neglect and legislation-backed prejudice. Administrators failed to step in during the year of bullying Nex suffered. Anti-trans politics created a moral panic around bathroom use. The demonization of LGBTQ-inclusive educational materials stoked ignorance and a devaluation of lives like Nex’s. Collectively, the far right policies in the Oklahoma education system and all the adults who uphold them are responsible for the hostile environment that killed Nex.

Shortly before Nex’s death, a 12-year-old named Eli, a gay child from Oklahoma, also died by suicide following extensive bullying that his school repeatedly failed to address.

“We are told, ‘If you are bullied so badly, why don’t you fight back?’ and in the next breath, ‘If you wouldn’t have fought back, this never would have happened.’ We are forced to play a rigged game,” said an Owassa High alum at a school board meeting in mid-March. “Let me be very clear, we will not allow this to continue.”

In Oklahoma, advocacy groups like Freedom Oklahoma and the ACLU continue to offer educational, social and legal opposition to anti-trans policies and social bigotry. They offer community support groups, volunteer training and gatherings in order to build collective power and solidarity among LGBTQ folks and their allies. But they have their work cut out for them.

In the week immediately following Nex’s death, the national youth crisis line Rainbow Youth Project reported receiving a surge of at least 1,000 calls — with a 200 percent increase specifically from Oklahoma. Many callers reported that they, too, were being bullied.
Going Forward

“The history of how Oklahoma was founded in lawlessness is important. The violence in how the state itself was created is critical in understanding why and how the current climate is adversarial when it comes to the State of Oklahoma and the Tribes, Tribal people,” explained Rebecca Nagle, Two-Spirit Cherokee author of By the Fire We Carry. “The Tribal schools the Indigenous kids were taken out of taught literature, art and global languages. The government put [Indigenous children] into the state-run school system that the kids exist within today. The state was started with ruthless lawlessness, not arts and collaboration, at its beginning.”

The modern-day attacks on trans health care have, similarly, influenced public policy, despite ample scientific and social research supporting trans rights. This disparity — between known, proven research and the lawlessness of anti-trans hatred — reflects a deeper political misinformation crisis that seeks to further reduce the autonomy and freedoms of marginalized people. Similar to the forced assimilation of Indigenous children in the boarding schools, the current anti-trans push is an attempt to lethally enforce a culturally-specific political structure onto a group of people that, simply, does not agree with or wish to live within it.

From 2023-2024, the Trans Legislation Tracker shows that, in Oklahoma, anti-trans bills have increased 46.3 percent — from 41 to 60. Oklahoma is a major node of the national anti-trans campaign, with 4.5 times more anti-trans bills than the average state and 8.8 percent of all anti-trans bills introduced this year. These bills restrict health care, access to education, sports, medical care and other aspects of public life — and, in many ways, seem to be a clear attempt to eliminate a people as a people, a core component of the UN definition of genocide.

When asked what Indigenous Two-Spirit youth in Oklahoma should do — be visible or remain in the closet — Nagle reckons with a difficult reply.

“Coming out and being visible is a very personal decision. There’s no telling young people what to do when it’s something so personal,” Nagle explains. “It can be very dangerous. I also know from my own experience that it can also be very dangerous to stay in the closet. It’s a very personal and important decision, and the stakes are just so very high in Oklahoma.”

Desiree Kane
Desiree Kane is a Miwok descendant and multimedia journalist focused on producing stories with a conscience at the intersection of Indigenous peoples and the environment. Follow Desiree on Bluesky.


Jen Byers
Jen Byers (they/she) is a visual and investigative journalist. Their work has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Showtime, CalMatters and elsewhere. Follow Jen on Bluesky.

'I’m not here to fight': First trans member of Congress responds to Johnson’s bathroom ban

WOMENS BATHROOMS HAVE CUBICLES FOR PRIVACY

MENS HAVE URINALS  AND 2 - 3 CUBICLES

Sarah McBride, Delaware state senator and candidate for United States Representative, is interviewed by Reuters in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S., October 26, 2024. REUTERS/Rachel Wisniewski

David Badash

November 20, 2024

U.S. Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride (D-DE) says she will “follow the rules” after Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson issued a ban on transgender women using women’s restrooms in the U.S. Capitol, a direct reaction to McBride becoming the first transgender member of Congress.

“I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” McBride (photo, center), 34, a member of the Delaware state Senate, said in a statement. “Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.”

“This effort to distract from the real issues facing this country hasn’t distracted me over the last several days, as l’ve remained hard at work preparing to represent the greatest state in the union come January. Serving in the 119th Congress will be the honor of a lifetime – and I continue to look forward to getting to know my future colleagues on both sides of the aisle.”

“Each of us were sent here because voters saw something in us that they value. I have loved getting to see those qualities in the future colleagues that I’ve met and I look forward to seeing those qualities in every member come January. I hope all of my colleagues will seek to do the same with me.”

McBride’s comments followed a wave of targeted attacks on social media and in the news by U.S. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC). Reports indicate that Mace posted over 260 messages on social media within 36 hours, specifically targeting McBride and transgender women more broadly.

Among them, a video in which Mace declared she will file legislation to make the ban on transgender women using women’s restrooms a national ban for all federal properties.

Speaker Johnson on Tuesday had insisted he was not interested in implementing any new rules, and was “not going to engage in this.”

“We don’t look down upon anyone,” he proudly told reporters, before adding, “a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and a man cannot become a woman.”

Twenty-four hours later Johnson issued his ban.

“All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings – such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms – are reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” Johnson’s statement reads. “It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol.”

“Women deserve women’s only spaces,” he concluded, not offering the same claim for men.

While Mace led the attacks against McBride and transgender people in general, Huffpostreports, “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) even suggested she would physically fight McBride for using the ladies’ room.”

Mace also waged her campaign against McBride in the news media, telling Forbes that the Congresswoman-elect was “absolutely” a “threat” to her personally. She claimed, “any man who wants to force his junk into the bathroom stall next to me or in a dressing room watching me, that is an assault on women.”

Forbes also notes, “McBride has never been accused of sexual misconduct or any kind of threatening behavior.”

The South Carolina Republican’s baseless allegations against McBride come just a few years after Mace began her congressional career by claiming to be pro-LGBTQ.

“I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality,” Mace said in 2021. “No one should be discriminated against.”

“I have friends and family that identify as LGBTQ,” she added. “Understanding how they feel and how they’ve been treated is important. Having been around gay, lesbian, and transgender people has informed my opinion over my lifetime.”

Mace, as Punchbowl News co-founder Jake Sherman reports, is also fundraising off her attacks.



Watch the video above or at this link.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ...

WordPress.com

https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com › ...

PDF

Butler, Judith P. Gender trouble : feminism and the subversion of identity / Judith. Butler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Originally ...

256 pages

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Gay Old Communists

Pope Francis urges genocide probe of Israel's war on Gaza

Brett Wilkins, 

Common Dreams
November 18, 2024 

Pope Francis (Tiziana FABI)

In a new book set to be released this week, Pope Francis I endorsed a genocide investigation into Israel's war on Gaza—which has killed or maimed more than 150,000 Palestinians and forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened millions more over the past 13 months.


"In the Middle East, where the open doors of nations like Jordan or Lebanon continue to be a salvation for millions of people fleeing conflicts in the region: I am thinking above all of those who leave Gaza in the midst of the famine that has struck their Palestinian brothers and sisters given the difficulty of getting food and aid into their territory," the pontiff wrote in his latest book, which goes on sale in some countries on November 19.

"According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide," the Pope added. "It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.

The Pope's words echo last week's finding by a United Nations expert panel that Israel's annihilation of Gaza is "consistent with the characteristics of genocide."

The International Court of Justice—a U.N. organ—is currently weighing a South Africa-led genocide case against Israel backed by more than 30 nations and regional blocs as well as hundreds of groups and experts around the world.

Meanwhile, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three former Hamas leaders assassinated by Israel, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including extermination.

Many jurists, scholars, and other experts—including some of Israel's leading Holocaust historians—have called Israel's policies and actions in Gaza genocide. Early in the war, Raz Segal—an Israeli historian and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey—called Israel's Gaza onslaught "a textbook case of genocide."

Numerous world leaders and other international officials, artists, entertainers, and others—including half of Democratic voters in the United States surveyed in May—also agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Many Palestinian Christians have been killed, injured, or otherwise harmed by Israeli forces during the bombardment, invasion, and siege of Gaza. With just 800 to 1,000 people believed remaining in Gaza, members of the world's oldest Christian community warned early in the war that they were "under threat of extinction."

In their most infamous attack on Gaza Christians, Israeli forces bombed the 12th century Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church, Gaza's oldest, in October 2023, killing 18 Palestinians including numerous children. Among the victims were two women and an infant related to former Republican U.S. Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan.

After an Israeli sniper fatally shot an elderly woman and her daughter on the grounds of a Catholic church in Gaza City last December, Pope Francis condemned what he called an act of "terrorism."


Amid the death and destruction wrought by Israel's assault on Gaza, last December's Christmas celebrations were canceled in Bethlehem, the purported birthplace of Jesus Christ.

"How can we celebrate when we feel this war—this genocide—that is taking place could resume at any moment?" asked Palestinian Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac at the time.

GAZA:  Genocidal violence

Editorial

Published November 16, 2024 

DAWN


A RECENTLY released UN report confirms what many around the world already know: that Israel has been using genocidal violence to wipe out the Palestinian population in Gaza. As per the findings of the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, Tel Aviv “is intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury” in the besieged Palestinian territory. Moreover, the report finds that Israel’s practices in Gaza “are consistent with the characteristics of genocide”. This is no empty rhetoric, as the UN body has documented several examples of Israeli savagery in Gaza ever since the events of Oct 7, 2023. For instance, the UN committee says by February, Israel had dropped over 25,000 tonnes of explosives on the tiny Strip; this is the equivalent of two nuclear bombs used against defenceless people. Israel is often hailed by its admirers for its tech savviness; it turns out that Tel Aviv is using its tech know-how with murderous precision in Palestine. The UN report highlights that Tel Aviv is using “AI-assisted targeting, with minimal human oversight”. This means that machines are drawing up ‘kill lists’, which the Israelis are adhering to faithfully. An earlier UN investigation had also found there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

Damning as these findings are, Israel has little consideration for what the UN or the world community has to say. Israel has already declared the UN secretary general ‘persona non grata’. The Zionist state knows it has the world’s sole superpower in its corner, and come January an array of pro-Israel hawks will take the reins in the Trump administration, further emboldening the extremists in Tel Aviv. European states mouth occasional entreaties about protecting the Palestinians while solidly backing Israel; on their part, the Muslim-Arab bloc can only issue strong statements in solidarity with Palestine. Is it any surprise, then, that Israel can get away with a modern, live-streamed genocidal campaign?

Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2024

With Trump, already negligible US distance with Israel to vanish

Biden admin's stance had already shifted to unwavering support for Tel Aviv after the Oct 7 attacks, despite growing criticism.

AFP | Dawn.com 

Published November 16, 2024

For more than a year, the United States has steadfastly backed Israel in its invasion of Gaza while quietly counselling restraint on occasion. With Donald Trump’s return, the little nuance present will vanish, although his hunger for deal-making makes him less predictable.

Trump, unlike every other recent president, has not even paid lip service to a fully sovereign, independent Palestinian state.

He leads a Republican Party so pro-Israel that some local offices handed out Israeli flags alongside Trump yard signs — a far cry from President Joe Biden, whose support for Israel faced fierce criticism from the left of his Democratic Party.

And while Biden’s two ambassadors to Israel were Jewish Americans who would occasionally nudge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump’s pick is evangelical Christian pastor Mike Huckabee, a former governor who sees biblical reason to champion Israel.

Other Trump nominees include Senator Marco Rubio — a hawk on Iran — as secretary of state, and Representative Elise Stefanik, who made waves by assailing universities’ handling of pro-Palestinian protests, as US ambassador to the United Nations.

“They’re, like, more pro-Israel than most Israelis,” said Asher Fredman, director of the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, an Israeli think tank.

He expected Trump to take an “America First” approach aimed at reducing US military resources and refocusing on countering China — which means both empowering Israel to fight enemies and encouraging its normalisation with Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia.

“There is really tremendous paradigm-shifting potential in a number of realms, such as advancing regional cooperation and putting maximum pressure on Iran,” Fredman said.
End of Biden’s approach

According to Anadolu Agency, while the Biden administration had previously balanced its approach by supporting Israel’s defence against Iran and endorsing a two-state solution, its stance shifted to unwavering support for Tel Aviv after the attacks, despite growing national and international criticism.

During the October 18, 2023 visit to Israel, Biden expressed unwavering support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, affirming the US’ solid backing.

Biden sought an additional $17.9 billion in military aid for Israel upon his return, supplementing the annual $3.5bn it already receives.

While Biden issued a memorandum in February requiring Congress to be notified if any US-funded country deliberately blocked humanitarian aid, the administration faced scrutiny for its response to humanitarian concerns in Gaza.

Blinken told Congress in May that Israel was not intentionally preventing humanitarian aid, despite reports from USAID suggesting that Israel was hindering the delivery of food assistance to Gaza.

The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration also recommended freezing funds to Israel because of humanitarian concerns, though the calls were ultimately unheeded.

Additionally, Biden’s administration vetoed three UN Security Council resolutions calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, which heightened international criticism.

Biden has also criticised Netanyahu on occasion for the heavy toll on civilians in the relentless bombardment in Gaza and unsuccessfully sought to prevent the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

But Biden has only once exercised the ultimate US leverage — holding some of the billions of dollars in military aid to Israel — with officials insisting their quiet approach has paid off.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin in a mid-October letter gave Israel a month to allow more assistance into Gaza or face cutoffs of some US weapons.

They ultimately decided not to take action, despite Israel not meeting metrics on the number of aid trucks and a new UN-backed assessment warning of imminent famine in Gaza.

Blinken told reporters Wednesday that the letter succeeded in injecting a “sense of urgency” to Israel, which addressed 12 of the 15 listed areas of concern.

Allison McManus, managing director for national security and international policy at the left-leaning Centre for American Progress, said the letter had offered an opening but that Biden wanted “near unconditional support” for Israel to be his legacy.

“Biden was very risk-averse — not wanting to rock the boat too much in terms of the traditional US support for Israel,” she said.

“He was dogmatic and quite orthodox in approaching the US-Israel relationship. Trump is, certainly, neither of those things,” she said.

Despite Trump’s stance on a Palestinian state, he has also boasted of seeking historic deals.

“There is certainly a world in which, if Netanyahu is obstinate, as he has been in reaching a ceasefire, then I wouldn’t be surprised if we actually see Trump applying some pressure,” she said.

“What that would look like, I don’t know.”

Deal not easy

Aaron David Miller, a longtime State Department advisor on the Middle East, said that Trump’s previous term showed a foreign policy that was “opportunistic, transactional and ad hoc.”

He said that Huckabee could turn out to be a “performative appointment” for political reasons, as top officials in Washington often work directly with their Middle Eastern counterparts.

But Miller said that even if Trump sought a Gaza deal, he would face some of the same impediments as Biden — the risk of Hamas surviving and the lack so far of a new security architecture.

“He cannot end the war in Gaza and won’t pressure Netanyahu to do so,” said Miller, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Elie Pieprz, director of international relations at the Israel Defence and Security Forum, said that Trump’s victory had already yielded wins for Israel, including Qatar distancing itself from mediating with Hamas and a more conciliatory tone from Iran.

As Biden had a “difficult” relationship with Israel, Trump will likely seek to ease friction, Pieprz said.

“Trump likes to see things in comparison to his opponents,” he said. Much like his domestic slogan, Pieprz said, Trump wants to “make the US-Israel relationship great again. “

Header image: Donald Trump meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, US, on July 26, 2024. — screengrab via Reuters

HRW accuses Israel of ‘war crime’ with ‘forcible transfer’ in Gaza


By AFP
November 14, 2024

Palestinians displaced from shelters in Beit Hanoun cross the main Salaheddine road into Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip following Israeli army evacuation orders 

- Copyright AFP Omar AL-QATTAA

Human Rights Watch said in a report released Thursday that Israel’s repeated evacuation orders in Gaza amount to the “war crime of forcible transfer”, and to “ethnic cleansing” in parts of the Palestinian territory.

“Human Rights Watch has amassed evidence that Israeli officials are… committing the war crime of forcible transfer,” the report said.

“Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing” in the areas where Palestinians will not be able to return, HRW added.

Nadia Hardman, an HRW researcher, noted the 172-page report’s findings are based on interviews with displaced Gazans, satellite imagery, and public reporting conducted until August 2024.

Although Israel says the displacement is justified for civilians’ safety or by military imperatives, Hardman said that “Israel cannot simply rely on the presence of armed groups to justify the displacement of civilians”.

“Israel would have to demonstrate in every instance that displacement of civilians was the only option”, to fully comply with international humanitarian law.

According to the United Nations, 1.9 million Palestinians were displaced in Gaza as of October 2024. Before the start of the war on October 7, 2023, the official population figure for the territory was 2.4 million inhabitants.

“Systematically rendering large parts of Gaza uninhabitable… in some cases permanently… amounts to ethnic cleansing,” Ahmed Benchemsi, spokesman for HRW’s Middle East division said in a press briefing.

The HRW report pointed in particular to the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors, running along the Egyptian border and cutting Gaza along its east-west axis respectively, which have been “razed, extended, and cleared”, by Israel’s army to create buffer zones and security corridors.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted that Israeli forces must retain long-term control over the Philadelphi Corridor.

Hardman said Israeli forces have turned the central Netzarim corridor, between Gaza City and Wadi Gaza, into a buffer zone four kilometres (2.5 miles) wide mostly cleared of buildings.


– ‘Wipe out the north’ –


The report excludes developments in the war since August 2024, particularly an intense Israeli offensive in northern Gaza since early October 2024.

The operation has forced the displacement of at least 100,000 people from the Palestinian territory’s far north to Gaza City and surrounding areas, UN Palestinian refugee agency spokeswoman Louise Wateridge told AFP.

Ragheb al-Rubaiya, a 63-year-old Palestinian from north Gaza’s Jabalia Camp, said to AFP that he had been driven from his home after “bombing started from the air and the tanks, and they drove us out against our will”.

“They’re destroying everything in Jabalia, and the goal is clear even to the blind: to wipe out the north and cut it off from Gaza,” he added.

HRW’s report argued “the actions of the Israeli authorities in Gaza are the actions of one ethnic or religious group to remove Palestinians, another ethnic or religious group, from areas within Gaza by violent means”.

It pointed to the organised nature of the displacement, and the intention for Israeli forces to ensure affected areas will “remain permanently emptied and cleansed of Palestinians”.

Islamic learning

Ghulam Shabbir 

November 8, 2024

MAN’S superiority over all creatures lies in his faculty of creative knowledge, which the heavens, despite their heights, the mountains, despite their firmness, and the earth, despite its vastness, refused to take on (Quran 33:72). This points to the faculty to discern the properties of things and give them ‘names’ (2:31). This is man’s inherent capability to unravel the mysteries of the universe and employ the same for his mastery over nature. Thus his mastery of the universe was a foregone conclusion. What matters most is to wield this mastery responsibly, for knowledge is a double-edged sword, prone to be used both for salutary and destructive ends.

Therefore, man’s real test lies in ‘mastering’ that mastery of the universe. So, ‘al-amana’ or the ‘trust’ which the universe trembled to bear, according to late Islamic scholar and thinker Fazlur Rahman, was to discover the laws of, and thus achieve mastery over, nature or in the Quranic terminology, to know the ‘names’ of all things and then use this mastery — under the human initiative — to create a positive world order.

To the Quran, all knowledge — intellectual, scientific or intuitive — comes from God. It sets high value on knowledge and excludes no category of learning whatsoever, with the overriding principle that this knowledge should be utilised through proper and constructive channels. Man’s essential task is to reconstruct a scientific picture of the objective reality and employ the same to create a healthy moral order. So, to engage in scientific pursuit without harnessing it for the creation of a just moral order — to know the ‘names’ without utilising them — would be, in the words of the Quran, ‘abath’ or a vain, dangerous, indeed Satanic pursuit.

Pristine Islam combined metaphysics and social reality — the Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) religious experience concerned both monotheism and socioeconomic justice. With an inherent symbiotic relationship, both monotheism and socioeconomic reforms assume fusion and flow like a seamless singular stream from the inner unity of the Quran and the immaculate conduct of the Prophet. Closer examination reveals that it was not monotheism but rather its entailing social reforms that invoked a vehement reaction from the Makkan oligarchy for they were least bothered by the monotheism of the Hanifs — certain Makkans who arrived at monotheism through self-deliberation — not linked with social reforms.


Islam combined metaphysics and social reality.

Islam, unlike the ancient world, combined metaphysics and social reality. Earlier, the streams of pure intellect and transcendentalism had flowed independently despite the coexistence of Jews and Greeks for a considerable period of time at Alexandria. To Christianity, excepting the gospels, everything was futile. Islam focused on the fusion of religious and positive knowledge; it made history a field of divine activity to objectify moral values. The Quran inspired Muslims to pursue all branches of knowledge irrespective of the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane and to utilise the same for the benefit of mankind.

Born out of a violent break with its past, the modern West will seek no negotiation with any spiritual system or moral ideology. In such a situation, what else but the Quran can steer the world out of its crisis? For Islam was the only genuine movement in history which ethically ‘oriented’ the raw materials of history rather than compromised with them under the convenient cover of secularism. Later, vested interests broke the fusion of metaphysics and social reality. Orthodoxy’s nexus with dictators led to the dichotomy of state and religion, while many Sufis’ neutr­ality to social phenomena triggered ‘personal-ism’ at the cost of collectivism. Ever since, orthodox religious knowledge is quarantined in the ma­­dressah, having no organic link with the positive knowledge of the external world.

The world of Islam in contradistinction to the ‘material’ West and the ‘spiritual’ East stands as a ‘gold median community’ (2:143) tasked with arbitrating their conflicts. On this premise, Iqbal has said: “Although we [Muslims] are coiled up in ourselves like a bud; should we perish, the whole garden [of the world] must perish.”

Dr Fazlur Rahman similarly challenged the West along the lines that you can ignore the law of gravity but Islam cannot be ignored. Muslims have become prisoners of the past and if they do not take the initiative to rediscover Islam, their future is bleak.

Muslims owe it to themselves and to the world at large to recover the fusion of moral values and social phenomena by the crystal-clear Weltanschauung of the Quran. This would be a potent step for them to assume the steering wheel of history. For how long must the Muslim faith remain in the grip of the past?

The writer is an academic.

Published in Dawn, November 8th, 2024

FURRIES

Fur flies as Russia takes on young fans of ‘quadrobics’


By AFP
November 8, 2024

Quadrobics is a fitness and social media trend that involves imitating the movements of four-legged animals - Copyright AFP Natalia KOLESNIKOVA

Yana, a 12-year-old Moscovite, is worried she will have to give up her hobby of quadrobics — a fitness and social media trend that involves imitating the movements of four-legged animals.

Russian officials, Orthodox clergymen and pro-government intellectuals have harshly criticised the trend in recent weeks, portraying it as a dangerous import from a decadent West.

In line with a hardening of Russia’s ultra-conservative social agenda since the start of the offensive on Ukraine in February 2022, lawmakers have recently proposed to ban quadrobics.

The proposal comes after similar interdictions against the LGBTQ movement and even against couples that don’t want to have children — moves touted by Moscow as necessary to defend Russia’s “traditional values”.

“We are being told how many children to have and how they should play? Seriously?” said Yana’s 38-year-old mother, Yulia, a travel agent.

Yulia spoke on condition of anonymity fearing potential repercussions in Russia’s increasingly repressive environment.

In their upmarket Moscow apartment, Yulia helped her daughter sort through the various bushy tails and cat and fox masks she has made.

Yana, who prefers to do quadrobics at home or in a park with friends, said it is “too cool”.

“Physically, I have become stronger. I can walk on my hands!” she said.

The emerging trend has raised hackles in some circles.

It was the subject of a roundtable in Moscow in July on “the struggle against Satanism” and is debated at length on state television news.

– Quadrobics and LGBT ‘hydra’ –



Irina Volets, the commissioner for children’s rights in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, said recently she had received “numerous complaints” from people concerned about “the dehumanisation of children” as a result of the trend.

“Quadrobics” and “furries” — a similar community of people who like to dress up as animals — “are heads of the same hydra along with the LGBT movement,” she said.

Russian Orthodox Church official Fyodor Lukyanov said that quadrobics “is not a child’s game or sport but a subculture… which prepares children to adopt anti-values like those of a plurality of genders and LGBT.”

Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, said last month: “We are at a stage where we are being pushed not only to renounce our gender identity but also our human identity.”

He called quadrobics a trend “from the United States and the West”.

Russian pro-Kremlin singer Mia Boyka drew attention to the trend in September when she humiliated a young fan dressed as a cat with a series of questions in an on-stage interview.

“Today it’s a cat, tomorrow a dog. The day after tomorrow she will decide she has become a boy… and we will have Mother 1 and Mother 2 in our families,” she said.

– ‘Nefarious foreign influence’ –



Yana’s mother Yulia dismisses this saying: “Horrible! Where do they get this from?

“It’s just our children having fun. There will come a time when they will all become boring adults,” she said.

But ultra-nationalist lawmaker Andrei Svintsov, who is behind a bill that would fine people for practising quadrobics, said it was “disgusting”.

The trend was one of several “imposed by the West” which “aim to destroy our demographics”, he said, referring to a steep demographic crisis in Russia which President Vladimir Putin has promised to address to no avail after more than a quarter century in power.

Konstantin Kalachev, an analyst, said Russian authorities were “driving this debate to create a division between Russians and the West”.

And it seems to be having an effect.

A survey by the pro-Kremlin polling institute VTsIOM found that 35 percent of Russians agreed quadrobics was a “nefarious foreign influence” and a third want to ban it.

Furry fandom - Wikipedia

WE HAVE WINNERS!

‘We have won’: Russians envision new global system with Trump victory

Francesca Ebel and Catherine Belton | The Washington Post
Nov 8, 2024 

MOSCOW - Donald Trump’s stunning political comeback has created an opening for Russia to shatter Western unity on Ukraine and redraw the global power map, according to several influential members of the Russian elite.

In Moscow’s corridors of power, the win for Trump’s populist argument that America should focus on domestic woes over aiding countries like Ukraine was hailed as a potential victory for Russia’s efforts to carve out its own sphere of influence in the world.

In broader terms, it was seen as a victory for conservative, isolationist forces supported by Russia against a liberal, Western-dominated global order that the Kremlin and its allies have been seeking to undermine.

‘Irrevocably disappearing’

In his first remarks since the election, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that the West’s post-Cold War monopoly on global power was “irrevocably disappearing” before praising Trump for behaving “courageously” during an attempt on his life this summer.

“His words about his desire to restore relations with the Russian Federation and to help resolve the Ukrainian crisis, in my opinion, deserve attention,” he said during his annual speech at the Valdai Forum in Sochi.

Members of Russia’s elite were more blunt in their response to Trump’s victory.

“We have won,” said Alexander Dugin, the Russian ideologue who has long pushed an imperialist agenda for Moscow and supported disinformation efforts against Kamala Harris’s campaign. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat,” he wrote on X.

The deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Konstantin Kosachev, said on his Telegram channel: “The victory of the right in the so-called ‘free world’ will be a blow to the left-liberal forces that dominate it. It is not by chance that Europe was so openly ‘rooting’ for Harris, who would, in fact, preserve the rule of the Obama-Clinton ‘clan.’”

Konstantin Malofeyev, the Russian Orthodox billionaire who has funded a conservative agenda promoting traditional Christian values on the far right and far left across the West, said on Telegram that it would be possible to negotiate with Trump “both about the division of Europe and the division of the world. After our victory on the battlefield.”


In more immediate terms, Trump’s election victory was expected to have a dramatic impact on Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to Leonid Slutsky, head of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee.

‘Matter of months, if not days’

“Judging by the pre-election rhetoric … the Republican team is not going to send more and more American taxpayer money into the furnace of the proxy war against Russia,” he said. “Once the West stops propping up [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s neo-Nazi regime, its downfall will happen in a matter of months, if not days.”

But others were more circumspect, and some warned that Trump’s presidency could lead to a more unpredictable era. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would wait to see if Trump’s campaign rhetoric, criticizing support for Ukraine and calling for an end to the war, translated into “concrete actions.” Peskov declared that the United States remains “an unfriendly country that directly and indirectly is involved in a war against our state.”

Russian lawmaker Maria Butina, who served 15 months in a U.S. federal prison after being convicted of operating as an unregistered foreign agent, told The Washington Post that this was “a good chance for U.S.-Russian relations to improve.” She added, “Hopefully this time … Trump will keep his promise to truly be a peacemaker.”

In the weeks before the election, Russian officials had sought to downplay their interest in the vote, but that public stance was belied by what U.S. officials said were intensifying Kremlin-directed disinformation operations seeking to stoke chaos and target Harris. The operations built on earlier efforts to stoke isolationist sentiments, according to documents previously reported on by The Post.


In the end, Russian efforts to interfere in the 2024 election were “pretty marginal to the overall trend of voter sentiment,” said Eric Ciaramella, a former White House official now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, especially compared with 2016, when U.S. intelligence officials concluded that a Russian hack-and-leak operation had helped change the narrative in support of Trump.

Changed the mainstream political debate

But analysts also noted that more than a decade of Russian propaganda operations amplifying anti-establishment, isolationist voices through increasingly sophisticated social media operations, including on X, had changed the mainstream political debate in a way that would never have been possible via traditional media.

“On a digital platform, your ability to do these things works,” said Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. After the vote, X owner Elon Musk hailed the result as cementing the power of his platform to provide alternative views over “legacy media.”

Russia’s business community also could not hide its sense of optimism that Trump’s victory would change things for the better, in the Russian view.

Shares on the Moscow stock exchange surged nearly 3% in early trading as the election results came in, amid widespread speculation that Trump could lift sanctions against Russia in return for an end to its military action.

“Trump is someone who is used to doing deals,” said one Moscow businessman, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “The expectation is that under Trump, decisions will be reached faster to end the conflict and ease sanctions.”

“For big business, Trump’s election is a hopeful factor,” he added. “Sanctions are strangling the economy, and costs are soaring.”

Risks remain high

But share prices later settled, and some analysts said risks remain high that relations could run aground and that the standoff could worsen under Trump. Alexei Venediktov, the well-connected longtime editor of the Echo of Moscow radio station, said the possible Republican capture of both houses of Congress would break the longstanding deadlock in the U.S. political system, letting the government reach decisions at far greater speed and creating new risks.

The Republican majority “is the threat from the Kremlin’s point of view, because there are no internal contradictions, no internal chaos,” Venediktov said. “It was important for the Kremlin that the winning candidate was Mr. or Mrs. Chaos.”

A clear sign of the lack of Kremlin trust in President-elect Trump, Venediktov said, was Putin’s decision not to immediately congratulate him as other leaders had. “This is actually an insult,” he said. “It’s a signal.”

Putin waited until the third hour of his annual speech Thursday to congratulate Trump, first discussing inequality, artificial intelligence and climate change.

But others said Putin’s move was, in fact, a sign of the Kremlin’s growing confidence. Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political analyst, said the expectation is that Trump will eventually, though not immediately, call Zelensky and Putin and propose a cease-fire deal along the lines of one already floated by his running mate, JD Vance, which appears to hand Russia the Ukrainian territory it already controls.


Under this proposal, a cease-fire would be reached along the current front line, together with the creation of a large demilitarized buffer zone, with new borders to be ratified under later referendums. “If everything goes okay, then Trump will lift sanctions” to pull Moscow out of China’s orbit, Markov said.

Putin unlikely to agree

But Markov and other analysts said Putin is unlikely to agree to any deal that does not include the complete demilitarization of Ukraine, which even Trump might reject. “Putin wants what no one can give him,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

One possibility, though, would be an agreement in which Moscow and Kyiv halt strikes on energy and power infrastructure, Markov suggested, an arrangement that was under discussion this summer, until Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. “This would be a colossal victory for Trump,” Markov said.

Thomas Gomart, director of the French Institute for International Relations, said other far-right and far-left political forces in Europe - many of which have been supported by Moscow - could be boosted by Trump’s win.

They could call for a U.S. rapprochement with Russia, potentially ushering in a new era in which politics would be dominated by autocrats and in which the winning coalition of Trump, Vance and Musk would introduce a new disruptive ideology. “In a sense, it could be a new realignment in Europe,” Gomart said.

“This is a very good moment against the globalist deep state,” said Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a far-right French politician and former member of the European Parliament who once facilitated a 9.4 million euro ($10.1 million) loan from a Russian bank to the presidential campaign of the French far right’s Marine Le Pen. “It’s a moment for Europe to make a bridge with conservative America” and align with Russia, he said.

“It can be a new era,” Schaffhauser said.