AU CONTRAIRE

North Korea Does Not Pose a Threat to the United States

by Simone Chun / October 10th, 2024

In an election year, both US parties are competing to outdo one another with hawkish rhetoric on the Korean Peninsula, leaning heavily into the strategy of confrontation with China through the US-South Korea-Japan tripartite alliance; a flawed vision that threatens to “erupt into a regional war, a full-scale war, or even a nuclear war.”

In her closing speech during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris presented the most openly militaristic take on Washington’s Korea policy “since the GOP convention that nominated [Senator Barry] Goldwater in 1964.” Harris’ hawkish view all but discards diplomacy to focus on herding South Korea and Japan together to form a US-led military triad to confront Chinese interests in East Asia. The candidate’s stance, echoed by the majority of the democratic party, raises what has been called a “truly baffling” prospect of a “Democratic president more aggressive towards [North Korea] than her Republican counterpart.”

This comes at a time when the virtually nonstop US-led war drills in South Korea have achieved a level of scope and intensity that far exceeds even that of the Cold War.  Taking place in the heavily militarized Korean Peninsula and ostensibly directed at the ubiquitous “North Korean threat,” these exercises are in fact a preparation for a future US-led war against China as part of Washington’s bold new Indo-Pacific strategy.

These momentous developments cap two years of virtually unabated military maneuvers at North Korea’s doorstep, beginning in 2023 with:

• 250+ days of US and South Korean joint war drills
• 21 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea
• 10+ UN Command joint military maneuvers

From January 1 to August 10, 2024 there have been:

• 180 days of US and South Korean joint war drills
•  17 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea

With the advent of the Biden administration, the prospect of a negotiated peace with North Korea all but vanished with the ultimate collapse of the modest confidence-building agreement in 2018 between Seoul and Pyongyang and South Korea, and Washington’s North Korea policy shifted to empowering South Korea’s autocratic Yoon administration to spearhead the “end of the North Korean regime” while the US steadily incorporates Korean military potential into its anti–China front.

The “North Korean threat” has long served as the justification for the increasingly formidable US forward military position in Asia, but how much of a threat does North Korea actually pose to the US?

North Korea spends only $4 billion annually on defense while the US annual defense budget is close to $900 billion. For North Korea to engage in the offensive use of its military against the US would be little short of suicide.

In addition to this basic fact, the commander of US Forces Korea himself, Gen. Paul LaCamera, has openly stated that North Korea’s military posture and policy is to establish deterrence and defend its sovereignty, and has characterized Kim Jong-un’s top priorities as “regime survivability” and “preparing to defend his nation.”

Kim himself has repeatedly stated that North Korea: “will never unilaterally unleash a war.”  Kim’s most urgent priority has been economic development under the “Regional Development 20×10 Policy,” an ambitious 10-year-plan to provide badly-needed improvements to civilian infrastructure and services for ordinary North Koreans.

In spite of the relentlessly “manufactured image of a war-mad Kim Jong-un,” recent opinion polls show that only 2% of Americans named North Korea as a threat to the US, apparently evincing the common-sense realization that a weak country’s deterrent posture is not regarded as a real threat to the United States.

Coexistence is an overlooked option

Current US policy in the Korean peninsula is an extension of its Indo-Pacific doctrine, and relies on coupling economic warfare with military and political pressure against Pyongyang to maintain the level of tension required for the continued deployment of US forward assets against China.

As Washington veers ever further into its collision course with China, it has recast South Korea as a “linchpin of the US-China strategy in Northeast Asia”; deepening the integration of US assets with South Korean conventional forces and inducting local troops to serve under US command as cannon fodder for a brewing regional war far beyond the confines of the Korean Peninsula.

The US considers tensions in the Korean Peninsula necessary to justify its forward position in East Asia, which is underpinned by the garrisons it maintains in South Korea and Japan and solidified by its de facto control over the nominally independent military forces of these states. The US has been attempting to prod Beijing into a conflict over Taiwan in the same manner as it has provoked Russia into war over the Ukraine.

One consequence of this strategy is that Washington’s hostility towards North Korea is becoming ever more entrenched in US foreign policy, with the US provoking South Korea, a US client state that lacks strategic independence, to escalate tensions with Pyongyang as a prelude to instigating a regional conflict with China. Under the pretext of deterring North Korea, the US is forcing South Korea into a brewing confrontation with China, in which the primary role of the South Korean military would be to tie down vital Chinese forces in a bloody inter-Korean conflict, giving the US a freer hand in the broader theater of operations.

To help cement its hold over South Korea at this crucial juncture in Washington’s grand Indo-Pacific strategy, the Biden administration has propped up the authoritarian and deeply unpopular President Yoon Seok-yeol, whose signature foreign policy platform is a steadfast commitment to allowing his nation to be dragooned into the brewing US war with China. According to the latest opinion survey, more than 66% of South Koreans think that Yoon’s subordination to the US Indo-Pacific strategy makes Korea less safe.

But what if relations with the North were treated as an inter-Korean or even a purely regional issue, and were decoupled from Washington’s broader anti-China strategy? The prospect of coexistence with the North possesses immense potential for stability and prosperity in the region.

A North Korea free of US-led sanctions and unburdened by an overriding drive to shore up national  defense could arguably be a regional economic powerhouse. Given that North Korea has been vigorously pushing for ambitious economic development since its last nuclear weapons test in 2017, analysts foresee the North achieving meaningful economic development under the right conditions.

If geopolitical conditions evolve to the point where some initial meaningful economic engagement becomes possible for the US and South Korea, Kim’s domestic agenda offers important benchmarks for collaboration and support that should be a starting point for helping him achieve success on improvements in the lives of the North Korean people.

An economically integrated Korean peninsula in a multipolar Northeast Asia has the potential to be the “world’s next epicenter of change,” placing the combined economy of the Korean peninsula second only to China, the US, and India, with the North accounting for approximately one-fourth of this total economic potential.

Arguably, a fundamental geopolitical shift with respect to North Korean economic integration is already underway: namely, the gradual erosion of US economic isolation as the North strengthens its ties with the two of the world’s largest economies: Russia and China. These developments occur at a critical historical juncture shaped by an increasing trend toward multipolarity coupled with the shifting geopolitical balance of power in Northeast Asia.

America’s long-term strategic interest lies in unlocking the potential domestic benefits to the US of opening up the North Korean economy rather than attempting to maintain its hegemony through the relentless pursuit of regional destabilization in preparation for a future Sino-American conflict.

Washington should instead work to reduce regional tensions by halting the increasingly provocative nuclear-conventional war games in the Korean Peninsula and putting US-North Korea normalization at the center of US foreign policyFacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She is on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors, and serves on the advisory board for CODEPINK. She can be found on Twitter at @simonechun. Read other articles by Simone.

 

Independent Politicians Become Victims of the War on Dissent

by Martin Averick / October 10th, 2024

Despite the modern trend of the society liberalization, 2024 was marked by a number of assassination attempts on world leaders and cases of exerting pressure on prominent politicians. On the 15th of May, Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt, and just a couple of months later the similar scenario repeated in the USA, where a young gunman shot at former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Following these events, people began to compare both of these crimes and found out that the shooting victims were independent politicians who actively opposed the continuation of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and had an alternative vision of the world order. Therefore, it’s suggested that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic could become the next victims of the “hunt on dissent”.

Viktor Orban, who had already been criticized by the EU leadership and leaders of several countries, just further worsened situation by visiting Beijing and Moscow in July this year. For some reason, it was not taken into account that the visits were part of Orban’s “peace mission” for Ukraine, and that within the framework of the mission he visited not only China and Russia, but also the USA and Ukraine. The European Union, promoting freedom and independence as its main values and standing against war and violence, strongly condemned the action of the Hungarian minister. European countries can’t admit that Orban is one of the few politicians who at least tries to help resolve the Ukrainian conflict peacefully, while others, on the contrary, can only write about it on social networks. Moreover, in response to Orban’s controversial visits the European Commission decided to boycott Hungary’s presidency of the EU Council. Why is the desire to resolve a conflict considered a negative action? And why is the leader of a sovereign state dictated which countries he can or cannot visit, and punished for “disobeying the instruction”?

As for Serbia, it faces constant pressure over non-recognition of Kosovo’s independence, maintenance of military neutrality and its attitude towards Russia’s war on Ukraine. It’s quite expected that external actors, in particular the EU, negatively assessing Belgrade’s desire to pursue an independent policy, may try to undermine the stability in Serbia and discredit the “unfavorable” President. Accusations of the possible involvement of high-ranking Serbian officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin, one of the closest associates of the Serbian President, in the armed attack in Banjska, are just another attempt to subvert the authority of Aleksandar Vucic with the further aim to replace him with a loyal candidate. The question arises: why does a liberal and free Europe, which condemns aggression and totalitarianism, turn into a harsh censor, punishing those acting against its interests?

At all times, those who were not afraid to go against the flow, face public misunderstanding and criticism. However, in the 21st century, when freedom and independence are recognized as the highest values, news about the “cancellation” or even elimination of people seems particularly shocking. Instead of working together to peacefully solve global issues and problems, politicians just heighten tensions in the geopolitical arena.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Martin Averick is a Nashville-based researcher. He is currently pursuing a degree in International Relations from the Vanderbilt University. His work work has been published by AntiWar.com. Read other articles by Martin.

 

The Retreat of Free Trade

Welcome to Tariff Land

by Binoy Kampmark / October 11th, 2024

Free markets?  Free trade?  The modern economic world has little time for these erroneous, misdirected terms.  More evident are the feelings of resentment, prejudice and indignant parochialism more accurately called My Country First, and Everyone Else Last.  Back your industries; hobble the competitors.  And everyone is doing it, except certain ideologues who, childishly, cling to the view that there ever was such a thing as a true laissez-faire world.

Free trade remains, in general, a fantasy, dangerous for the naïve who feel that by embracing it, they are somehow enlarging their appeal and standing.  Often, countries extolling its value are only those desiring exclusive or privileged access to a market.  From 2016 onwards, the free traders have been pummeled.  With Donald Trump in the White House, America First meant imposing, among other things, tariffs of 25% on US$50 billion on Chinese goods under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. More rises followed.

Under the Biden administration, Trump’s tariff legacy remained in place, though some suspensions were made.  (These were subsequently reimposed.)  This enabled President Joe Biden to sharpen the focus on specific categories: electric vehicles (EVs), semiconductors, lithium ion batteries.  Tariffs on Chinese semiconductors spiked to 50%, while Chinese EVs received a bruising 100% increase.

In April last year, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan delivered an address to the Brookings Institution tearing the free-market consensus to shreds with what he called the “new Washington consensus”.  China was the convenient excuse for doing so, a country that had subsidised “at a massive scale both traditional industrial sectors, like steel, as well as key industries in the future, like clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced biotechnologies.”  US competitiveness had, as a result, been eroded.

The response from foreign affairs pulpit huggers such as Walter Russell Mead was excoriating. Sullivan’s position represented a wish to “return to the system of relatively closed and highly regulated national economies that characterised the immediate post-Second World War era.”

Even those on the consultancy front are proclaiming the end of free trade. The Boston Consulting Group, for instance, declared in May that global free trade, an era “spanning the late 20th and early 21st centuries, has ended, and a new geopolitical landscape has emerged: a multipolar world characterized by distinct economic and political blocs.”

Little wonder, then, that the stomp on a forced, generally fictional notion has also appealed to European Union officials who have now made their entry into the thorny undergrowth of Tariff Land.  On October 4, the European Union voted to place tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles after a yearlong investigation into the role played by Chinese subsidies and export dumping practices.  The vote was split: ten EU states agreed to the measure, while five voted against it, with twelve abstentions.

The European Commission had already imposed provisional duties in July.  The move prompted China to file a request with the World Trade Organisation in August requesting consultations with the EU over alleged protectionist measures arising out of the provisional countervailing duties on EVs.

This has left the European Union in an interesting situation.  For one, they are not exactly unflinching on the exercise.  The Commission has more than hinted that a negotiated settlement is tenable. Were Chinese EV companies to propose an acceptable minimal minimum price for their vehicles, the tariffs would be lifted.

The reasoning on that score is clear enough: the EU has, ideologically and foolishly, imperilled itself to a free trade agenda that has enabled Beijing to make considerable inroads into the European market regarding EV technology.  While the United States huffs and struts in imposing 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, such a policy can be pursued with assurance.  The US market was only ever going to suffer negligible losses, there being negligible Chinese EV imports to begin with.  For the European Union, up to 25% of all EVs sold this year will have a Chinese origin.

It is little wonder that there is no true European consensus on how to euthanize the free trade patient.  Germany, as one of the countries voting against the imposition of tariffs (a third of new German cars are sold annually in China), failed to exert sufficient influence on the final vote, hardly surprising given disagreements within its own political ranks. “Germany and European industry can no longer convince the Commission to be reasonable,” lamented Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.  “But then again, who can?”

How different it was from 2013, when the country, under the stewardship of Angela Merkel, convinced then European Commission president José Manuel Barroso that China should be exempt from tariffs in favour of a minimum price threshold.

If nothing else, the values of Tariff Land are revealing.  The decarbonising program seen as essential to stay a rise in global temperatures has balkanised.  Disputing trade officials, not technological innovators or scientists, dominate the discussions.  The US government is even chewing over banning the use of Chinese technology in autonomous and connected cars, showing how far this will go.

Joseph Webster, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, expresses the sentiment.  “The EU – as well as other US allies, especially Australia – do not appear to be grappling with the real and uncomfortable tensions between decarbonization objectives on the one hand, and the security risks Chinese-linked connected vehicles pose on the other.”  Yet again, the free trade globalists have been shown up, leaving way for the chest beating patriots to take centre stage over the corpse of an idea.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 

NEW: Portal for Tracking Genocidal Incitement Against Palestinians

by Dissident Voice Communications / October 11th, 2024

For the last year, since October 7, Law For Palestine has been documenting genocidal incitement against Palestinians by Israeli government officials, military personnel, and public figures. We partnered with them to launch a new portal to house this crucial data, which they regularly update as a resource for legal action, advocacy, and ensuring justice for the Palestinian people. To date, the database has compiled over 400 instances of genocidal rhetoric. Users can filter by theme and sector, search by person or keyword, and view and download the datasheet.

This database is a crucial resource for the international community, legal experts, human rights organizations, and policymakers. It provides an extensive, well-organized repository of evidence documenting how incitement to genocide has directly fueled Israel’s military and political strategies, including civilian harm, forced displacement, collective punishment, dehumanization, destruction of infrastructure, starvation, and torture.

Explore other genocidal intent themes here or read the full press release from Law for Palestine. Special thanks to Nate Wright for his collaboration on this project.

Each of these themes represent clear violations of international law, including the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. By cataloging and categorizing these crimes, this database supports global efforts to hold Israeli officials accountable and builds a strong foundation for legal action in international courts, thus ensuring that these brutal crimes do not go unpunished.
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Dissident Voice Communications (DVC) is a non-profit meta-company in the public interest (well, depends on which public), we aim to challenge the hegemony of Big Media by communicating... all sorts of stuff. Read other articles by Dissident Voice Communications.

 

The Cats of Gaza

by Eros Salvatore / October 11th, 2024

Nine-year-old Jana ignores the gunfire in the distance as she carries a cardboard box across the sand. The box contains her best friend: a four-month-old orange-white kitten that bears her name and cuddles with her when the bombs are falling. A few meters behind her, her twelve-year-old sister Nada carries one of the kitten’s siblings, a silver-grey tabby who likewise shares her name. Their father, Salah El-Din Youssef, named the kittens after his daughters so the girls would become attached to them. He didn’t have to bother. They would have loved the kittens no matter what their names were. And, judging from the calm, serene looks on the kittens’ faces as they peek out over the tops of the boxes, they trust the girls enough to love them back.

Though the sisters occasionally stumble over rocks and debris beneath the hot summer sun, they don’t mind because they know their journey is almost over. Their father has secured a spot on the beaches of Der al-Balah where they can live. They can almost hear the cool sea breeze whispering their names as they get closer. Their father follows them with a box containing the mother cat, Kitty, and another silver-grey tabby kitten named Angie. Salah is relieved. No one in the family was killed or injured during the evacuation, and they were able to take what little they owned. Salah’s wife, Samaher, and their three other daughters, Dana, Yara, and Rahaf, are tidying up the new tarp and stick home when they arrive. They haven’t felt this safe in a while.

Two days ago the Israelis dropped evacuation orders on their camp. We are liberating you from the tyranny of Hamas. Your zone will become a battlefield. You must leave immediately.

Some screamed in response, others silently panicked. The attack could come at any moment. Scattered refugees ran here and there, unsure of where to go. Whole families scurried through the streets carrying as much as they could. Heavy items lay discarded in abandoned camps, too burdensome to move. Everything was pared down to food, clothing, and documents. Flour, lentils, cooking oil. Shoes, shirts, headscarves. ID, birth, and death certificates. Everyone carried something. The sick carried the sickest. The young carried the youngest.

The cats are lucky. They’ve become items of necessity in the middle of a calamity. Who would want to face death without a friend? Salah found Kitty in early spring. Her kittens were born on April 25th. He adopted them all.

“I treat them as if they were my children. I eat and drink from God’s provisions, and my children do the same.”

Between the rockets and hunger, these bundles of soft, warm fur make life more tolerable.

“All the children here love to play with Kitty and her kittens. They were all happy when she became a mother and gave birth to these beautiful babies.”

In a far cry from his pastry chef days before the war, Salah and his family start each day collecting enough food for one meal which they share with the cats.

“My older brother, Ezz, and my younger nephew, Hamoud, like to help. Sometimes Hamoud has to walk long distances to find the type of luncheon meat the cats like. They demand the best—standard cat behavior! Kitty supplements her diet with the occasional bird, though I have never seen her catch a mouse.”

Kitty is often thirsty. This is the end of the dry season, and there is little water available on the streets. When Salah brings out a bowl of water, Kitty laps it down as fast as she can.

Salah

Salah feeds and frets about all of the homeless cats the way any animal lover would. When he has the time and money, he buys several cans of potted meat and goes to the areas with an abundance of strays. Dozens of cats come running whenever he calls. It reminds me of a Siamese cat I had as a kid. Every day after school I would stand behind our apartment building and yell out his name: Sudene! Within seconds he would come bounding out of the woods to greet me. Those were the happiest moments of my childhood. In a land where happiness is scarce, those moments mean even more. They help Jana and Nada cope. Salah shows me photographs of them before the war, dressed like pop stars. T-shirts, jeans, and purses. Sunglasses perched atop their heads. Faces decorated with smatterings of lipstick and blush, as they play grown-up. Now here they are in tattered clothes, singing lullabies to kittens in the middle of a genocide. Hush little baby, don’t you cry…sounds soothing no matter what the language.

Like most Palestinians, Salah’s family mimics a feral cat colony full of multiple generations of felines trying to make it in the world. Besides his wife and five daughters, Salah has three brothers and two sisters, each with families of their own. Before October 7th, they all lived on the same block. Now, they live on the ruins of blocks, moving every few months during the forced evacuations, always keeping together. Like the cats he feeds, they live and die in close proximity to each other. And with each bombing, there’s a chance they will all be wiped out.

The cats sense something is wrong when the humans leave the camps. But, unlike stray dogs, they don’t follow. They won’t leave their territories until it’s too late. Only the lucky survive.

Refugees call the cats martyrs when they die. Every innocent creature in their beloved land becomes a martyr when it is murdered. Even their national symbol, the olive tree, is martyred by D9s, Israel’s armored bulldozers.

The cats of Gaza watch our foolishness and folly, as well as our sacrifice and struggle. If they could talk, in between the pets and meows, they would have incredible stories to tell.

Salah’s family has a story too. “My father was killed by the Occupation before the war. He needed surgery abroad, but the Israelis would not allow him to leave. Now my mother, Ummah, is in the same situation.”

Ummah had been injured in a rocket attack. Their neighbor’s house had been blown to pieces and a cinder block fell on her leg, breaking her femur. She spends her days lying on a mattress on the dirt floor, unable to move. Sometimes Salah is able to get medicine for her diabetes. Often she goes without. Medical care in Gaza is limited, especially for adults. Children are more likely to get what little treatment is available. The old are requisitioned to die young. Mothers and fathers are forced to bury, or be buried by, their children. No family in Gaza escapes unscathed.

In the middle of June, after eight months of war, Salah’s tent was burned down by incendiary weapons. The Occupation uses them to scorch the earth and make the land uninhabitable. The family evacuated, with Kitty and her kittens, to the Al-Mawasi/Khan Yunis “humanitarian zone,” where the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) could kill them more efficiently. They had no shelter when they arrived, and for a while, they slept out in the open beneath the stars, too poor to buy a two-hundred-dollar tarp or a thousand-dollar tent.

In mid-July Salah’s twenty-something nephew, Adi, broke his hand running from a missile attack. Now he has to struggle to survive one-handed. No one gets time off to heal. A few days later Salah had to go to the hospital. The salty water they had been drinking gave him a kidney stone. He spent three days at the hospital waiting for the stone to pass, because it was too painful to walk back home. Salah sent me a video of Jana feeding the cats while he was gone, in addition to one of Nada singing for peace in Arabic. Google Translate filled in the main points of the lyrics, even if some of the sentences made no sense. Nada sang to the world, demanding the right to be heard, to play with friends, to be loved by her parents, to have her own home, to go to school, and to live without fear. In response, we pretend they’re all terrorists and encourage Israel to bomb them at taxpayers’ expense. Palestinians use their blood to pay the rent. Remember when the Zionists said, “Never forget!”

On July 24th, Salah’s uncle Ramzi and two of his sons, Diaa and Badr, suffered severe burns in a missile attack. They were taken to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah. It has the best care in the Gaza Strip. And that’s a problem, because it’s full, and they’ve run out of supplies. Salah asked me to contact the medical charity I’m friends with, but I doubt they will be able to help.

Badr al-Din Ramzi

Badr dies first. He was only ten years old. Salah sends me a photograph of him playing games on a smartphone. He’s an innocent-looking boy with short black hair and dark brown framed glasses. Ramzi prayed for death when he learned of his son’s passing. His wish was granted a few hours later. Only Diaa survives, facing a long, nightmarish recovery sans skin grafts and painkillers.

Badr’s older brother Ibrahim published a memorial to him on social media: My little brother, a piece of my heart, if it is true to say, you left us, returning to the gardens of eternity, God willing, a martyr and a bird in paradise. You were a full moon that illuminated my life. My words are powerless before you. I regret all the moments that I could not be by your side and the feeling of helplessness that possessed me in your last days, while you told me I would get out of here safely! I, who was your older brother, could not do anything for you in the midst of this cruel war. May God have mercy on you, Badr el-Din.

I told Salah the people at the charity saw my message but never responded.

“Don’t worry,” Salah replied. “God will help us.”

On July 26th, Salah sent me a video of the funeral procession. Orange stretcher, white shroud, mass grave. They do about a hundred ceremonies a day. In this madness, guilt marries shame. Prayers and prostrations can’t overcome pain.

On July 27th, the school adjacent to the area they were camping in was targeted with rockets. Thirty-one died and one-hundred-and-fifty were injured. I suppose God did help Salah—none of the casualties were family or friends.

In the middle of August, Salah’s teenage nephew Qusay had his thumb torn off by shrapnel. His crime? He was shopping with his father. The IDF bombs markets when the refugees have enough food or merchandise to sell.

Later that week, Salah receives flour from friends in Egypt and sends me photographs of it. Even simple things become important life events.

The children get new clothes. Jana, in a black top, white and purple leopard print leggings, and a ponytail, feeds the cats. Nada, clad in a pink dress, hair undone, gives them water. The girls are blessed. How can God deny their entry into Paradise after death?

In early September Salah’s cousin, Dr. Moin Fares Youssef, is killed. He spent fifteen years in Israeli prisons only to be martyred in his own home upon release. There’s a story there, but I never ask Salah what it is. I’ve already learned enough.

As fall begins, Salah sends me a photograph of Kitty nursing four new kittens, eyes unopened. Two orange, one white, and one calico. Someday, when all the wars end and the humans disappear, the cats will still be there: purring and sunning themselves like they’ve always done.

You can find out more about Salah El-Din Youssf at his GoFundMeFacebookTwitter

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Eros Salvatore is a writer and filmmaker living in Bellingham, Washington. They have been published in the journals Anti-Heroin Chic and The Blue Nib among others, and have shown two short films in festivals. They have a BA from Humboldt State University, and a foster daughter who grew up under the Taliban in a tribal area of Pakistan. Read other articles by Eros, or visit Eros's website.

 

Zionism Pursues Its Attempted Hold-up on Jews the World over

by French Jewish Union for Peace / October 12th, 2024

The Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF), French Zionist Consistory, and their members and allies called for a demonstration on Sunday 6 October in the following terms: “Next Sunday 6 October, with a group of Zionist institutions, community organizations and citizen groups, we are organizing a large scale demonstration at Paris; we will assert our solidarity with the people and the state of Israel in the existential war that they have waged for a year, we will honor the memory of the victims of the pogrom of 7 October and we will denounce antisemitism”.

This call sets up once again the confusion between Jew, Zionist, and Israeli. Happily, there are among the citizen groups of this country organizations which have nothing to do with this confusion. The confusion between the state of Israel – Zionist and supremacist – and its Jewish population is grossly misleading in that a significant part of this population, if it has only partially broken with Zionism, denounces the Netanyahu government and its judeo-fascist allies. [This is] a government that has deliberately sacrificed the hostages to engage in a genocidal operation in the Gaza strip and escalate ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

Never has the Jewish population in Palestine been as threatened for its long-term existence as by this politics. But how does one dare to speak of this potential existential threat when the existential threat for the Palestinian people on Palestinian soil is here and now?

To respect the Jewish values of equality and dignity of all mankind, one life must value another life. To honor the victims of 7 October without having a minimum of empathy for the victims of Gaza is frighteningly violent and constitutes acquiescence to the genocide in course.

The utilization of the term ‘pogrom’ is inappropriate to describe the murders of civilians committed not against Jews as such but against colonizers and occupiers. The term resonates as a reminder of actions led before and during the destruction of the Jews of Europe, encouraged by Tsarism and the dictatorships of Central Europe. [This is] hardly comparable to the actions, if murderous, of a population enclosed for more than 15 years in a blockade by land, sea and air. Many of us experience the usage of this term as an insult to the memory of our families.

This demonstration claims to denounce antisemitism. We are unhappily obliged to note that the unqualified defense of a state that claims to act in the name of all the Jews of the world and practices ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and now genocide, can only provoke renewed antisemitism, putting in danger Jews everywhere around the world, summoned to be accomplices at the risk of being designated as traitors.

Combatting antisemitism is an urgent task, but in standing with all victims of racism, with all the racialized. This is what we are currently engaged in.

*****

Launch of the ‘European Jews for Palestine’ network, at the European Parliament 3 October 2024

The new European Jewish network, European Jews for Palestine (EJP) has been launched in the European Parliament at Brussels this Thursday 3 October 2024.

[Video of the meeting, 1 hr 22 mins, with English subtitles]

The event is a product of work by members of the new organization, as well as European Deputies, directors of European anti-racist organisations and Palestinian representatives.

This meeting coincides with the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah).

“We mark this important moment in the Jewish calendar by a message of solidarity with the Palestinian people and a call to put an end to the genocide in Gaza and to Israel’s war crimes”, declared Gabi Kaplan, co-founder of the network and spokesperson for EJP.

EJP is a collective of more than 20 Jewish groups from fourteen European countries. These organizations, sharing the same opinions, met for the first time in March 2023 in Paris and officially established their European organization in September 2024. The event in the European Parliament on 3 October marks the first public appearance of the network.

The EJP network rejects “the ideology of Jewish supremacy of the Zionist state” and denounces “the cynical conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism”. The network advocates the “decoupling of Judaism from the colonialist doctrine of Zionism” and commits itself to promote “equal rights for all in historic Palestine, from the river to the sea”.

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These statements have been published on the website of the Union Juive Française pour la paix, 25 September 2024 and 4 October 2024, and have been translated by Evan Jones.FacebookTwitterReddit

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The Union Juive Française pour la Paix was established in Paris in April 1994 during the commemoration of Passover. In 2002, the UJFP becomes a foundation member of European Jews for a Just Peace, successor to the International Jewish Peace union, created in 1982. From the UJFP’s charter: “The colonial character of Zionism has developed with the acceleration of the ‘judaisation’ of the totality of historic Palestine and of ethnic cleansing, [embodied in] the passage of the ‘Basic Law’ in July 2018]. The fate reserved to Gaza, open air prison, the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel can only revolt all those who defend human rights across the world.” Read other articles by French Jewish Union for Peace, or visit French Jewish Union for Peace's website.

Macron’s Arms Embargo on Israel Crumbles Under Scrutiny

by J.D. Hester / October 12th, 2024

Emmanuel Macron and the macaron have many similarities. Both the French President and the French dessert are airy and insubstantial and are loved by the rich elite. For these reasons, it was a surprise to many when Macron announced his support for an end to arms deliveries to the Israeli terrorist regime. For a neoliberal following in the footsteps of interventionists such as George Bush and Tony Blair, such a declaration is nigh unthinkable. Not even Vice-President Kamala Harris, a nominal progressive, has called for an arms embargo. In fact, Harris has made it emphatically that she does not support any restraint when it comes to arms sales to Israel. Why then would a politician like Emmanuel Macron support such a position?

Well, it seems that George Bush and Tony Blair are only secondary influences on Macron whose true playbook seems to be derived from that of Italian philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli is famous for his quote “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception”, and Macron seems to have taken this to heart with his finger always in the proverbial “wind” of politics. But what would cause Macron to adopt this position in particular? Should we believe him when he says that he wants to “avoid the escalation of tensions, protect civilian populations, free the hostages and find political solutions”?

Up until this recent declaration, Emmanuel Macron has been anything but a friend to the people of occupied Palestine. From condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism in the presence of Bibi Netanyahu, Macron has been staunchly pro-Israel his entire political career. Macron has not just actively voiced his opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict; he has also worked to crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. In one such Orwellian maneuver, France under macron’s leadership banned all pro-Palestinian protests.

Obviously, the French Left and, frankly, all supporters of free speech, were horrified by this despicable directive and the many other disastrous decisions carried out by the French government under Macron. Unsurprisingly, in the most recent French election, the people of France, both left-wing and right-wing, seemed to agree that Macronism should be tossed onto the trash heap of history. As a result, Macron’s party, Ensemble, suffered a historic defeat at the hands of the New Popular Front and the National Rally with the New Popular Front (NPF) faring the best out of the three. According to the Intercept, one of the factors contributing to this victory for the NPF was the coalition’s support for Palestine.

Macron’s strategy of pandering to the Right by fear mongering about the “radial Left” clearly did not contribute to positive electoral success. According to CNBC, “Without the left vote in favor of Macron against Le Pen in 2022 and 2017, he would not be president, and he never really tried to do something together in the end with the people who made him president”. Macron failed because he counted on the Left to bend to his every whim. He did not confront the real possibility of the Left being able to stand alone, but the Left realized that they simply did not need Macron to defeat the Right. Everyone has heard the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and this seems to be the case with Emmanuel Macron. It is obvious that he truly does not care about the Palestinian people, yet he is willing to say what he believes will help him electorally including declaring his support for an arms embargo on Israel.

Nevertheless, Macron likely has other strategic reasons for this shift as well. Under Macron, France has done its best to maintain good relations with Western and non-Western powers alike. A recent example of this was the 2024 China-France summit which saw Macron pursuing, as some described, as strategic autonomy from the United States. Likewise, Macron has supported a hypothetical Ukraine-Russia cease-fire deal because he realizes that, according to Responsible Statecraft, “The vast majority of the electorate is clearly opposed to sending troops to Ukraine… Macron will be unwilling to risk hundreds of French lives for such a distant war nobody wants”.

Macron’s foreign policy strategy of realpolitik is all about appeasement. Macron believes that he must appease both the United States and the international community alike which is clearly opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza per the recent UN vote of 124 to 14 in favor of demanding an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank. Similarly, Macron believes that in order for his centrist party to remain in power he must placate both the French political Left and Right. Unfortunately for Macron, this strategy of fence-sitting has led to failure both electorally and geopolitically and will, naturally, continue to fail in the future.

Macron’s sudden shift in favor of an arms embargo is part of a greater political wager, which the French President believes will pay dividends in terms of international relevance and domestic support. His statement is inherently elitist and predicated on the idea that the French people are of low intelligence and will forget his history of support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For now, Macron’s dubious promises of peace and restraint are as insubstantial as the airy, delicate macarons his out-of-touch supporters so adore. And just like the dessert, they crumble easily under pressure, revealing the emptiness inside.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

J.D. Hster is an American writer born and raised in Arizona. He has previously written for Antiwar.com, Front Porch Republic, and CounterCurrents.org. You can find him on his Substack, Hester Unfiltered. You can send him an email at josephdhester@gmail.com. Follow him on X. Read other articles by J.D. Hester.