Juan Cole – Informed Comment https://www.juancole.com Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion Tue, 21 Jan 2025 06:40:59 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.10 The Qur’an’s Celebration of Diverse Skin Colors: Forms of Equality in the Muslim Scripture https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/celebration-equality-scripture.html Tue, 21 Jan 2025 05:15:02 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222636 I am reprinting part of this essay that appeared in Renovatio, the literary magazine of a small Muslim liberal arts college — Zaytuna — in Berkeley, Ca. The Qur’an is the most hated book in America that no one has ever read, and there are already new visa bans on Muslims deriving from severe misunderstandings of Islam and its scripture:

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The long struggle in the United States for racial equality, which has thrown up memorable and impassioned phrases, such as “We shall overcome,” “I have a dream,” and “Black lives matter,” has sought procedural equality for minorities, who systematically have been treated differently from the white majority by police. In this light, it has struck me that the Qur’an is remarkably uninterested in any distinction between the self and the barbarian, or between white and black. 

The world of late antiquity, to which the Qur’an was preached, was on the whole hostile to the idea of equality. The rise from the fourth century of a Christian Roman Empire under the successors of Constantine did nothing to change the old Greek and Roman discourse about civilized citizens and “barbarians.”1 In Iran’s Sasanian Empire, Zoroastrian thinkers and officials made a firm distinction between “Iran” and “not-Iran” (anīrān), and there was no doubt for Sasanian authors that being Iranian was superior in every way.

Still, these civilizations at the same time transmitted wisdom about human unity. Socrates cheekily pointed out that pretenders to the robes of Greek nobility had countless ancestors, including the indigent, slaves, and barbarians as well as Greeks and royalty (Theaetetus 175a). Zoroastrian myth asserted that all mankind had a single origin in the primal man, Gayomart. 

The Qur’an was recited by the Prophet Muĥammad in the early seventh century, on the West Arabian frontier of both the Eastern Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran. In Arabian society of that period, one sort of inequality was based on appearance and on a heritage of slavery. Children of Arab men and slave women from Axum (in what is now Ethiopia) remained slaves and were not acknowledged by their fathers. Those who became poets were called the “crows of the Arabs.”2

Some sorts of hierarchy are recognized in the Qur’an, but they are not social or ethnic. Rather, they are spiritual. In late antiquity, those who argued for equality did not necessarily challenge concrete social hierarchies but rather concentrated on principle and on the next life.3 For Islam, as for Christianity, it is ethical and moral acts of the will that establish the better and worse (though the Qur’an does urge manumission of slaves as a good deed and promulgates a generally egalitarian ethos). The Qur’anic chapter of Prostration (32:18) says, “Is the believer like one who is debauched? They are not equal.” The two are not on the same plane, not because of the estate into which they were born or because one is from a civilized people and the other a barbarian but because of the choices they have made in life. In short, this kind of inequality is actually an argument for equality. The Chambers (49:13) observes, “The noblest of you in the sight of God is the most pious of you.” This is a theme to which we will return.


“Bilal,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2024

Reading the Qur’an requires attention to what scholars of literature call “voice.” It switches among speakers with no punctuation or transition. Sometimes the omniscient voice of God speaks, but sometimes the Prophet does, and sometimes angels do or even the damned in hell. In chapter 80 (He Frowned), the voice of God addresses the Prophet Muĥammad personally, using the second-person singular. The passage is a rare rebuke of the Messenger of God by the one who dispatched him. In my translation, I have used small caps for the pronouns referring to Muĥammad. Initially, the divine narrates Muĥammad’s actions in the third person, but then God speaks directly to His envoy about delivering the scripture, here called “the reminder”:

  1 HE frowned and turned away,
  2 because the blind man came to HIM.
  3 How could YOU know? Perhaps he would purify himself,
  4 or is able to take a lesson, and so would benefit from the reminder.
  5 As for those who think themselves self-sufficient,
  6 YOU are attentive to them;
  7 but YOU are not responsible if they will not purify themselves.
  8 As for those who come to YOU, full of earnest striving 
  9 and devout,
10 YOU ignore them.

The great historian and Qur’an commentator Muĥammad b. Jarīr al-Ţabarī (d. 923) quoted the Prophet’s third wife,`Ā’ishah, on the significance of this passage. She said, “‘He Frowned’ was revealed concerning Ibn Umm Maktūm. He came to the Messenger of God and began to say, ‘Guide me.’ The Messenger of God was with pagan notables. The Prophet began to turn away from him, addressing someone else. The man asked [plaintively], ‘Do you see any harm in what I say?’ He replied, ‘No.’” Despite his being blind, `Abd Allāh b. Umm Maktūm was later made a caller to prayer in the Medina period, according to another saying of`Ā’ishah. The man’s name underlines his marginality in Arabian society of that time. He is the son (Ibn) of “the mother (Umm) of Maktūm (his older brother).” Arabian names were patriarchal like those of the Norse, for instance “Erik Thorsson.” It was an embarrassment to lack a patronymic, to be defined only by one’s mother’s name. The blind`Abd Allāh b. Umm Maktūm would have been named with regard to his father if anyone had known who the latter was. Thus, he was a person of no social consequence in the small shrine city of Mecca.

The plain sense of these verses is clear, whether this anecdote is historical or not. The Prophet is scolded by the voice of the divine for having turned his back, annoyed, when the blind nobody dared make a demand on his time and attention. What is worse, `Abd Allāh did so while Muĥammad was giving his attention instead to a gathering of the wealthy Meccan elite—those who thought they were “self-sufficient” and did not need God’s grace. The voice of the divine points out that Ibn Umm Maktūm’s soul was just as valuable as the souls of the pagan magnates, and it was possible that, with some pastoral care, he might accept the truth. The Prophet Muĥammad preached, according to the later Muslim tradition, from 610 to 632, and this incident is thought to have occurred early in his ministry. Was it 613? It is implied in the Qur’an that God intervened right at the beginning of Muĥammad’s career to underscore that the mission work had to proceed on the basis of the spiritual equality of all potential hearers.

Skin color was used in many ways by authors in the ancient world and not always as a sign of inferiority or superiority, but there were undeniably forms where discrimination played a part. When the widely read Greek medical thinker Galen at one point described “Ethiopians,” he mentioned their outward attributes, such as frizzy hair and broad noses, but then went on to describe them also as mentally deficient.4 Solomon’s bride in the “Song of Songs” describes herself as black: “I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.” This description caused late antique Christian authors some puzzlement, since they did not associate blackness with beauty or other positive attributes.5 The ancient world did not have a conception of race, a modern idea that emerged in its contemporary sense in the nineteenth century; it only had a set of aesthetic preferences around appearances. But some authors clearly did invest blackness with negative connotations.

“Inasmuch as God’s creativity inevitably bestows form on the formless and difference on primal uniformity, the Qur’an says, wherever in the world we see variety, we can be assured that God is behind it.”

The story of Antarah b. Shaddād illustrates inequalities based on skin color in pre-Islamic Arabia. Arabic speakers and the Sabaic speakers of Yemen along the Tihamah, the western coast of Arabia, had thick social relations with Africans across the Red Sea. These included commerce but also slave taking.`Antarah’s father, Shaddād of the `Abs tribe, had his son with an enslaved Ethiopian woman, Zabībah, but did not manumit him in his youth and did not initially consider him his son. The legends say that `Antarah was in love with a girl named `Ablah, but his low estate made that match impossible. The story goes that when the `Abs tribe was attacked by an enemy tribe, Shaddād realized they needed the martial skills of `Antarah and offered to free him if he would lead them to victory. He did so, but even after becoming free, he is said to have faced prejudice from his kinsmen because of his mixed heritage and darkness. Poetry attributed to him contains this verse: “My color bothers not me nor Zabībah’s name / Since my enemies are short of my ambition / If I survive I will do wonders and I will / Silence the rhetoric of the eloquent.”6

In the Qur’an, in contrast, differences of outward appearance between human beings are seen as positive, and indeed as a sign of God. The chapter of Rome (30:22) says, “Among his signs are the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and complexions. In that are signs for those who know.” Why should the varying skin colors of human beings be thought a sign of God and therefore be endowed with a positive valuation? 

Ancient Near Eastern cosmology had an equivalent of our contemporary notion of the Big Bang. In the beginning, the universe was undifferentiated. The divine not only created the cosmos but set in train the process whereby amorphous emptiness was given form and things were distinguished from one another. Genesis 1:2, echoing Mesopotamian creation myths, says that in the beginning, “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” God then separated light from darkness and brought distinct creatures into being. Making things different from one another is thus a key component of God’s creative activity. 

In the Qur’an, as well, God is called the “splitter of the heavens” as a way of saying that He is the creator. To create is to make things multiple, to break up dull sameness. Likewise, He splits the primeval world of sea into saltwater oceans and sweet water lakes, a notion that goes back to ancient Mesopotamia. The chapter of the Ants (27:61) asks, “Is He not the one who made the ground stable and fixed in its midst rivers, and anchored it, and erected a barrier between the two seas?” The Creator (35:12) says of the result of this divine creation-through-differentiation, “The two seas are not equivalent. One is fresh and sweet, potable for drinking. The other is salt and bitter.” 

Inasmuch as God’s creativity inevitably bestows form on the formless and difference on primal uniformity, the Qur’an says, wherever in the world we see variety, we can be assured that God is behind it. Hence, that human beings come in a plethora of hues, being bronze, black, fair, and everything in between, is a sign that God has created them and differentiated them. The human rainbow bears witness to the existence of a providential creator, since the state of nature is monotony.

The chapter of the Creator (35:27) waxes eloquent on this principle: “Have you not seen how God sends down rains from the heavens? ‘Then We produced thereby multi-colored fruit. And in the mountains are veins of white and red of various hues, along with black basalt.’” This passage glories in the splash of color visible everywhere in the natural world, not merely for its beauty but because the strands of white quartz, red granite, and ebony basalt testify to the divine mind that spun them out from a primeval dull gray abyss. The French modernist Édouard Manet (d. 1883) observed that the “painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds.” In the Qur’an, there is a similar sentiment about God.

The following verse (35:28) continues this theme: “And among the people and animals and livestock are also a range of colors. Only the learned among His servants stand in awe of God. God is almighty, forgiving.” Like the chapter of Rome, this verse in the chapter of the Creator celebrates the “range of colors” visible “among the people.” Mountains are colorful, fruits are colorful, animals and livestock are colorful, and people are colorful. The spectrum of complexions situates human beings in the kaleidoscopic world of nature. That the differences in skin color are theophanic and are signs of God, however, can only be perceived by the people with knowledge. It is not a commonsense insight but requires study . . . .

Read the rest at Renovatio

See also now Rachel Schine, Black Knights

]]> Let us be Joyous about the Release of all Hostages, Israeli and Palestinian, in Gaza Peace Deal, including 21 Palestinian Children https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/palestinian-including-children.html Mon, 20 Jan 2025 05:15:59 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222625 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – It is wonderful news that on Sunday and Monday Israeli and Palestinian hostages were released as part of the ceasefire deal brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the United States.

Hamas released Romi Gonen, 24, kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023. Emily Damari, 28, was kidnapped from her home in the Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Likewise Doron Steinbrecher, 31, a veterinary nurse, was taken from the same kibbutz. The delight and relief of their families are the delight and relief of all of us. Their kidnapping was a war crime, for which — among other things — Hamas leaders were indicted at the International Criminal Court.

The Palestinian hostages released by Israel need to be celebrated with just as much joy and fervor. 90 of them — 69 women and 21 children — had to wait an extra 8 hours for their freedom, while Israeli troops forbade displays of joy by their friends and relatives outside Ofer Prison, and even attacked them with flash bombs, and rubber-coated metal bullets.

Many of the Palestinians let go on Monday just after midnight were prisoners of conscience, jailed for social media posts just as they might have been in Russia or Saudi Arabia. Palestinians, being stateless and without citizenship, do not have the right to have rights. They have no right to free speech. The sort of idle expression of sentiment on Facebook that barely draws a yawn in the United States can mean years of confinement.

Al Jazeera (itself banned in Israel) reported that one of the Palestinian hostages released was journalist Rula Hassanein. Let us consider her case. The Committee to Protect Journalists explained that on March 19, Israeli military personnel — without providing any justification — detained Hassanein, an editor for the Ramallah-based Wattan Media Network, at her residence in the Al-Ma’asra neighborhood of Bethlehem in the Palestinian West Bank. She was manacled and hooded, and had her laptop and cell phone seized. She was then transferred to Damon Prison, near Haifa.

CPJ said that Hassanein appeared before the Judea military court, located in Ofer Prison northwest of Jerusalem, on March 25. She was charged with incitement on social media and supporting a proscribed organization deemed illegal under Israeli law.

Remember, she is a working journalist published in several regional newspapers. She was arrested for tweeting or retweeting her distress at the Israeli total war on Gaza. She did not do anything that would be punished with jail time in a democratic country. She didn’t present a clear and immediate danger of violence. She is the victim of a brutal foreign military occupation.

ICJ explained, “The health of Hassanein’s prematurely born daughter Elia, who suffers from a weak immune system and ulcers on her palms, feet, and mouth, has declined since her mother’s arrest as she was exclusively breastfed, according to those sources and medical reports, reviewed by CPJ. Hassanein gave birth last year to twins, Elia and Youssef, two months early due to health complications, and lost Youssef three hours after birth, those sources said.”

I just hope Elia, her daughter, is OK after so many months of separation from her mother.

Al Jazeera writes that another released Palestinian hostage, an 18-year-old girl, had also been arrested for her social media posts. It quotes her mother:

    “I’ll hug her right away. Of course, I’ll hug her. At first, it’ll just be tears of joy…

    “They accused her of incitement because of posts she wrote on Facebook,”

She called the charges “ridiculous.” And so they were.

Al Jazeera added, “The father of another young man who hasn’t yet been released told AFP his son was also arrested for social media activity.”

So some of the 90 let go today were guilty of using social media while Palestinian.

Since Israeli military and prison authorities routinely practice torture, some of those released bear physical and psychological scars that will haunt them the rest of their lives, no less than do the released Israeli hostages.


“Release,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reported, “In media statements, the female prisoners spoke about the harsh conditions they endured in Damon Prison, including abuse, beatings, isolation, and humiliation, which exacerbated their suffering and added to the pain of imprisonment.”

The newspaper says that many of the women seemed feeble and unsteady as they got off the vehicles carrying them.

It should be remembered that large numbers of Palestinians are taken hostage by the Israeli military, which lodges no charges against them and provides them with no opportunity to defend themselves. That is why they are legitimately called “hostages” rather than prisoners. There is no due process.

Since American news outlets won’t mention any of these Palestinian hostages or their ordeal, let me at least give their names here from Al-Sharq. The transliteration is done by ChatGPT:

Walaa Khaled Fawzi Tanjeh
Nawal Mohammed Mahmoud Abd Fteihah
Rawda Mousa Abdel Qader Abu Ajamiya
Aseel Osama Omar Shahadeh
Tamara Moammar Hussein Abu Luban
Nafisa Rashid Fareed Zorba
Yasmin Abdul Rahman Rasheed Abu Sarour
Khaleda Kana’an Mohammed Jarrar
Jenin Mohammed Taha Amro
Fatima Nemer Mohammed Rimawi
Zahra Wahib Abdel Fattah Khadrajj
Fatima Mohammed Suleiman Saqr
Dalal Mohammed Suleiman Khoshib
Mona Ahmed Qasem Abu Hussein
Bushra Jamal Mohammed Taweel
Raida Janem Mohammed Abdel Majid
Rana Jamal Mohammed Eid
Marjana Mohammed Mustafa Heresh
Halima Faik Suleiman Abu Amara
Rola Ibrahim Abdel Rahim Hassanein
Balqees Issa Ali Zawahreh
Dohaa Azam Ahmed Al-Wahsh
Shaimaa Mohammed Abdel Jalil Rawajbeh
Salwa Atiyah Mahmoud Hamdan
Fatima Yousef Ali Al-Farakhneh
Roz Yousef Mohammed Khweis
Haneen Akram Mahmoud Al-Mas’aeid
Jihad Ghazi Ahmed Joudeh
Nidaa Ali Ahmed Zghaybi
Amal Ziyad Omar Shojaiya
Ayat Yousef Saleh Mahfouz
Ola Mahmoud Qasem Joudeh
Lubna Mazen Saleem Talalwah
Hadeel Mohammed Hussein Hijaz
Rasha Ghassan Mohammed Hijjawi
Wafaa Ahmed Abdullah Nemer
Zeina Majd Abdel Rahim Barbour
Naheel Kamal Mustafa Masalmeh
Tihani Jamal Abdel Ashour
Aya Omar Yousef Ramadan
Shaimaa Omar Yousef Ramadan
Israa Hader Ahmed Ghoneimat
Donia Ishtayeh Marouf Ishtayeh
Alaa Jadallah Nabhan Qadi
Khitam Aref Hassan Khabaybeh
Alaa Sameer Harb Abu Raheimeh
Aseel Mohammed Jamal Eid
Shatha Nawaf Abdel Jabbar Jarab’ah
Bara’a Hatem Hafez Foqaha
Saja Imad Saad Daraghmeh
Dania Saqr Mohammed Hanatsheh
Raghad Waleed Mahmoud Amro
Raghad Khader Deeb Mubarak
Al-Yamama Ibrahim Hassan Al-Hraynat
Ashwaq Mohammed Eyad Awad
Hanan Ammar Bilal Malwani
Eman Ibrahim Ahmed Zeid
Saja Zuheir Mohammed Al-Maadi
Israr Abdel Fattah Mohammed Al-Lahham
Maiser Mohammed Said Al-Faqih
Abeer Mohammed Hamdan Ba’ara
Samah Bilal Abdel Rahman Soof
Lateefa Khaled Ramadan Mashasha’
Margaret Mohammed Mahmoud Al-Ra’ee
Alaa Khaled Mohammed Saqr
Israa Mustafa Mohammed Berri
Lana Farouq Naeem Fawaleh
Tahreer Badran Badr Jaber
Abla Mohammed Othman Abdel Rasool
Fahmi Mohammed Fahmi Faroukh
Ahmed Waleed Mohammed Khashan
Jamal Ibrahim Salama Al-Atimeen
Ahmed Bashar Jumaa Abu Alya
Mohammed Anan Fawzi Bashkar
Ibrahim Sultan Ibrahim Zummar
Abdul Rahman Amjad Jameel Khedair
Maw’ed Omar Abdullah Al-Hajj
Essam Ma’moon Mohammed Abu Diab
Thaer Ayoub Rasheed Abu Sarah
Qasem Eyad Mohammed Ja’afreh
Yousef Jamal Eyad Al-Hraymi
Saeed Mazeed Saeed Saleem
Mahmoud Mohammed Dawood Al-Yawat
Firas Jihad Ahmed Al-Maqdisi
Abdul Aziz Mohammed Abdul Aziz Atauna
Fadi Bassam Mohammed Hindi
Osama Nasser Jubran Abduh Atayah
Ayham Ali Issa Jaradat
Adam Khalil Ibrahim Hadrah
Laith Muhammad Naji Kumail.

]]> UK Parliamentary Committee to British Gov’t: Recognize Palestinian State for Sustainable Peace https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/parliamentary-palestinian-sustainable.html Sun, 19 Jan 2025 05:15:12 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222598 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The British Parliament has the longest history of any parliament, since it was the first, so it has had time to make a lot of mistakes. On the other hand, it is generally far less an embarrassment than the U.S. Congress.

This principle was demonstrated on Friday when the International Development Committee (do we even have one of those?) issued a Report on the situation in Israel and Palestine.

The committee is not a court, and noted its lack of ability to render a legal verdict, but said: “In line with a growing list of experts, we believe that there is a plausible risk that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza may have included grave violations of international humanitarian law, which has given rise to accusations of genocide.”

They add, “this Report also calls on the Government to set out further details and a timeline for the recognition of a Palestinian state — a statement of intent to match the rhetoric of this and previous Governments. This recognition, alongside safety and security for Israel, are necessary for a sustainable and long-lasting peace.”

Although there are individual congressmen who might say such a sensible thing, I can’t imagine a whole committee of our US House of Representatives coming up with such language.

The Committee is entirely correct. As I pointed out in my book, Gaza Yet Stands, the statelessness of the Palestinians is a constant obstacle to their well-being. Stateless people don’t have the right to have rights. You can make a treaty with them, like the 1993 Oslo Accords, which Israel signed off on, and then just entirely renege on it. What are they going to do? Sue?

That Palestinians have no citizenship in a state also means that there is no real reason for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adhere to the terms of the ceasefire deal his cabinet approved just before midnight on Friday. Apparently incoming president Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff flew to Israel last weekend and read Netanyahu the riot act. Netanyahu blew off and humiliated Joe Biden for over 15 months, but he folded after some choice expletives from Witkoff.


Photo by @nomundodejr Jr.: https://www.pexels.com/photo/thames-river-panorama-with-big-ben-and-westminster-bridge-london-england-17487791/

I’m not sure why, but Trump appears to have felt that it was important for his image that the Gaza War wind down before his inauguration, and Netanyahu decided not to cross him, even though the Israeli cabinet did not want this deal and Netanyahu did not want the deal. The members of the far, far right Jewish Power bloc, the Israel equivalent of Neo-Nazis, resigned in protest, including Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The problem is that the long 3-stage peace process in Gaza will only succeed if both Hamas and the Israeli government abide by it. And we can’t be sure that Trump or Witkoff will keep the pressure on.

Moreover, when they speak about Palestine, many US congressmen and senators appear to have a nervous breakdown and they start shouting AIPAC slogans and denigrating and dehumanizing Palestinians, so you can’t expect this Congress to play a positive role in upholding the peace process.

If Washington loses interest or turns even more malicious than usual, and given that the Palestinians are stateless and without any power or leverage, then Netanyahu can restart his extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza at any time.

The UK parliamentary committee continued, “We call on the Government to treat the removal of Palestinian civilians from the West Bank, through co-ordinated destruction of property and settler violence, as forcible transfer, which is illegal under international law, rather than simply displacement. Finally, we restate our view that it is imperative that UNRWA — United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East — be permitted to carry on its UN-mandated role across the Occupied Palestinian Territory unimpeded, in the light of laws passed recently by the Israeli Knesset that will effectively ban UNRWA from the region.”

Beyond Gaza, the committee is worried about the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from Occupied Territories, including the Palestinian West Bank, and urges the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer to recognize these actions as severe violations of international law. [They violate the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.]

Member of Parliament for the Labour Party Sarah Champion heads the committee, and has a long record of speaking out about Palestine — and of visiting there.

]]> Shamash! Feeling Helpless https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/shamash-crude-strikes-2.html Sun, 19 Jan 2025 05:02:32 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222579 ]]> Panel #31

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]]> Biden Reveals Netanyahu’s Determination to Turn Gaza into Hiroshima, and his own Complicity https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/netanyahus-determination-complicity.html Sat, 18 Jan 2025 05:17:02 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222574 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – President Joe Biden’s interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell demonstrates that the project of right-wing Zionism, led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is to repeal post-World War II international law and take the world back to the jungle of the 1930s and 1940s, when the world’s great powers polished off 65 million people.

Scott D. Sagan, a Stanford political scientist, and researcher Katherine E. McKinney point out that the Truman administration’s bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 would violate international law as it is accepted today. That acceptance is not just verbal or aspirational. It is embodied in treaties adopted by national legislatures and therefore has a binding character. The US Senate, for instance, ratified the Charter of the United Nations together with the Statute of the International Court of Justice on October 24, 1945.

McKinney and Sagan write of Hiroshima, “More than 70,000 men, women, and children were killed immediately; the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed. Such a nuclear attack would be illegal today. It would violate three major requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions: the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution”

They explain later that these principles, codified in the first protocol to the Geneva Conventions (ratified by 174 countries), require combatants “to not intentionally attack civilians (the principle of distinction or noncombatant immunity); to ensure that collateral damage against civilians is not disproportionate to the direct military advantage gained from the target’s destruction (the principle of proportionality); and to take all feasible precautions to reduce collateral damage against civilians (the precautionary principle).”

The Israeli military repeatedly and publicly violated all three of these principles in its total war on Gaza civilians, as has been documented by the International Criminal Court, South Africa, Ireland, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

The Likud Party and the parties to its right that dominate the current Israeli cabinet desperately wish to undo all these three principles, which were legislated by the international community after the end of WW II. That is because they are committed to genociding the Palestinian people, and international law is very inconvenient to this aspiration.

In 1945, President Truman alleged that Hiroshima was a legitimate military target. But McKinley and Sagan point out that, while Hiroshima housed certain military-related industrial sites, an army command center, and troop embarkation docks, the bustling metropolis of over 250,000 residents -— men, women, and children -— was far from being “a military base”… In fact, they say, fewer than 10 percent of those who perished in the city on August 6, 1945 were members of the Japanese armed forces.

Alas, they say, U.S. planners of the attack made no effort to “minimize, as much as possible, the killing of civilians.” They say that the historical record of discussion by principals such as Robert J. Oppenheimer, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves and Secretary of War Henry Stimson shows that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was purposefully detonated above the city’s residential and commercial hub, rather than above valid military targets, to amplify the psychological impact on the Japanese population and the leadership in Tokyo.

International humanitarian law has subsequently been erected and widely adopted by treaty in order to prevent the Trumans, Oppenheimers, Groves’s and Stimsons of the future from ever behaving this way again with impunity.

1948 and after are a new era, where, fitfully and in a staccato fashion, the human community is trying to turn a page on the mind-boggling butchery of the mid-20th century, which included the horrors of the genocide of Europe’s Jews.

Netanyahu and his cronies want to pocket the good will toward Jews created by revulsion at the Holocaust, but to hold themselves harmless from the very legal strictures, such as the Geneva Conventions, that underpin the sentiment of “never again.”

Thus, Israel and the United States are signatories to the United Nations Charter and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Last summer, the ICJ ruled that the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank has departed so starkly, in so many ways, and for so long from the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of occupied populations that it is now illegal.

I can’t tell you how inconvenient for a Greater Israel aggressor like Netanyahu this ruling is. It is also inconvenient for the US government, Netanyahu’s patron and enabler, which is why Washington has ignored the ruling, despite its treaty obligations to abide by it.

Netanyahu’s response to this series of inconveniences? Tear it all down! He wants to abolish international humanitarian law.

The United States, on the other hand, still has uses for IHL, as in its campaign against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.


“Hiroshima on the Mediterranean,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

These are Biden’s revelations to O’Donnell about his discussions with Netanyahu regarding the Israeli use of disproportionate force in Gaza:

Biden: “When I went to Israel immediately after the attack led by Hamas, eight days later or whatever it was, I told him that we were going to help. And I said, ‘But Bibi, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities.’ And he said to me, ‘Well you did it. You carpet bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war.’”

Biden: “I said, ‘But that’s why we came up with the [United Nations]. New deals by which—how what we do relative to civilians and military.’”

O’Donnell: “So he was comparing twenty-first-century war tactics, battle tactics, with World War II?”

Biden: “Well, what he was really doing was going after me for saying, ‘You can’t indiscriminately bomb civilian areas. Even if the bad guys are there. Even if the bad guys are there, you can’t take out two, 10, 1,500 innocent people in order to get one bad guy.'”

“And he made the legitimate argument, his perspective -— ‘Look, these are the guys that killed my people. These are the guys that are all over in these tunnels. Nobody has any idea of the miles of tunnels that are down there. The only way to get to them is to take out the places under which they got to the tunnels.’”

Needless to say, Netanyahu’s argument that he was justified in razing all civilian objects in Gaza to the ground to get at some Hamas fighters was not in fact “legitimate.” Like the Hiroshima holocaust, these tactics violate current international legal norms, which is why there is an arrest warrant out for Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court.

That Biden thought Netanyahu’s argument was “legitimate” tells you everything you need to know about the hypocrisy, bankruptcy and sheer evil of current American foreign policy. As Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling said at The New Republic, “it’s bad.” Biden had some successes domestically. His eager and steadfast pursuit of a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza will haunt his legacy, and will forever stain the escutcheon of the United States of America.

]]> Crime of the Century: CBS’ 60 Minutes Exposes the Biden Administration’s Complicity in Gaza Genocide, Interviews the Whistleblowers https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/administrations-complicity-whistleblowers.html Mon, 13 Jan 2025 05:15:14 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222505 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The amazingly brave Cecilia Vega at CBS’ 60 Minutes did a groundbreaking segment on Sunday in which she interviewed US government officials involved with the Israeli war on Gaza, who resigned in protest either explicitly or implicitly. She also screened the sort of horrific footage of the aftermath of Israeli attacks in Gaza, with the gory parts left in. Here is the transcript.

American television news has almost completely ignored Israeli (and US) war crimes in Gaza, which have been taking place daily, but are not apparently deemed “news” at CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBS, ABC, etc.

Here let me just excerpt some statements by the former US government officials:

Hala Rharrit was an American diplomat working on human rights: “What is happening in Gaza would not be able to happen without U.S. arms. That’s without a doubt.”

“I would show the complicity that was indisputable. Fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of– of ch– mostly children. And that’s the devastation. It’s been overwhelmingly children.” (Emphasis added.)

“I would show images of children that were starved to death. In one incident, I was basically berated, “Don’t put that image in there. We don’t wanna see it. We don’t wanna see that the children are starving to death.”

Hala Rharrit: The level of anger throughout the Arab world, and I– I’ll say beyond the Arab world– is palpable. Protests began erupting in the Arab world, which I was also documenting, with people burning American flags. This is very significant because we worked so hard after the war on terror to strengthen ties with the Arab world.

[Cecilia Vega: You believe that this has put a target on America’s back, you’ve said.]

Hala Rharrit: 100%.

Hala Rharrit: Yes. I don’t say them lightly. And I say it as someone that myself has survived two terrorist attacks. My first assignment was in the U.S. Embassy in Yemen. I survived a mortar attack. I say it as someone who has worked intensely on these issues and has intensely monitored the region for two decades.

After three months of the Gaza War in 2023, she was told her reports were no longer needed.

Josh Paul spent 11 years as a director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political – Military Affairs.

Josh Paul: Most of the bombs come from America. Most of the technology comes from America. And all of the fighter jets, all of Israel’s fixed-wing fleet– comes from America.

Josh Paul: There is a linkage between every single bomb that is dropped in Gaza and the U.S. because every single bomb that is dropped is dropped from an American-made plane.

Josh Paul: After October 7th, there was no space for debate or discussion. I was part of email chains where there were very clear directions saying, “Here are the latest requests from Israel. These need to be approved by 3:00 p.m.”

Josh Paul: “This came from the president, from the secretary and from those around them.”

Josh Paul: I would argue exactly the opposite. I think the moment of October 7th was a moment of incredible worldwide solidarity with Israel. And had Israel leveraged that moment to press for a real, just and lasting peace, I think we would be in a very different place now in which Israel would not be facing this increasing isolation around the world and in which its hostages would be free.


“America in Gaza,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, Clip2Comic

Andrew Miller was the deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs.

Andrew Miller: The Israelis were using those bombs in some instances to target one or two individuals in densely packed areas. And in enough instances, we saw that was in question, how Israel was using it. And those weapons were suspended.

Andrew Miller: There were conversations from the earliest days about U.S. desires and expectations for what Israel would do. But they weren’t defined as a red line.

Andrew Miller: I’m unaware of any red lines being imposed beyond the normal language about complying with international law, international humanitarian law, the law of armed conflict.

Andrew Miller: I believe the message that Prime Minister Netanyahu received is that he was the one in the driver’s seat, and he was controlling this, and U.S. support was going to be there, and he could take it for granted.

Andrew Miller: There is a danger– that if the U.S. was not providing support to Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran would see that as an opportunity to go after Israel. However, we could have said, we are taking this step because we believe this class of weapons– is being used inappropriately. But if you use this moment to accelerate your attacks against Israel, then we are going to immediately lift our prohibition.

Andrew Miller: Yes. I think it’s fair to say Israel does get the benefit of the doubt. There is a deference to Israeli accounts of what’s taken place.

Here is the segment on YouTube:

Biden policy on Israel-Gaza sparks warnings, dissent, resignations | 60 Minutes

]]> New Solar Installations double to 24.5 Gigawatts in 2024 in India — World’s 5th Largest Economy https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/installations-gigawatts-largest.html Sun, 12 Jan 2025 05:15:44 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222490 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – India installed 24.5 new gigawatts of solar power in 2024, along with 3.4 gigawatts of new wind. That represented a doubling of solar installations over 2023. This surge in renewables installations is unprecedented in the country’s history.

In all, India has roughly 100 gigawatts of installed solar capacity. The United States, with an economy 7.5 times as big and vastly more resources, only has 179 gigawatts of solar.

India saw 18.5 gigawatts of new utility-scale solar projects implemented, nearly 3 times as much as in the previous year.

Indians installed 4.59 gigawatts of rooftop solar, impelled by a government program called the Prime Minister’s” Free Electricity Program [Muft Bijli Yojana],” or solar for residences, which was put into effect by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It successfully promoted 700,000 rooftop solar installations within 10 months of its start. It aims to put rooftop solar on 10 million homes and to spend $8.7 billion.

The big increase in solar installations is thought to be in part because of government incentives and in part because of a steep drop in the price of Chinese solar panels this past year.

India is emerging as one of the more important countries in the world by nominal over-all gross domestic product (GDP). The IMF is projecting its 2025 GDP to be $4,271,922, only a bit less than Japan, which in turn has a somewhat smaller economy than Germany. India is therefore the world’s fifth largest economy, ahead of Britain, France, Italy and Canada. Of course, India’s enormous population is such that its per capital GDP is small. But if we are talking about the place of the country as a whole, it is becoming one of the leading world economies.


“Rashtrapati Bhavan,” Digtial, Dream / Dream v3, Clip2Comic, 2024

India’s transition to green energy is therefore consequential. It is currently the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States. Again, its per capita emissions are small.

Renewables make up 43.6% of the Indian electricity grid, a more impressive number than can be offered by China or the United States. It amounts to 209 gigawatts in total. India hopes to put in 500 gigawatts of renewables by 2030.

Total installed renewable capacity surged nearly 14% in 2024.

India imports half of the natural gas it uses, and spent some $15 billion a year on these imports in 2024. The Financial Express reports that India’s natural gas import costs rose by 18.5% last year, reaching $7.7 billion in the first half of the current fiscal year. That was up from $6.5 billion in the same period last year. This increase is attributed to a higher demand, particularly from city gas distribution companies and the power sector.

India is still poor on a per capita basis and would benefit from not having to spend $14 billion a year on fossil gas imports, especially since it could have the same energy for free from the sun.

Further, being beholden to Trump, the UAE, and Nigeria for imports of Liquefied Natural Gas is a security issue for India, which has such abundant solar that it does not need to put itself in that situation. US sanctions have already forced India to back off imports of Russian fossil gas.

]]> Palestinian Deaths from Military attacks in Gaza 69% Higher than Estimated, 60% Women, Children, Elderly https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/palestinian-military-estimated.html Sat, 11 Jan 2025 05:15:58 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222479 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A team of researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Yale has published a study in The Lancet finding that the Gaza Ministry of Health substantially underestimated war deaths in Gaza. Casualties were 69% higher than reported.

The current estimate by the Ministry of Health for Palestinians killed by Israeli weaponry in their total war on Gaza is 46,000. The Lancet study suggests the true number today is closer to 70,000.

Researchers said that they used data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health hospital records, a Ministry of Health online survey, and obituaries that appeared on social media to estimate the true number of deaths between October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024.

The researchers then used statistical models to look at the overlap between these sources. After combining the results, they calculated the estimated total deaths during this period. They then compared age- and sex-specific death rates with those from 2022. This method has been used successfully in other conflict zones.

The team estimated 64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury (i.e. by military weaponry) during the study period, October – June. The Ministry of Health estimate at that time was 37,877 (that is, the actual number was 69% higher)

AFP interviewed Patrick Ball, a sociologist of human rights on whose doctoral committee I served years ago, about the method. He has used it to estimate deaths in conflicts “in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.” AFP writes that he told the agency that “the well-tested technique had been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached ‘a good estimate’ for Gaza.”

Women, minors under 18, and the elderly over 65 comprised 59.1% of those killed militarily, or 28,257 deaths among those for whom sex and age information was known.

It should be pointed out that only a small number of military-age men were members of the paramilitary al-Qassam Brigades or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, so that the percentage of innocent civilians among the dead is much higher than 59%.


Juan Cole, Gaza Yet Stands. Informed Comment KDP. Click here to Buy or order the paperback from your local bookstore. All proceeds go to UNICEF for their Gaza work.

In the U.S. Afghanistan war, the Watson Institute at Brown estimated that some 271,000 people were killed, including 71,344 civilians. That would indicate that 29.6% of those killed were innocent civilians. Over-all, the civilian kill ratio is most wars is 30% to 50%, so the Israeli military in Gaza is clearly much more brutal than the norm.

The researchers found peaks of deaths in the first three months of the Gaza War, in autumn 2023. This was a time when we know that the Israeli air force dropped hundreds of 2000-lb. bombs on residential complexes. A United Nations study found that in many of these attacks, no clear military target was visible.

The casualties spiked again in June, during the Israeli campaign against Rafah, which the Biden administration and the International Court of Justice had forbidden as a red line because it was the last part of the Gaza Strip that still had the urban infrastructure to keep people alive and healthy. The Israelis razed it and expelled its inhabitants, many of them being displaced for a third or fourth time, to already-destroyed neighborhoods in the center.

The team found that deaths were under-reported by 41% by the Ministry of Health. Most of the newspaper reporting misunderstood this way of stating the statistic. What they found was that casualties were 59% more numerous than the Ministry of Health reported.

The study only treated deaths from military actions and weaponry (“traumatic”) deaths. Last July, the Lancet published an estimate that as of that moment, 186,000 Palestinians in Gaza would die over time because of infectious diseases, exposure, and lack of water and food, as a result of Israeli strategy and tactics. That number is surely much higher now.

]]> Yes, Human-Caused Climate Change Contributed to the Burning of Los Angeles https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/climate-contributed-burning.html Thu, 09 Jan 2025 05:15:23 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222454 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Los Angeles wildfires destroyed over 1,000 buildings, forced thousands from their homes, and left at least five dead as of this writing. The Pacific Palisades fires destroyed many historic structures, including the home of legendary comedian and actor Will Rogers (d. 1935). Reading some of his quotes, I conclude that the sorry episode would not have surprised him in the least. People who know me know that I have a California dimension — my father was stationed out there on a couple of occasions in the army, and I did a degree at UCLA. I’m devastated. Some of my friends had to flee their homes.

As the experts quoted by Matt McGrath at the BBC point out, climate change certainly played a role in the destruction of Pacific Palisades and Altadena yesterday in Los Angeles, though its precise effect has yet to be calculated.

He cites the Director of the Centre for Wildfire Research at Swansea University, Professor Stefan Doerr, saying, “While fires are common and natural in this region, California has seen some of the most significant increases in the length and extremity of the fire weather season globally in recent decades, driven largely climate change.”

Doerr goes on to caution that the precise contribution of human-caused climate change to yesterday’s conflagration has yet to be estimated. Still, the only question is how much our carbon dioxide and methane emissions turbocharged the wildfires, not whether they did. Was it by 10% or 30%? There is some indication it could have been by 40%! (See below).

Climate is long-term weather patterns. Weather is a one-off. A two-day downpour can be weather. A long-term increase in rainfall over previous averages would be climate change.

The ways in which weather contributed to the Los Angeles catastrophe are easier to specify. California had a twenty-year drought that ended two years ago. The plentiful rainfall since then caused a lot of shrubs and greenery to spring up. Then, this spring, summer and fall turned extremely dry. The December rains did not come. Usually there would have been 4 inches by early January. It was under an inch. That water would have tamped down the fire risk. Then, the Santa Ana winds blowing west through the mountains were unusually strong and hot, and hit places they usually missed.


“Blaze Stalks L.A.,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024.

But why has this year been so dry, creating abundant “fuel” for the wildfire demons?

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, pointed in a scientific paper to the way in which burning fossil fuels and putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has caused more frequent dry autumns, and caused them to be drier for longer. Since the Santa Ana winds hit in fall and winter, if the dry season is extended, it increasingly overlaps with the winds. That is a recipe for disaster, as we just saw. Swain cites another study of the years 1960 – 2019 showing that November has gotten consistently drier over the past 60 years. We saw that again this fall. But it wasn’t weather, since there is a clear pattern of desiccation in the 11th month. It is climate.

Worse, Swain thinks we may see more and more of this deadly overlap as humans heat up the earth.

He also cites studies showing that winter rains may be concentrated later in the year. You could have some showers in October in the old days, and November could be wet. Increasingly, those months are dry, and rains fall December through February, maybe especially January-February.

I’ve long noticed how much it rains in the Raymond Chandler mysteries set in Los Angeles. Except for February, I don’t remember it being that rainy, cool and miserable in L.A. At first I thought it was because Chandler was British and he was importing his weather imagery to southern California. But after reading Swain I wonder if the rain wasn’t just spread out more in the 1930s and 1940s, and whether there didn’t used to be more of it.

As for the percentage by which human-caused climate change has ramped up the dangers, we have a study that suggests a particular number. A 2022 paper by Linnia R. Hawkins et al. subjected the teens of this century to a computer study comparing the current likelihood of autumn wildfires in southern California, northern California and Oregon to what it would be without human-caused climate change. They found a 40% increase in the likelihood:

    We show that while present-day anthropogenic climate change has . . . increased the likelihood of extreme fire weather indices by 40% in areas where recent autumn wind-driven fires have occurred in northern California and Oregon. The increase was primarily through increased autumn fuel aridity and warmer temperatures during dry wind events. These findings illustrate that anthropogenic climate change is exacerbating autumn fire weather extremes that contribute to high-impact catastrophic fires in populated regions of the western US.

The authors, however, cite literature that does not find a strong climate change effect for changes in the Santa Ana winds. It is possible that those 100-mile-an-hour gales hitting places they usually don’t, such as Altadena and Pasadena, were just weather. But combined with the shift of rains later in the year and the extra heat and aridity in the fall being driven by climate change, they proved deadly.

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