Featured – Informed Comment

Trumpocalypse: What Turbocharged Carbon Will Do to Our Children

Juan Cole — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 05:15:11 +0000

I am reprinting my column this week from Tomdispatch.com . Check in over there for the essential introduction of the invaluable Tom Engelhardt.

My name isn’t important, only what I have to say. I’m writing with a pencil because I need to conserve my batteries tonight. It’s Year 24 of Our Trump (though he himself, of course, is no longer with us, just his kids who are running things). I feel like I should try to explain our era to whoever opens this time capsule a century from now, though you may need scuba gear to get at it. A lot of records could be lost by then. The Chinese climate hoax was less of a hoax than we thought at the time. Forgive me, Donald, but despite what the New Evangelical Church says, you were anything but infallible — even if I still can’t say so publicly.

I’d like to move away from the coast, maybe even go north. But real estate in the interior is too pricey, especially at higher elevations away from the flood plains. Looking on the bright side, though, my bunker has held up alright so far, even during the usual Cat 7 hurricanes, and I’ve stocked plenty of canned soup. I do worry, though, about being submerged by a storm surge. No one wants to end up like those poor people in Galveston.

I only hope that the state police won’t find my solar panels, which charge my contraband batteries to keep the AC going down here. We’re all haunted by that Black August in Palm Beach. It turns out that they had 100 percent humidity then. Combine that with temperatures reaching 120º F and it dead-on kills you. Your sweat just can’t cool you down anymore and you end up with terminal heat stroke. Of course, most of them could have been saved by air conditioning if it hadn’t been for the blackout at that new nuclear plant. Bad timing. It turns out such plants use water for cooling and, that day, the local water was so hot they had to shut the plant down.

Tipping Point

There was an unforeseen climate tipping point we blundered into. Looking back, I now realize that the U.S. put out 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in the year before — yes, before! — the Second Advent of Our Trump. Horrific as that may have been, it was only about 11% of total global emissions, which hit 41.6 billion metric tons that year before the Second Advent (up from 40.6 billion tons in 2023). In short, we used up our carbon budget twice as fast as anyone had predicted, though I wasn’t paying attention at the time. My friends then would have thought me crazy if I had.

Even a few years ago, such facts and figures would have seemed unbearably wonky to me. I didn’t realize my wife would divorce me over them and I’d end up alone here in my bunker, doomscrolling the dark web looking for the catastrophes they don’t let the mainstream media report anymore. Don’t worry, I use a virtual private network and I don’t think the NSA can trace me. The long and short of it is that the world was going in the wrong direction even before Our Trump returned that second time and turbocharged that all too unfortunate trajectory.

Some people think we should flee the Big One. For me, it’s too late. The highways are a parking lot and the price of gasoline is too steep because of the fracked fields going dry. Maybe Our Trump shouldn’t have banned EVs. And I can’t fly out of here anymore (even if I could afford to). It’s too hot for the airplanes to take off. I hadn’t known it, but flying depends on the air having a certain thickness, and hot air has less volume because the molecules speed up and spread around. That’s what Alfred, my PAIC (Personal AI Chatbot), told me when I asked him. Not sure I understand, but it doesn’t matter. The planes are grounded, and so am I.

The Resurrection and the Triumph of Coal

When Our Trump and Secretary of Energy Joe Manchin put billions into reviving Big Coal, that shot U.S. emissions up to six billion metric tons of CO₂ in just a couple of years, then seven billion, and so on, launching an international trend as Trumpist-style parties took over ever more governments globally.

As you might expect, once Elon Musk bankrolled the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and helped put it in charge, its Fourth Reich held huge rallies in soccer stadiums where they piled up banned solar panels and wind turbine blades and burned them. Then they rounded up immigrants to use as slave labor in Germany’s revived coal mines. When the European Court of Justice ruled against them, the fascist government in Berlin promptly annexed Belgium. And that essentially marked the end of the European Union.

Russia also doubled down on coal. Even in the early 2020s, its Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia was one of the world’s largest coal producers. When Our Trump gave Eastern Europe back to Moscow, the Russian Federation prohibited electric cars and heat pumps so it could sell its oil and gas. Poland predictably returned to being all coal all the time and the Le Pen cartel in France, taking its marching orders from Russia, soon legislated the same prohibitions on green tech. Europe’s carbon dioxide production soon skyrocketed.

Buy the Book

But the worst problems lay in Asia, an area about which I’ve only recently started to get up to speed. The leaders of China and India insisted that they were damned if they would make sacrifices and risk labor unrest shutting down their coal industries, when the U.S. and Europe were planning to go all out promoting theirs. Imagine the Chinese communists being afraid of their own workers and, worse yet — something I hadn’t faintly realized then — but at the time half the coal mined in the world came from China and even before Our Great Leader came to power a second time, the Communist Party already had plans to mine a billion more tons of it per year.

With America’s implicit permission, Beijing promptly ramped up production. I found out that they were already putting out 70% of the world’s methane emissions from coal mines in the early ’20s. Even then, there were 1.5 million Chinese coal miners while more than 6% of that country still depended on coal plants for electricity. All those numbers only went up when the Communist Party, citing Our Trump, ramped up coal production, sending billions of tons more CO₂ and methane into the atmosphere. Alfred says methane is up to 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even if for a shorter period of time.

In the early part of this century, India was already increasing its coal-fired power plants. When the Hindu nationalists fell in love with Our Trump, however, they became yet more bullish on coal. Their CO₂emissions went through the proverbial roof. They say that, given the smog in New Delhi, the capital, nowadays you can’t see two feet in front of you on a typical day, and 10% of Indians have chronic bronchitis.

The Indians had rejected criticisms of all those carbon-dioxide emissions from low-lying Bangladesh as “anti-Hindu propaganda.” Our Trump used to say that we’d just get more top-notch beachfront property out of sea level rise, but now I realize that was a sick joke. If you keep heating up this planet, it melts the surface ice, which goes into the ocean and does indeed cause its level to rise. Warmer water also takes up more space, contributing to sea level rise. So, the Bay of Bengal did indeed rise to claim the capital, Dhaka, along with 20% of the rest of the country. Famine left tens of millions of its people gaunt or skeletal. When millions of Bangladeshi climate refugees then tried to get into India, its army committed what’s now known as the Great Bangla Genocide. Historians say killings on that scale had never been carried out before.

Goodbye to Trump Tower

At an old, banned National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration site on the dark web I found a document that said, “Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever — accelerating on a steep rise to levels far above any experienced during human existence.” That was from 2024 and whoever wrote it may now be in one of those reeducation camps for Beijing Ministry of State Security spies accused of promoting what the Trump Environmental Protection Agency branded “the climate hoax.” I might find myself there, too, if anyone discovers just how I feel these days.

I now realize that scientists have known for over a century that carbon dioxide absorbs the ultraviolet light reflected off the earth’s surface, keeping more of the sun’s heat in our atmosphere. I guess those UV rays used to hit this planet and then radiate back into outer space at a significantly greater rate, leaving us so much cooler than we are now. I never paid attention to any of this back in the twenties of this century. Since then, however, I’ve had time to get up to speed. After all, what else is there to do in this bunker?

Believe me, it was kind of embarrassing in 2034, even to me, when The Tower of Our Trump collapsed in Manhattan. Of course, as he said then, it was absolutely not his fault. Instead, he blamed the immigrant construction workers who built it, but they weren’t to blame, either. These days, at least three or four percent of the buildings in New York City are at risk from groundwater table rise. And it isn’t just that. Every time another big storm hits, flooding damages tens of thousands of buildings and turns the subway into a swimming pool.

Worse yet, more than a third of the buildings in New York are at risk from storm surges in year 24 of Our Trump. I read somewhere that the southern tip of Manhattan, the East Village, the Upper East Side, and the Tribeca and Canal Street areas now flood for some months of the year. Likewise, the Queens neighborhoods near Jamaica Bay are thoroughly waterlogged. Wasn’t Our Trump originally from Queens?

And to jump across what’s left of this country for a moment, today I caught someone on the dark web reporting from Phoenix, Arizona. It seems like the population there is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago. Half of the year now it’s dangerously hot and there isn’t enough water. And the electricity blackouts that take out your AC are evidently a nightmare and a half. Same problem, hot river water can’t cool the plant equipment.

That fellow reporting from Phoenix said those local diehards who refuse to leave call themselves Fremen like in the remake of the Dune film and say they need stillsuits. When the Proud Boys won the election for city council there, Our Trump told them to deep-six the local climate action plan, which he swore was for “pussies.” Painting everything white, he insisted, made the city look like a tomb and he wanted the urban tree cover to be cut down for firewood.

Trump’s will be done, as they say.

At least Phoenix is still there. Los Angeles wasn’t so lucky. As it got drier and drier every fall, the Santa Ana winds regularly whipped up wildfires, and one neighborhood after another was turned into cinders. When Beverly Hills went up in flames the way Pacific Palisades had 20 years earlier, that was the nail in the coffin.

The Big One?

Now, I spend my days thinking about the Big One, about how it could all go down. When Chinese forces fired on that American destroyer off Taiwan, the Trump dynasty went ballistic. They said they would bring pain to Beijing like the world had never seen before. They didn’t want to send in ships or troops though, claiming their Dad had been against wasting money on foreign wars.

That was when someone on Fox & Friends (the only “news” show still allowed) suggested a symbolic response, an attack on that big new Chinese military base on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The Trump family immediately ordered a nuclear strike there. I hear Tiffany was the only one who didn’t think it was a good idea. But it melted a lot of the Thwaites glacier, one of the biggest in the world, and the rest of it slid into the ocean. They say it will raise sea level by two feet globally and pretty darn quickly, too, because of that nuke melting so much surface ice. Count on one thing: it will truly be a Trumpocalypse.

That would put my bunker under, of course. I only hope it’s watertight.

Via Tomdispatch.com

The Qur’an’s Celebration of Diverse Skin Colors: Forms of Equality in the Muslim Scripture

Juan Cole — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 05:15:02 +0000

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:

—–

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.

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

Juan Cole — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 05:15:59 +0000

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:

“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

Juan Cole — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 05:15:12 +0000

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.

Biden Reveals Netanyahu’s Determination to Turn Gaza into Hiroshima, and his own Complicity

Juan Cole — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 05:17:02 +0000

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.

The Fatal Despair of Exile: An Iran they could neither Live in nor Leave Behind

Fariba Amini — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 05:15:33 +0000

Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams

to my reality: not dust and not fire. What

will I do without roses from Samarkand? What

will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar

stones? Our weight has become light like our houses

in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange

creatures in the clouds … and we are now loosened

from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what

will we do without exile, and a long night

that stares at the water? — Mahmoud Darwish

Newark, Del. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Ebrahim Nabavi was an Iranian satirist. On January 15, 2025, he took his life at the age of sixty four in Silver Spring, Md. He never felt at home, whether in Brussels or in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. He always wanted to go back to Iran. He was one of the reformists who took on the mantle to criticize the Islamic Republic. He was imprisoned. He shared the same block with other famous prisoners.

He did stand-up comedy. He wrote satirical views on different media outlets, first in Iran and later in Europe and in the U.S.

I didn’t always agree with him. He wrote an article to which I felt the need to reply. I wish I had known him better.

But what happens to luminaries who die in exile, either naturally or by taking their own lives?

In 1942, Stefan Zweig took his life in Brazil. He had seen the devastation of his homeland Austria and, later Germany, by the Nazis. He could not tolerate it.

Such people tend to be more sensitive than others. They are not weak but more emotional perhaps. Or this world of ours is too much for them to handle.

Gholamhossein Saedi, a renowned playwright, a physician from Tabriz was one of them. He immigrated to Paris. He never liked the city, even though he tried. He wrote his essays and tried very hard to become part of Parisian intellectual life. He said, I can relate to Paris, but Paris is not Tehran. My pen does not write well in Paris.

Gholamhossein Saedi; h/t Wikimedia

“All the buildings in Paris are like a theatre décor. I feel as if I am living in a post card,” he wrote.

In a way he also committed suicide. He died at the age of 49.

I met him in Tehran after the Revolution at his house and then, much later, in Paris. He was not the same man.

He was laid to rest in Père Lachaise where many famous people are buried. A few weeks ago, his tombstone was desecrated in a terrible way. Someone urinated on it.

Saedi was a famous person; he had been incarcerated by the Shah and then by the Islamic Republic. A few of his plays were turned into films, among them the Cow by the famous film maker, Dariush Mehrjoui.

Ebrahim Nabavi took his life perhaps because he could not stand to be away from his homeland.

Who knows?

What drives some people to suicide?

They both shared one thing: A long-lasting love for Iran. An Iran they could neither live in nor leave behind.

The Fatal Effort to Dismantle the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees

Dan Steinbock — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 05:15:33 +0000

Over the past 15 months, the international community has failed to prevent genocidal atrocities in Gaza. Dismantling the UN refugee agency would perfect the nightmare.

New York (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Early in the year, State Department officials briefed Joel Rayburn from the Trump transition team there could be a humanitarian “catastrophe” in Gaza when a new Israeli law barring contact with the UN refugee agency for Palestinians takes effect at the end of the month.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is the primary aid agency operating in the Gaza Strip. After more than a year of war, the UN and other aid organizations warn Gaza is close to uninhabitable. Tens of thousands of houses have been destroyed. More than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 107,000 injured. In the future, these numbers are likely to prove three to four times higher. And still worse could be ahead.

During President Trump’s first term, his administration gradually cut all U.S. assistance to UNRWA. The Biden administration later resumed U.S. aid to the agency. Last March, Congress passed a law that bans the U.S. from funding UNRWA until at least 2025.

Why should the horrific policy errors of the past be compounded with monstrous new policy mistakes?

The origins

The fate of UNRWA is one of the many dilemmas I scrutinized while working on The Fall of Israel (2025). After achieving an initial truce in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat, used it to lay the groundwork for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

Bernadotte tried to balance the different interests of the Israelis and Palestinians, the major powers in the region and the UN Partition Plan. Having witnessed the horrible outcome of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe and hoping to avert a catastrophe in Palestine, he also proposed that the UN should establish a Palestine conciliation commission and Arab refugees would have a full right to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory.

Just hours after his proposal, Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Jewish paramilitary Stern group, while pursuing his official duties. One of those who planned the killing was Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister of Israel, and the predecessor and onetime mentor of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current PM.

Ever since then, UNRWA has been a lifeline to generations of Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the adjacent Arab countries. Created as a purely temporary measure, UNRWA’s mandate has been subject to renewal every three years ever since.

Dan Steinbock, The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military. Clarity Press, 2025. Click here to buy.

Historically, the United States has been UNRWA’s largest financial contributor, with more than $7.3 billion since 1950. From the start, these contributions have been subject to a variety of legislative conditions and oversight measures, however.

Funding threats

Decades of U.S. policy toward Israel and the occupied territories, however ambiguous, was reversed almost overnight, when the Trump administration executed a series of dramatic policy changes in 2018 and canceled nearly all U.S. aid to the West Bank and Gaza, plus $360 million in annual aid previously given to the UNRWA. Subsequently, the Biden administration restored much of the funding, yet provided Israel weapons and financing for the mass atrocities of those the UNRWA funding was supposed to help.

After allegations surfaced connecting a few of the 30,000 UNRWA employees with the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks against Israel, the Agency fired nine staff members following a UN investigation. While it denied allegations that the agency has widespread links to Hamas, Congress enacted a March 2024 prohibition on U.S. funding to UNRWA (P.L. 118-47), which is set to last until late March, 2025.

To put things into context: The Empire State Building is said to have 21,000 employees. Imagine what would happen if six of them would be suspected of terrorism and therefore the entire building would have to be dismantled and all employees fired? It would be an absurd collective punishment for the alleged crimes of a few.

Worse, the Israeli laws passed on October 28, 2024 and scheduled to take effect 90 days later, would endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.

Millions of lives threatened

The new U.S. and Israeli legal measures emboldened Jewish settlers, particularly the Messianic far-right. In May 2024 they launched several attacks on the UNRWA headquarters, setting fire to the perimeter of the building in East Jerusalem. The attacks against UNRWA came after months of far-right settler protests outside of the building, following Israeli claims of UNRWA-Hamas links; accusations that lacked verification, according to U.S. intelligence.

Among the protesters was Aryeh King, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem and a prominent advocate for settlements, who called Palestinian Gazans “Muslim Nazis,” described them as “sub-human” calling for captured Palestinians to be “buried alive” in December 2023.

By the year-end of 2024, some 265 UNRWA staff had been killed in hostilities since October 7, 2023. Despite a record-high number that suggests intentional targeting, those behind the Israeli strikes have not been prosecuted.

More than 5.9 million Palestinians, including three of four in Gaza, are registered with UNRWA as refugees.

The stakes

In Gaza, nearly two million Palestinians are displaced and dependent on aid for food, water and medical services. U.S. officials say there’s no serious backup plan for providing humanitarian supplies and services to Palestinians. With the new U.S.-Israeli laws, senior UNRWA emergency officers presage social order in the Strip could collapse.

Here are some ways to preempt such disasters:

The White House should pressure Israel to suspend and nullify the impending adverse acts against UNRWA
S. Congress should lift current prohibition on UNRWA funding through March 2025
UNRWA’s funding should be broadened by the U.S. and internationally in light of the devastation and genocidal atrocities caused in Gaza
The Agency’s existence should be premised on the implementation of all relevant and existing UN resolutions both the U.S. and the international community have voted for.

How probable are such measures in the conceivable future? Highly unlikely.

What’s the alternative? Far worse, far worse.

Professor Katherine Franke on being Fired from Columbia Law School for Palestine Advocacy

Katherine M. Franke — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 05:15:40 +0000

Statement from Katherine Franke, January 10, 2025

For the last year and a half, as students at Columbia University and across the globe have protested against the Israeli government’s genocidal assault on Palestinians after the October 2023 attacks, a response that has resulted in horrendous devastation in Gaza, I have ardently defended students’ right to peaceful protest on our campus and across the country. I truly believed that student engagement with the rights and dignity of Palestinians continued a celebrated tradition at Columbia University of student protest. Instead, the University has allowed its own disciplinary process to be weaponized against members of our community, including myself. I have been targeted for my support of pro-Palestinian protesters – by the president of Columbia University, by several colleagues, by university trustees, and by outside actors. This has included an unjustified finding by the University that my public comments condemning attacks against student protesters violated university non-discrimination policy.

I have come to the view that the Columbia University administration has created such a toxic and hostile environment for legitimate debate around the war in Israel and Palestine that I can no longer teach or conduct research. Effective today, I have reached an agreement with Columbia University that relieves me of my obligations to teach or participate in faculty governance after serving on the Columbia law faculty for 25 years. While the university may call this change in my status “retirement,” it should be more accurately understood as a termination dressed up in more palatable terms. In exchange for my agreement to step down as an active member of the Columbia faculty, the university demanded that I surrender significant rights and privileges that are provided to all retired faculty as a matter of policy. To describe my change in status with the university as a “retirement” is both misleading and disingenuous. Last January I spoke out publicly, defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire in the Israeli military assault in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel, a country that is widely regarded to be engaging in a genocide against Palestinians.

In my statements, including an interview on Democracy Now! on January 25, 2024, I condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on our campus with a toxic chemical that caused such significant injuries that several students were hospitalized. In those statements I noted that the parties that sprayed our students with a chemical were Israeli students who were currently enrolled in Columbia’s joint degree program with Tel Aviv University, and who had recently performed military service in Israel. These facts were confirmed both by Columbia University and the Israeli students themselves. I also noted that there had been a history of attacks against Palestinian students and their allies on our campus by Israeli students who had recently completed military service, and that Columbia University was not taking this pattern of harassment seriously enough. I have long had a concern that the transition from the mindset required of a soldier to that of a student could be a difficult one for some people, and that the university needed to do more to protect the safety of all members of our community. Numerous students at Columbia have verified this history of harassment and that they had consulted me about it over the years.

In February 2024, two Columbia colleagues filed a complaint against me with the university’s Office of Equal Employment and Affirmative Action, charging that one sentence in my comments on Democracy Now! amounted to harassment of Israeli members of the Columbia community in violation of university policies. As the investigation of these complaints progressed, I insisted that Columbia University could not serve as a neutral investigator or judge of this matter since it was irretrievably biased against me. For example, in April 2024 during a congressional hearing, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked then-President Minouche Shafik what disciplinary actions had been taken against “Professor Katherine Franke from Columbia Law School, who said that ‘all Israeli students who have served in the IDF are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus.’” President Shafik responded, “I agree with you that those comments are completely unacceptable and discriminatory.” President Shafik was aware at that time that Congresswoman Stefanik’s summary of my comments was grossly inaccurate and misleading, yet she made no effort to correct the Congresswoman’s deliberate mischaracterization of my comments. After much insistence, Columbia agreed to appoint an outside investigator of the charges against me, and in late November 2024, the university issued a determination, based on the investigation, that my one sentence of comments on Democracy Now! violated EOAA policies because I referenced a history of harassment of Palestinians and their allies on our campus, and further found that I had retaliated against the complainants in this case by confirming their names to a reporter last summer.

Katherine M.Franke, via her Columbia Law School web page, where she is listed as “retired.”

I filed an appeal of that determination of guilt, and should the determination be upheld, the matter would go to my Dean to impose a sanction. Upon reflection, it became clear to me that Columbia had become such a hostile environment, that I could no longer serve as an active member of the faculty. Over the last year I have had several people posing as students come to my office to seek my advice about student protests while they were secretly videotaping me and then edited versions of those recordings were published on right-wing social media sites. After President Shafik defamed me in Congress, I received several death threats at my home. I regularly receive emails that express the hope that I am raped, murdered, and otherwise assaulted on account of my support of Palestinian rights. I have had law school colleagues follow me from the subway to my office in the law school, yelling at me in front of students that I am a Hamas-supporter and accusing me of supporting violence against Israeli women and children.

Colleagues in the law school have videotaped me without my consent and then shared it with right wing organizations outside the law school. And I have had students enroll in my classes with the primary purpose of creating situations in which they can provoke discussions that they can record, post online, and then use to file complaints against me with the university. I have come to regard Columbia Law School as a hostile work environment in which I can no longer enter the classroom, hold office hours, walk through the campus, or engage in faculty governance functions free from egregious and unwelcome harassment on account of my defense of students’ freedom to protest and express views that are critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, treatment that is widely regarded by the most prominent human rights organizations nationally and globally as a genocide.

I have also come to regard Columbia University as having lost its commitment to its unique and important mission. Rather than defend the role of a university in a democracy, in fostering critical debate, research, and learning around matters of vital public concern, and in educating the next generation with the tools to become engaged citizens, Columbia University’s leadership has demonstrated a willingness to collaborate with the very enemies of our academic mission. In a time when assaults on higher education are the most acute since the McCarthyite assaults of the 1950s, the University’s leadership and trustees have abandoned any duty to protect the university’s most precious resources: its faculty, students, and academic mission. As Columbia’s Board of Trustees has become constituted largely by hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and venture capitalists, the university has become more of a real estate holding concern than a non-profit educational institution. With this degradation of the university’s leadership has come, in some cases, an inability to resist pressures placed on the university by outside entities carrying a brief for the destruction of higher education, and in other cases, a shared commitment to a right-wing, and pro-Israel, ideology. My commitment to defending the university and our students rendered me an attractive target for the university’s opponents, and they weaponized the EOAA process to chill and punish my advocacy on the students’ behalf. I walk away from an active role on the Columbia teaching faculty now – and at some significant cost – not because this tactic has won, but rather because I aim to refocus my efforts on fighting for the rights and dignity of Palestinians, resisting the pull of a disingenuous distraction at Columbia. I will always be a teacher, and am always learning.

—

Katherine Franke was the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University, and Founder/Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. She serves on the Executive Committees of Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation’s leading scholars writing on law, sexuality, race, and religion drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.

Professor Franke also founded and served as faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project, a think tank based at Columbia Law School that develops policy and thought leadership on the complex ways in which religious liberty rights interact with other fundamental rights. In 2021, Professor Franke launched the ERA Project, a law and policy think tank to develop academically rigorous research, policy papers, expert guidance, and strategic leadership on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, and on the role of the ERA in advancing the larger cause of gender-based justice.

Professor Franke also led a team that researched Columbia Law School’s relationship to slavery and its legacies.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

Representative, it is Shameful that you Voted to Sanction the Justices of the Int’l Criminal Court for Netanyahu Arrest Warrant

Hugh J. Curran — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 05:15:31 +0000

Letter to Representative Jared Golden (D-ME)

Dear Representative Jared Golden:

Your decision to vote in favor of sanctioning the International Criminal Court of Justice, (ICC) which had ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocide in Gaza, was dismaying. This recent vote to sanction the ICC by Representatives of Congress erodes the ability of the high court to adhere to the principles of “ International Humanitarian Law, whose purpose is the reduce suffering during war”.

The legislators passed this so-called “illegitimate Court Counteraction act” by a vote of 243-140, mostly supported by 198 Republican legislators. The question is why you, Rep Golden, felt it necessary to join this charade in support of a far-right regime in the Israeli Knesset, led by a man who is roundly detested by most citizens of Israel.

The intent of the legislation was to sanction anyone who assists the ICC in its attempts…to prosecute a citizen of an allied country” (ie Israel). In this case, it involved posting arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for their leadership in promoting genocide in Gaza.

Perhaps it would be to your benefit to do some serious reading on the horrors taking place in Gaza, with 46,500 civilians having been killed, including 16,000 children, by Israel bombs, supplied by the U.S..

Several highly regarded Israeli historians have written about the plight of the Palestinians which has now fallen upon extreme destitution, as most of their homes, hospitals and schools have been destroyed by a continual barrage of bombing. In addition, even many tents, inhabited by refugee families in camps, have been bombed.

The Israeli military (IDF) is being urged on by the extremist leadership in the Knesset in a process of “ethnic cleansing”. Israeli historians have taken note of this attempt to exterminate a population, such historians as Avi Shlaim, an Oxford University scholar raised in Israel who served with the IDF; Shlomo Sand who teaches in Tel Aviv University and has written books including “The Invention of the Jewish People”; Ilan Pappe, an historian teaching at Reading University in the UK who has written “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”.

Rep Golden, with the above in mind, it appears that you are making decisions based on a very limited understanding of the history of Palestine. Are you aware that 5-6 million acres were expropriated from 750,000 Palestinians in 1947, forcing them into homelessness, and into becoming refugees, many having no choice but to move to Gaza.

It is shameful that you take the part of a right -wing cabal, led by a man totally lacking in empathy, not only for the thousands of children being killed by the IDF bombing, but also, until recently, for his unwillingness to negotiate in good faith, for the release of Israeli captives.

“Justice in Chains,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

There are over 160 organizations in Palestine/Israel involving hundreds of thousands of people devoted to building a shared society of cooperation, justice, equality and mutual understanding. Such groups as this are among a significant number of Israelis who are opposed to this genocidal bombing and killing that is taking place in Gaza.

Walls of separation between Palestinians and Israelis have, unfortunately, become a major issue. Such walls are a form of “Apartheid” which our admirable former President, Jimmy Carter addressed in his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”. He noted that Israel’s “construction of settlements” has been the primary obstacle to a comprehensive peace agreement. In addition, he wrote: “some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and [then] justify their subjugation and persecution [thus creating a sense] of hopelessness among Palestinians”

I would hope that you had kept in mind President Carter’s words when you voted for this repugnant piece of legislation: to sanction the ICC (International Criminal Court) indicates that you did not reflect very deeply on the issues. Instead you supported far-right leaders in the Israeli government. The question that is paramount in my mind is that you might have been persuaded by financial considerations. After all, you received from the “American Israel Public Affairs Cmte”, (AIPAC) the sum of $375,091, making Israel lobbyists your top Contributor for 2023-2024. (as reported by “opensecrets.org/members of congress).

It may be worthwhile for you to reflect on the ancestral home of many residents of Maine: Ireland, which recently filed a “declaration with the International Court of Justice (ICC) with their intention to intervene in [the] genocide case against Israel’s tactics in its war on Gaza. Ireland believes that every state, of the 189 nations who have signed the Genocide Convention, “has the right to intervene in the proceedings” based upon the principles expressed in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.

The essence of Ireland ‘s declaration is that “the crime [of genocide] may also be committed where a perpetrator– regardless of his or her purpose – knows (or should know) that the natural and probable consequence of these acts is either to destroy or contribute to the destruction of the protected group [ie Palestinians] , in whole or part, as such, and [yet] proceeds regardless.”

In conclusion, you still have an opportunity to develop a sense of fairness and justice for all, and not to allow yourself to be swayed by political contributions meant to influence your vote on crucial issues relating to Palestine and Israel.