US Bill Would Reverse ATACMS Order

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/12/07/us-bill-would-reverse-atacms-order/



December 7, 2024



A bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, if it were law, would reduce the danger of nuclear war over Ukraine by stopping U.S. ATACMS attacks on Russia, reports Joe Lauria.



By Joe Lauria
on Capitol Hill, Washington
Special to Consortium News



A bill introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) would prohibit the U.S. from sending long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine to be fired into Russia.

As U.S. personnel and satellites are required to fire the missiles from Ukrainian territory, Moscow considers it a direct U.S. attack on Russia putting it in a state of war with the U.S. which could lead to nuclear conflict.

To remove the potential of nuclear war, the proposed legislation seeks to end ATACMS launches into Russia. The bill reads:



(a) Prohibition.—For the period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act and ending at the close of January 20, 2025, notwithstanding any other provision of law, during any period for which a state of conflict exists between Ukraine and the Russian Federation—

1) no Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) may be transferred to Ukraine; and



(2) U.S. Military Services or intelligence agencies may not provide support to Ukrainian units operating High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HMARS) platforms utilizing ATACMS munitions to strike outside of internationally recognized Ukrainian territorial borders—

(A) targeting intelligence support;


(B) mission planning support; and


(C) any other type of support.

Several members of Congress and their staff said they were taken off guard by President Joe Biden’s reversal of his previous decision not to allow the use of ATACMS to be fired into Russia from Ukraine.

The members and their staff made these remarks during meetings on Thursday on Capitol Hill with former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter and activists of Code Pink, led by Medea Benjamin.

Biden Breaks With Realists

ATACMS missile firing in May 2006. (U.S. Army/Wikimedia Commons)

Biden had twice before sided with the Pentagon to avoid direct war with Russia. In March 2022 he overruled his Secretary of State Antony Blinken to scotch plans for a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine, which could have lead to direct conflict with Russia.

Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

Then in September Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.

Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

That was a clear warning that British and U.S. targets could be hit. Biden thus wisely backed off.

But after he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House last month, Biden suddenly switched gears allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance.

Higgin’s bill was introduced as H.R. 10218 on Nov. 21, but none of the other House members that Ritter and Benjamin met with on Capitol Hill had heard of it. Nor was it reported in the mainstream media.

“We found that commonsense is actually alive and living here in the halls of Congress,” Ritter told Consortium News. “Members of Congress and their staffs understand the danger of nuclear war. We found that there was a bill already written … that sought to achieve what we were trying to get them to do.”

Benjamin said: “We are excited to push this bill, which we just found out about. … It will not pass, but the idea is to get momentum for it so that message is coming out there that there are members of Congress who want to see this reversed and that in the next Congress, they will introduce it again with a lot more momentum.”

“To stop a nuclear war comes down to one issue,” Ritter said:


“The United States has to stop attacking Russian soil with American-made ATACMS missiles. Even though we use a Ukrainian cutout, it’s American provided, American targets and American intelligence. It’s the Americans attacking Russia. From the Russian perspective, the United States is at war with Russia … which has triggered their nuclear doctrine.”





Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

Chorus Calling it Genocide Grows

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/12/06/chorus-calling-it-genocide-grows/



December 6, 2024



More than a year into Israel’a assault on Gaza, Amnesty International joined those who have been calling it the crime of genocide against the Palestinian population.



By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams


The leading human rights group Amnesty International has said what United Nations experts, national leaders, and historians have been arguing for months: that Israel’s massive assault on Gaza amounts to the crime of genocide against the Palestinian population.

Amnesty, which had sharply criticized Israel’s U.S.-backed war but stopped short of labeling it genocide, detailed its findings in a sprawling new report released Wednesday titled, “’You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.”

The 296-page document features interviews with survivors and witnesses of Israel’s large-scale campaign of bombing, displacement, arbitrary detention and destruction of Gaza’s agricultural land and civilian infrastructure, interviews supplemented by an analysis of satellite imagery, video footage, and other visual evidence.

Israeli authorities, the group said, did not respond substantively to any of its inquiries between October 2023 — when the assault on Gaza began in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel — and October 2024. The report does, however, include quotes from Israeli officials and soldiers, including one who declared that “there is no innocence in Gaza.”

“Through its research findings and legal analysis,” the report states, “Amnesty International has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel committed, during the nine-month period under review, prohibited acts under Articles II (a), (b), and (c) of the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Amnesty said it also “found sufficient basis to conclude that these acts were committed with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, who form a substantial part of the Palestinian population.”

Agnès Callamard in 2019. (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general, said in a statement that her organization’s report “demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.”

“Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” said Callamard. “Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.”

Amnesty published its findings more than a year into an Israeli assault that has killed more than 44,500 people in Gaza, displaced almost all of the enclave’s population, and left many at dire risk of starvation and disease. Nearly 70 percent of the deaths verified by the U.N. have been women and children.

The human rights group’s report comes less than a month after a special U.N. committee said that the Israeli military’s actions in the Gaza Strip — including the obstruction of humanitarian aid and targeted attacks on civilians — bear “the characteristics of genocide.”

Amnesty echoes that assessment, pointing to Israel’s mass destruction of cultural and religious sites in Gaza, detention and torture, use of dehumanizing language against Palestinians, and—in the case of many soldiers—the open celebration of Palestinian suffering.




“Amnesty International considers that the pattern of conduct which characterized Israel’s military operations, coupled with the statements of Israeli officials and soldiers made in a context of apartheid, an unlawful blockade, and an unlawful military occupation, provide sufficient evidence of Israel’s intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such,” the report states.

Callamard called on nations continuing to provide military support for Israel’s assault, including the United States, to cease arms transfers immediately, as they are “violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide.”

“The international community’s seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a cease-fire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience,” said Callamard.

“Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel’s violations of international law,” she added. “States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel’s allies.”



Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

France Must Go From Africa Is The Slogan Of The Hour

https://popularresistance.org/france-must-go-from-africa-is-the-slogan-of-the-hour/





By Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. December 6, 2024
Chad and Senegal join Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger in demanding the withdrawal of the French military from their countries.

A surge of sovereignty continues to ripple across the Sahel.

A cascade of anti-French sentiment continues to sweep across the belt of the Sahel in Africa: joining Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, Chad and Senegal demanded in November that the French government withdraw its military from their territories. From the western border of Sudan to the Atlantic Ocean, French armed forces, which have been in the area since 1659, will no longer have a base. The statement by the foreign minister of Chad, Abderaman Koulamallah, is exemplary: ‘France… must now also consider that Chad has grown up, matured, and that Chad is a sovereign state that is very jealous of its sovereignty’. The key term here is ‘sovereignty’. What Koulamallah signals is that the countries of the Sahel are no longer satisfied by the symbolic independence – or flag independence – critiqued by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), what they want is genuine sovereignty.

Fanon’s book was published the year after the countries in the Sahel won their formal independence from France in 1960. But this ‘independence’ was shallow. It meant that these countries, from Senegal to Chad, would remain part of the Communauté franco-africaine (French-African Community, CFA) and that they would allow for the use of the CFA franc, anchored in France, as their currency, that they would allow French companies to remain in control of their economies, and that they would allow French troops to be based on their territory. In September 1958, a constitutional referendum was held across the French colonies of the Sahel, with only Guinea voting against the proposition for ‘independence’ from direct French colonial rule under the French neocolonial CFA. Forces that campaigned against joining the CFA and winning actual independence faced repression from Charles de Gaulle’s political and military establishment.

Djibo Bakary (1922–1998), the leader of the Union of Popular Forces for Democracy and Progress-Sawaba (Liberation) party and president of Niger’s Government Council, articulated the mood of the people in the late 1950s with his slogan, l’indépendance nationale d’abord, le reste ensuite (‘national independence first, the rest afterwards’). Bakary was invested in the idea of sawki (‘deliverance’), which meant not only relief from French colonialism but abolition of poverty and distress. In May 1958, the General Union of Workers of Black Africa (UGTAN) met in Cotonou (Benin) and called for the total end of the French colonial system. That July, at an inter-territorial conference in Cotonou, Bakary catapulted this demand into wider public discourse in Niger and across the Sahel. At the Sawaba party congress the following month, in August, Adamou Sékou reflected the sensibility against the French desire for colonial rule by other means: ‘this sense of our human dignity that too many of our metropolitan friends have difficulty admitting; a dignity that we can never renounce because the black Africans want to be themselves free first and foremost’.

If people are not allowed to be ‘themselves’ or free, Fanon wrote around the same time, then they will rebel. ‘The masses begin to sulk’, he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth. ‘They turn away from this nation in which they have been given no place and begin to lose interest in it’. The false nationalists, or flag nationalists, Fanon wrote, ‘mobilise the people with slogans of independence, and for the rest leave it to future events’. Six decades later, we are now in the midst of these ‘future events’.

From 19 to 21 November, hundreds of people from around the continent and the world gathered in Niamey, Niger, for the Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel. This was the first such conference since the military coups overthrew the French affiliated governments in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, and since the establishment in September 2023 of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). The conference, held at Niamey’s Mahatma Gandhi International Conference Centre, was coordinated by the West African Peoples Organisation (WAPO), Pan-Africanism Today, and the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA). Speakers at the conference included representatives of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP), people’s organisations from the AES as well as other countries in the Sahel, West Africa and the continent, and political leaders from Latin America to Asia. The three days culminated in the passage of the Niamey Declaration, whose last section bears quoting in full:


We commend the governments emerging from recent coups for adopting patriotic measures to reclaim political and economic sovereignty over their territories and natural resources. These measures include terminating neocolonial agreements, demanding the withdrawal of French, American, and other foreign forces, and undertaking ambitious plans for sovereign development.

We are particularly encouraged by these countries’ formation of the Alliance of Sahel States. This move revitalises the legacy of Pan-African leaders and represents a concrete step toward true independence and Pan-African unity.

These governments currently enjoy widespread support from their citizens, who drive and rally around these revolutionary actions. This unity is crucial for achieving democratic and patriotic ideals and is an aspirational development model for other African nations.

In conclusion, while much remains to be done toward the complete liberation of the Sahel states, we are optimistic that these governments, by continuing to listen to their people, will fulfil their objectives for total national liberation and contribute to the broader goal of a unified and free Africa.

In August 2022, fifteen social and political organisations in Niger joined together to form the M62 Movement (Sacred Union for the Safeguard of the Sovereignty and Dignity of the People, M62). They released a statement against the presence of the French military in Niger, which had been ‘driven out of Mali and [are] illegally present on our territory’, and called for their ‘immediate departure’. The movement asked ‘all citizens to form citizens’ committees for dignity’ across the country. One of the movement’s leaders, Abdoulaye Seydou, heads the Pan-African Network for Peace, Democracy, and Development, whose office is named after the Burkinabe leader Thomas Sankara (1949–1987). The office itself has a picture of Fanon with the quote, ‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it’. Seydou’s general political outlook at that time was that the misery of the people of Niger could not be overcome within the context of French neocolonial control. That is why the M62 began rolling protests against the French military presence and held a nightly cultural festival in Niamey to deepen the message for deliverance. These protests galvanised the military to move against the neocolonial administration of Mohamed Bazoum and install a government lead by General Abdourahamane Tchiani. This coup, like those in Burkina Faso and Mali, was widely celebrated in the country for having opened the door to what Fanon had called ‘future events’.

At the solidarity conference in November, Souleymane Falmata Taya, a leader of the M62 movement, said that the struggle in Niger was not being led by the military but by the youth and women. ‘All we want is to be treated as human beings’, she said. A few months earlier, she had said that the people of Niger appreciate the strides made by the government of Prime Minister Ali Lamine Zeine, a former minister of finance, but that the people must be vigilant and the government must be transparent.

In 1991, former left-wing student leaders formed the Revolutionary Organisation for New Democracy-Tarmouwa (‘star’ in Hausa) or ORDN-Tarmouwa. This political organisation has played a foundational role in the mass movements against the French neocolonial structure and the parasitic governments that enabled it. Mamane Sani Adamou, one of the founders of the ORDN-Tarmouwa, called the recent period a second awakening for the people of Niger. ‘We are living through a patriotic revolution, a struggle for a second independence’. The people of Niger need sovereignty over their monetary system, over their food production, and over their overall economic agenda. ‘We need to adopt a new strategy’, he said. ‘The difference today is that we are deciding on our own. We no longer get instructions from Paris. We take instructions from home’.

The fundamental word in the Sahel is sovereignty. If a dependent country such as Senegal or Niger fights for sovereignty, and if it tries to deepen its sovereignty, it will certainly need to dislodge the tentacles of the neocolonial structure. There can be no sovereignty with the neocolonial structure in place. At this point, imperialist intervention is inevitable. How the forces for sovereignty will deal with a sharp imperialist attack is to be seen. When the French tried to intervene against these popular military coups through the military forces of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 2023, this threat only accelerated the integration of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger into the AES. The first test was successfully overcome by the popular coup governments, who refused to surrender to an imperialist intervention. To escalate the demand for sovereignty through a struggle with the imperialist system, as is demanded by ORDN-Tarmouwa and M62, will necessarily force these governments to deepen their commitment to solving social problems.

Fanon’s ‘future events’ are now our present. So is the expectation of Sawaba’s Adamou Sékou, who said in 1958, ‘From Téra to N’guigmi, the refrain of independence must have its echoes in every village’. Independence, he said, ‘is the end of backward colonialism, with its slave-trading economy, its dispossessions, its social injustices. It is the end of the calculation of values based on the pigmentation of men. It is the end of prejudices. It is the resurrection of our people’.

Israel’s Genocide Day 426: Israel Bombs Tents In Gaza

https://popularresistance.org/israels-genocide-day-426-israel-bombs-tents-in-gaza/





By Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss. December 6, 2024


International condemnation grows.

Hamas accepts Egypt’s proposal to form an independent Palestinian committee to run Gaza after the war, while Israel bombs another tent encampment for displaced Palestinians in Khan Younis. Amnesty International declares Israel is committing genocide.
Casualties 44,580 + killed* and at least 105,739 wounded in the Gaza Strip, 59% of whom are women, children and elderly.
806+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
3,961 Lebanese killed and more than 16,520 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
Israel recognizes the death of 890 Israeli soldiers, policemen and intelligence officers and the injury of at least 5,065 others since October 7.****

* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on December 5, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.

** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of December 4, 2024.

*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on December 1, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.

**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
Key Developments

Gaza Israel kills 20 Palestinians in an airstrike on a tent encampment in the Mawasi area in Khan Younis on Wednesday.
Palestinian medics at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis tell the Anadolu news agency that bodies of Palestinians killed in Wednesday’s airstrike on Mawasi arrived “burned and some without heads.”
The Palestinian Civil Defense says that Israeli bombs on Mawasi caused fire to spread in the encampment and destroy tents.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society says that Israeli bombs in Mawasi destroyed tents and food warehouses in the encampment sheltering displaced Palestinians.
Israeli quadcopters kill a 16-year-old teenager and wound three medics at the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia in the north of Gaza.
Hamas announces its acceptance of Egypt’s proposal to form an independent committee to run the Rafah crossing point to the Gaza Strip and run reconstruction efforts after a potential end of the war.
Israeli president Yitzhak Herzog confirms that “intensified negotiations” are taking place to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, according to Israel’s channel 12.
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar says that there is “an opportunity to reach a prisoners’ exchange deal” in Gaza, following a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Malta.
The Israeli army issues an investigation suggesting the possibility that six Israeli captives in Gaza were killed by Israeli fire.

Lebanon Hezbollah’s Secretary General Naim Qassem says in a televised statement that the ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel is “an executive mechanism” of the 2006 UN resolution 1701, and not a separate or new agreement.
Hezbollah’s secretary general Naim Qassem says that the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon concerns only the south of the Litani river, and that the relationship between Hezbollah and the Lebanese state is an internal Lebanese issue.
Hezbollah’s secretary general Naim Qassem says that Hezbollah will “stand by Syria” in the battle against rebel groups who have taken over the cities of Aleppo and Hama since last week.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that the ceasefire with Lebanon does not mean the end of the war.
Lebanon says that Israel has breached the ceasefire more than 60 times since it entered into effect, through airstrikes and gunfire.

West Bank Israeli forces raid the city of Nablus and several surrounding towns and arrest 28 Palestinians.
Israeli forces raid the Al-Arabi hospital in Nablus and abduct a wounded Palestinian.
Israeli forces force several Palestinian families to leave their homes in the Naqara neighborhood in Nablus during its raid on the city.
Israeli settlers take over a Palestinian land in the village of Ain al-Hilwa in the northern Jordan Valley, threatening 12 Palestinian families with displacement.
Israeli settlers burn two Palestinian cars in Huwwara, south of Nablus, and a house in the building and a store in Beit Furik, east of Nablus.
Amnesty International accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza in new report

Leading international human rights organization Amnesty International has concluded, in a report it released on Wednesday, that Israel was responsible for acts of genocide against the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip.

The group said that it had been analyzing events and statements by Israeli officials for months, concluding that the legal threshold for the crime of genocide has been met. It is the first time that Amnesty has reached such a conclusion during an ongoing conflict.

Amnesty’s chief Agnes Callamard said in a statement on Wednesday that “month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” adding that “Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.”

The report comes more than a year after Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip following the Hamas-led October 7 attacks. At the time of the report’s release, the death toll in Gaza had surpassed 44,500, including 60% women, children and elderly, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Amnesty’s report arrives also a year after South Africa filed its case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, for charges of breaching the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. The ICJ ruled that Israel was “plausibly commiting genocide,” and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent it, though according to experts, no such measures have been taken, and Israel has in fact continued its genocidal attacks on Gaza for months after the ICJ ruling.

Amnesty’s own branch in Israel dissociated itself from the findings of its parent organization, clarifying in a long statement that it does not believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. However, it said that the killing and destruction in Gaza has reached “horrifying levels,” and called for investigation into possible crimes against humanity.

Israel, for its part, rejected the report. The spokesperson of the Israeli foreign minister, Oren Marmorstein called Amnesty “fanatical,” in a post on ‘X’, and called the report “fabricated” and “based on lies.”

The report comes a few days after former Israeli chief of staff and war minister, Moshe Yaalon sparked controversy in Israel after saying in a local TV interview that Israel is committing ethnic cleansing in Gaza, especially in the north of the strip, where since early October Israeli forces have killed and injured thousands, and forced tens of thousands more to leave south. Only 70,000 Palestinians remain in the north of Gaza, in comparison to more than 350,000 before October 7 of last year.*

Currently, around 1.8 million Palestinians, more than 98% of the population of the Gaza Strip, have been displaced multiple times during last year. The secretary general of the UN, Antonio Guterres described the situation in Gaza as “apocalyptic,” and has reiterated calls for an immediate ceasefire.



*In previous reports we indicated that the north of Gaza had 700,000 before October 7 of 2023. That number refers to all of the northern part of the strip including Gaza city, and not the area besieged since early October, which does not include Gaza City.

Private Israeli Security Firms Are Killing Free Speech On College Campuses

https://popularresistance.org/private-israeli-security-firms-are-killing-free-speech-on-college-campuses/





By Robert Inlakesh, MintPress News. December 6, 2024



Following the unprecedented proliferation of student-led protests against Israel’s war on Gaza across U.S. and international college campuses, educational institutions have found themselves under immense pressure to crush the movement from private Israeli security firms.

Following a surge of demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience in protests of Israel’s genocide in Gaza by students across U.S. college campuses, university administrations faced immense pressure to strengthen security measures and suppress the movement.

In response to escalating demonstrations against Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Board of Trustees authorized a $4 million contract with Strategic Security Corp. (SSC), a private security firm with connections to Israel. SSC highlights on its website that its “counter-surveillance experts have received formal training in Israel,” and its CEO, Joseph Sordi, has also undergone training there.

A more troubling development has surfaced at Concordia University in Montreal, where the administration has reportedly enlisted the services of not one but two Israeli private security firms. The first, Perceptage International, is led by Adam Cohen, a former Israeli soldier whose military pedigree appears to underpin the company’s operations. The second, Moshav Security Consultants, is managed by Eyal Feldman, a reserve major in the Israeli army and a former special advisor to Israel’s Ministry of Defense.

At Concordia University, students have taken to the streets in protest against the college’s decision to employ private security firms with contentious backgrounds. Social media posts from the demonstrators have unveiled allegations that these companies employ former IDF soldiers, mercenaries with battlefield experience in Ukraine, and individuals who once served in the Canadian Armed Forces.

As protests rage across Canada, the backlash against these student movements has taken on a sharper edge. Right-wing outlets like the National Post have stoked tensions, branding academic institutions as “Hamas HQs” in incendiary headlines. Simultaneously, allegations of anti-Semitism and accusations of terrorist sympathies have fueled a toxic atmosphere, with reports of racial abuse directed at anti-war student protesters intensifying the divisions.




In May, a tense standoff unfolded at UCLA’s campus when an encampment of students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza became the epicenter of disturbing violence. At the heart of the controversy was Apex Security Group and its parent company, Contemporary Services Corporation (CSC). Witness accounts described security personnel acting aggressively with protesters, with one incident involving a student being punched near Powell Library.

CSC is an affiliate of ASIS International, an association of security professionals with an exclusive chapter in Israel. Apex and CSC’s reach extends far beyond UCLA; their fingerprints can be found on college campuses across the United States.

According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the private security firm Magen Am, which employs former Israeli military personnel, played an active role in the violence that erupted during the UCLA student encampment in April. Protesters accused the firm of engaging directly in confrontations with student demonstrations.

Magen Am’s has ties to local law enforcement across the United States. The firm coordinates closely with the Los Angeles Police Department and, until August, was poised to receive $1 million in funding from the city.




Private security firms have become something of an Israeli specialty, their proliferation fueled by Tel Aviv’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories. That occupation has created a fertile environment, offering opportunities to profit from contracts to operate checkpoints and test new surveillance technologies, and often weapons, on Palestinians—a grim yet profitable proving ground. These security firms are often, like their U.S. and Canadian-based counterparts, staffed by former intelligence and army personnel, allowing them to take on tasks such as manning up to 49 checkpoints.

Across university campuses in North America, peaceful student encampments have become the targets of coordinated crackdowns by private security forces and police alike. These actions are carried out with the tacit approval—or outright endorsement—of university administrations eager to avoid scrutiny from special interest groups and overzealous lawmakers.

This has largely been attributed to the immense pressure influential donors and public officials placed upon universities. Despite efforts to comply with the demands leveled against them, concessions have not spared the heads of these institutions. Several academic leaders have been outright removed from their positions amidst the furor.

Harvard University President Claudine Gay and Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, in particular, faced scathing public criticism and were ultimately forced to step down.

Despite the overwhelming number of reported cases of racism and violent attacks being perpetrated by pro-Israel counter-protesters, police officers, and private security personnel, students critical of Israel’s war on Gaza at these universities continue to face accusations of being terrorism supporters and racist anti-Semites.





Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47

The Biden Family Of Liars

https://popularresistance.org/the-biden-family-of-liars/






By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News. December 6, 2024




Given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings, it follows that his intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself.


This is the sixth in Consortium News’s series on the extensive criminal allegations leveled at Hunter Biden in the course of the past year and President Biden’s apparent involvement in his son’s influence-peddling affairs. We conclude the series with this commentary on Joe Biden’s announcement last weekend that he has granted his son a full pardon. Our earlier reports can be read here, here, here, here and here .

With his shocking presidential pardon of his son Hunter, announced Thanksgiving weekend, when the maximum number of Americans would be watching football games and consuming potato chips, Joe Biden goes out just as he was the whole of his tatty career as a politician — a self-serving fiddler, indifferent to democratic process, ever going against his word.

Peter Baker, that inimitable (thank goodness) clerk The New York Times posts as its chief White House correspondent, tells us in Wednesday’s editions, “We don’t really know how history will remember Joe Biden. It’s too early to say, obviously.”

Actually, we really know at this point. Obviously.

Much has been made of Biden as the family man torn between his duties as president and his compassion for an errant son as the victim of perverted justice. The Times unfolded a singular line of argument on Tuesday.

“President Biden was deeply concerned,” Katie Rogers and Glenn Thrush reported, “that legal problems would push his son into a relapse after years of sobriety, and he began to realize there might not be any way out beyond issuing a pardon.”

No other way out. Here we have Joe Biden pimping the helpless suffering of his son’s addictions (to alcohol and crack). It is of a piece with Biden’s very regular references, always for similar political advantage, to the death of his other son, Beau, and the earlier deaths of his first wife and daughter.

The Rogers and Thrush piece now passes for news reporting Americans are invited to take seriously. It is one among countless others of its kind and quality that are together a measure of how the corruptions of the Bidens, father and son as well as others, have deepened an already severe crisis in American media and turned public discourse into bad afternoon television.

The reporting on the pardon has been defective since the White House released the Executive Grant of Clemency, along with Biden’s official statement, last Sunday. The Times, The Washington Post, the other major dailies and the broadcast networks all reported as if in unison that Joe Biden’s motivating concerns were the guilty verdicts Hunter Biden faces on gun-possession and tax-evasion charges.

Hunter was scheduled to be sentenced later this month. Biden père has told the nation his intent was simply to protect Hunter from a judicial system that political antagonists had unduly politicized.

From the president’s statement:


The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room—with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong.

You read a statement such as this and you have to wonder whether Joe Biden is capable of speaking truthfully in any circumstance bearing upon his personal interests.

The plea deal, negotiated in the summer of 2023, was indeed carefully negotiated — by Hunter’s attorneys and corrupt Justice Department prosecutors acting to keep the president’s son out of prison. The agreement collapsed not due to political pressure — there was none — but because an un-beholden judge with a commitment to the rule of law, Maryellen Noreika, read it and threw it out of court.

The feature of the plea bargain that moved Judge Noreika to put an end to the negotiated arrangement was its stipulation that Hunter would be immune from further prosecution not only for the matters then tried — the gun and taxes charges — but for any other crimes he may have committed. Preposterous, Noreika rightly concluded.
Special Treatment

Was Hunter Biden singled out as his father asserts? Not as his father asserts, but yes, singled out. He had made a mess of his life, breaching various laws while doing so, and was singled out for special treatment in a judicial system that plainly leaves elites and their families above the law.

This context is essential to understanding why Joe Biden decided — and one strongly suspects this was not, as reported, a decision Biden considered and took over the Thanksgiving weekend — to grant his son clemency in the manner he did. The operative language in the official document, the raison d’être of the case, is this:


Be It Known, That This Day, I, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., President of the United States, Pursuant to My Powers Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, of the Constitution, Have Granted Unto ROBERT HUNTER BIDEN A Full and Unconditional Pardon For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions)…

As is easily discerned, President Biden has reinstated, not quite verbatim but nearly, the terms of the plea agreement thrown out of court a year and a half ago — the agreement he defended in his official statement as fair and reasonable. He has granted his son precisely what Judge Noreika found objectionable — open-ended immunity for crimes “he has committed or may have committed or taken part in.”

The dates are what matter in this language. Hunter Biden assumed his infamous board seat at Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas supplier, in March 2014, a few months after the beginning of the period his father’s pardon covers. Years of bribe-taking, extortion schemes, and various other financial machinations involving Burisma and other foreign clients followed.

The tax and gun charges, to put this point another way, were all along minor matters next to the far graver allegations leveled at Hunter Biden. This is why guilty verdicts on the lesser infractions went through. They were effectively displays intended to demonstrate prosecutors’ integrity and seriousness as they ignored or otherwise quashed compelling evidence of grand-scale corruption.

As has been widely remarked, Hunter’s attorneys were almost certain to argue successfully for very light prison time, or none, during the sentencing hearings due this month. The gravity of the foreign business dealings allowed for no such prospect. Not only did these yield Hunter, his business colleagues, and his uncle, Joe’s brother James, tens of millions of dollars; the evidence implicating Joe Biden — “the Big Guy,” as Hunter referred to his father — is hard and plentiful.

It is possible, providing one has followed various investigations into Hunter Biden’s influence-selling schemes, to read the terms of Hunter’s pardon as Joe Biden’s upside-down admission of his son’s guilt.

And given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings — as an enabler and a beneficiary — it follows that Joe Biden’s ultimate intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself — that is, to protect himself by immunizing the master of all the malign ceremonies from prosecution.

It was more than a year ago, in September 2023, that the House speaker at the time, Kevin McCarthy, authorized the Oversight Committee to open preliminary hearings to determine if the full House should begin impeachment proceedings against the president for his alleged involvement in Hunter’s corruptions.
Plenty of Evidence

Evidence had already begun to accumulate. It was obvious Biden was headed into increasing political peril. And it was obvious that the White House and the Democratic machine, having concluded neither Biden nor his son could win at trial, would fight their corner in the media.

Evidence? What evidence? There is no evidence. This was the Democrats’ rather pitiful counter as the case against Biden mounted.

In mid–December 2023 the full House voted to begin a formal investigation into the president’s alleged involvement in Hunter’s affairs, based on the accumulating evidence, implicating the president as a participant in and/or a beneficiary of Hunter’s years of manifestly criminal conniving during his father’s years as Barack Obama’s vice-president and during the post–Obama interim before Joe was elected president in 2020.


This evidence was formidable. It included very considerable email and text message archives, 36,000 pages of bank records, and 2,000 pages of the Treasury Departments “suspicious activity reports,” which cover irregular international bank transfers. There was also testimony from Hunter’s business partners, federal agents, federal attorneys, and Mykola Zlochevsky, the chief executive of Burisma Holdings.

The investigators’ inventory included records of gross payments to the Biden family, chiefly Hunter and Joe’s brother James, of more than $20 million during the years (2009–2017) Joe was vice-president. Investigators also uncovered a network of more than 20 shell companies the Biden family set up to disguise payments received from influence-peddling schemes Hunter conducted in Ukraine, Russia, China, and elsewhere.

At that time of the House vote a year ago, Oversight made clear those areas where it would further focus its attention. These include what Hunter Biden and James Biden took in from their dealings with various foreign entities and where it went, the numerous occasions when Joe met with Hunter’s foreign partners, and the extent to which the Biden White House and the Justice Department had obstructed or suppressed investigations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.

Among the most significant findings of F.B.I. and IRS investigators was a payment of $10 million Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly extorted from Burisma in an even split, as described by Zlochevsky in several interviews with an F.B.I. informant, and a payment of $240,000 James made to his older brother immediately after a Chinese equity investor paid Hunter several million dollars.

As the stonewalling at the Biden White House continued, mainstream media began reporting, again in unison, that the House hearings had reached a dead end. But the propaganda operation against the Oversight Committee was failing.

More than two-thirds of Americans, according to a poll conducted earlier this year, thought the House hearings should continue; half of these respondents — 34 percent of those surveyed — “think Joe Biden is guilty of corruption and should be impeached.”

Hunter Biden agreed to testify under oath last February, an appearance he refused until he was threatened with contempt of Congress. The House Ways and Means Committee, which also had an investigative function in the Biden case, voted on May 22 to release 100 pages of new evidence showing that Hunter Biden lied three times during that testimony.

The evidence of this was provided by Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, the two IRS investigators who had previously presented the Oversight Committee with evidence of the Biden family’s corruption.

It is a family of liars, we can now conclude. Joe Biden, having denied any involvement in his son’s businesses on multiple occasions, was proven to have lied on just as many. He went on to assert numerous times that he would not pardon his son.

Strangely enough, he said in the official statement issued last Sunday, “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word… .” This is Joe Biden. He has operated for half a century on the understanding that people believe his lies if he repeats them often enough.

It is likely that the case against the Biden crime family, as various commentators have taken to calling it, is closed, but it is too early to conclude this with certainty. Biden’s pardon is perfectly legal, but a court challenge would be legal, too, if the House or another entity chose to mount one.

While Biden’s intent appears in part to have been to protect himself a well as his son, it does not automatically follow that he cannot be investigated after he leaves office.

How far the House investigations would go, where they would lead, always hinged partly on political will: Oversight and Ways and Means had sufficient evidence to try Joe Biden, but it was never certain the full House would advise the Senate to do so. And it was highly unlikely the Senate, with a Democratic majority until last month, would proceed to trial.

The damage the Bidens have done to an already failing republic is very formidable. This is chiefly due to the gross corruption of the Justice Department, from attorney general on down, and straight through the F.B.I.’s leadership. As I have written elsewhere, when the judicial system decays, the road to failed-state status opens.

Democrats are fond of asserting that Donald Trump, in his second term, will politicize the Justice Department as a matter of avenging his enemies. One hopes not, although Trump has plenty of cause to seek revenge for actual politicized prosecutions against him.

It was the Democrats who corrupted Justice, in large measure to protect Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. And this will be the deepest, most enduring scar they leave on the American polity.





Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @Thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

Russia On Brink Capture 5 Key Cities Ukraine Admits; Oreshnik to Belarus; Romania Annuls Election

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgos9EXLSps