Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, October 18, 2023

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Join the national march in solidarity with Palestine!

 

Now is the time to stand with the besieged people of Palestine! Gaza is being bombed by the hour. Its people are denied food, water, and electricity by Israel. Tens of thousands more people are likely to die. We must ACT! People are in the streets every day in their local cities and towns. Now we must UNITE! Join the tens-of-thousands people, from every corner of the United States, who are converging for a truly massive National March on Washington D.C. on Saturday, November 4.

 

Today, the Israeli military deliberately bombed a hospital where thousands of people had taken refuge. The death toll is staggering, and the Biden administration has announced that it is preparing 2,000 troops to support Israel after having already deployed an aircraft carrier battle group and war planes.

 

Israel, with the full backing of the U.S. government, is carrying out an unprecedented massacre in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians are being killed with bombs, bullets and missiles paid for by U.S. tax dollars. This is the latest bloody chapter in the colonial project of Israel, founded with the objective of dispossessing Palestinians from their land.

 

Join us in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, November 4 at 1pm to demand: End the Siege of Gaza! End all U.S. aid to Israel! Free Palestine!

 

Initial co-sponsoring organizations:

 

Palestinian Youth Movement

ANSWER Coalition

American Muslim Association

The People’s Forum

National Students for Justice in Palestine

Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition

Party for Socialism and Liberation

U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)

U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR)

Maryland2Palestine

 

Endorse the march here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdIoioEdHTwb1d8Qx9ZbH2a-gsh3aDa3hWSiSMPsAR0scgIfw/viewform?pli=1

 

Buses and transportation centers are being organized in cities and towns across the country. Check back here for updated information about transportation options.

 

Please make an urgently needed donation to support solidarity work with Palestine in this pivotal moment:

https://www.answercoalition.org/donate?utm_campaign=palestine_11_4_national_demo_a&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition

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Jewish Doctor Speaks Out on Israel and Palestine

Dr. Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian physician and author describes his own life experience and expresses his view on the situation in Israel and Palestine.

“I’m personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived. My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and most of my extended family were killed. I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Auschwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army…and then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.

“There’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent—that’s what’s called the ‘Nakba’ in Arabic; the ‘disaster’ or the ‘catastrophe.’ There’s a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel you’re not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it’s at the very basis of the foundation of Israel.

“I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now it’s much worse than it was then.

“It’s the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century. I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, can’t even visit!

“So, then you have these miserable people packed into this, horrible…people call it an ‘outdoor prison,’ which is what it is. You don’t have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, that’s a complete falsity. You think the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.

“And ‘anybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite’ is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true.”

—Independent Catholic News, October 16, 2023

https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/48251

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TERRORISM IN THE EYES OF THE IMPERIAL BEHOLDER - a poem

 

the French word

for rabies

is

la rage -

rage or outrage

 

and 

the French have a saying -

a man who wants to get rid of his dog

accuses it of spreading rabies

 

the people of Gaza

treated as inhuman animals

worse than dogs

are charged

with terrorism

 

come to think of it

what an honor !

 

world war two's resistance

against nazi extermination

was designated

as terrorism

by the Axis allies

 

what an honor !

 

Mandela

was monitored

as a terrorist

by the CIA

 

What an honor !

 

Tortuguita

peacefully meditating

near Israeli-funded cop city

was executed

in cold blood

on suspicion

of domestic terrorism 

 

What an honor !

 

in the spirit of Mandela

in the spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising

in the spirit of Tortuguita

in the spirit of Attica

may the anti colonial outrage

of the People of Palestine

contaminate us all -

the only epidemic

worth dying for

 

 (c) Julia Wright. October 17 2023. All Rights Reserved To The family of Wadea Al- Fayoume.

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Ruchell Cinque Magee Joins the Ancestors 

                                                         1939-2023

 

Ruchell Cinque Magee joined the ancestors October 17, 2023, after recently being released after 67 years of being caged!

 

Ruchell Magee was 84 years old and spent most of his life behind bars. Throughout his sixty-seven years of unjust captivity, Ruchell was one of the first and most consistent prisoners linking mass incarceration and the U.S. prison system to slavery. Ruchell Magee took the name Cinque from the enslaved African Sengbe Pieh who led an 1839 rebellion to commandeer the slave ship La Amistad, arguing that Africans have the right to resist “unlawful” slavery. Ruchell maintained that Black people in the US have the right to resist this new form of slavery which is part of the colonial control of Black people in this country:

 

“Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It’s the same but with a new name.”

 

“My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery…This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”

 

“You have to deal on your own tactics. You have a right to take up arms to oppose any usurped government, particularly the type of corruption that we have today.” – Ruchell Magee

 

Ruchell’s life commitment, political stance and writings point to the need for a prison abolitionist movement to seriously address the historical legacy of slavery, and slave rebellions in order to truly be in solidarity with the millions of people incarcerated in the US. 

 

May Ruchell Cinque Magee rest in power!

 

Ruchell Cinque Magee joined the ancestors last night after recently being released after 67 years of being caged!

 

Ruchell Magee was 84 years old and spent most of his life behind bars. Throughout his sixty-seven years of unjust captivity, Ruchell was one of the first and most consistent prisoners linking mass incarceration and the U.S. prison system to slavery. Ruchell Magee took the name Cinque from the enslaved African Sengbe Pieh who led an 1839 rebellion to commandeer the slave ship La Amistad, arguing that Africans have the right to resist “unlawful” slavery. Ruchell maintained that Black people in the US have the right to resist this new form of slavery which is part of the colonial control of Black people in this country:

 

“Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It’s the same but with a new name.”

 

“My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery…This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”

 

“You have to deal on your own tactics. You have a right to take up arms to oppose any usurped government, particularly the type of corruption that we have today.” – Ruchell Magee

 

Ruchell’s life commitment, political stance and writings point to the need for a prison abolitionist movement to seriously address the historical legacy of slavery, and slave rebellions in order to truly be in solidarity with the millions of people incarcerated in the US. 

 

May Ruchell Cinque Magee rest in power!

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The ongoing Zionist theft of Palestinian land from 1946 to now.

77 years of brutal oppression must end!

End all U.S. aid to Israel now!

For a democratic, secular Palestine!

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Leonard Peltier’s Letter Delivered to Supporters on September 12, 2023, in Front of the Whitehouse

 

Dear friends, relatives, supporters, loved ones:

 

Seventy-nine years old. Mother Earth has taken us on another journey around Grandfather Sun.  Babies have taken their first breath. People have lived, loved, and died. Seeds have been planted and sent their roots deep below red earth and their breath to the Stars and our Ancestors.

 

I am still here.

 

Time has twisted one more year out of me. A year that has been a moment.  A year that has been a lifetime. For almost five decades I’ve existed in a cage of concrete and steel.  With the “good time” calculations of the system, I’ve actually served over 60 years.

 

Year after year, I have encouraged you to live as spirit warriors. Even while in here, I can envision what is real and far beyond these walls.  I’ve seen a reawakening of an ancient Native pride that does my heart good.

 

I may leave this place in a box. That is a cold truth. But I have put my heart and soul into making our world a better place and there is a lot of work left to do – I would like to get out and do it with you.

 

I know that the spirit warriors coming up behind me have the heart and soul to fight racism and oppression, and to fight the greed that is poisoning our lands, waters, and people. 

 

We are still here.

 

Remember who you are, even if they come for your land, your water, your family. We are children of Mother Earth and we owe her and her other children our care.

 

I long to turn my face to the sky. In this cage, I am denied that simple pleasure. I am in prison, but in my mind, I remain as I was born: a free Native spirit.

 

That is what allows me to laugh, keeps me laughing. These walls cannot contain my laughter – or my hope.

 

I know there are those who stand with me, who work around the clock for my freedom. I have been blessed to have such friends.

 

We are still here and you give me hope. 

 

I hope to breathe free air before I die. Hope is a hard thing to hold, but no one is strong enough to take it from me. 

 

I love you. I hope for you. I pray for you. 

 

And prayer is more than a cry to the Creator that runs through your head.  Prayer is an action.

 

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

DOKSHA, 

LEONARD PELTIER

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132

USP Coleman 1

P.O. Box 1033

Coleman, FL 33521

Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.

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Drop the Charges on the Tampa 5!

Sign the Petition:

https://peoplespetitions.org/tampa5

 

The Tampa 5—Gia Davila, Lauren Pineiro, Laura Rodriguez, Jeanie K, and Chrisley Carpio—are the five Students for a Democratic Society protesters at the University of South Florida who were attacked by campus police and are now facing five to ten years in prison for protesting Governor Ron DeSantis' attacks on diversity programs and all of higher education.

 

On July 12, 2023, the Tampa 5 had their second court appearance. 

 

The Tampa 5 are still in the middle of the process of discovery, which means that they are obtaining evidence from the prosecution that is meant to convict them. They have said publicly that all the security camera footage they have seen so far absolves them, and they are eager to not only receive more of this evidence but also to share it with the world. The Tampa 5 and their supporters demand full transparency and USF's full cooperation with discovery, to which all of the defendants are entitled.

 

In spite of this, the charges have not yet been dropped. The case of the five SDS protesters is hurtling towards a trial. So, they need all of their supporters and all parties interested in the right to protest DeSantis to stay out in the streets!

 

We need to demand that the DeSantis-appointed, unelected State Attorney Susan Lopez and Assistant Prosecutor Justin Diaz drop the charges.

 

We need to win this case once and for all and protect the right of the student movement—and all social movements in the United States—to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech and to protest.

 

Defend the Tampa 5!

 

State Attorney Susy Lopez, Prosecutor Justin Diaz, Drop the Charges!

 

Save Diversity in Higher Education!

 

Protesting DeSantis is Not a Crime!

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Free Julian Assange

Immediate Repeated Action Needed to Free Assange

 

Please call your Congressional Representatives, the White House, and the DOJ. Calls are tallied—they do count.  We are to believe we are represented in this country.  This is a political case, so our efforts can change things politically as well.  Please take this action as often as you can:

 

Find your representatives:

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

 

Leave each of your representatives a message individually to: 

·      Drop the charges against Julian Assange

·      Speak out publicly against the indictment and

·      Sign on to Rashida Tlaib's letter to the DOJ to drop the charges: 

           202-224-3121—Capitol Main Switchboard 

 

Leave a message on the White House comment line to 

Demand Julian Assange be pardoned: 

             202-456-1111

             Tuesday–Thursday, 11:00 A.M.–3:00 P.M. EST

 

Call the DOJ and demand they drop the charges against Julian Assange:

             202-353-1555—DOJ Comment Line

             202-514-2000 Main Switchboard 

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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!

FREE HIM NOW!

Write to Mumia at:

Smart Communications/PADOC

Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335

SCI Mahanoy

P.O. Box 33028

St. Petersburg, FL 33733

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Updates From Kevin Cooper 

March 23, 2023 

Dear Friends and Comrades, 

This is Kevin Cooper writing and sending this update to you in 'Peace & Solidarity'. First and foremost I am well and healthy, and over the ill effect(s) that I went through after that biased report from MoFo, and their pro prosecution and law enforcement experts. I am back working with my legal team from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.

'We' have made great progress in refuting all that those experts from MoFo came up with by twisting the truth to fit their narrative, or omitting things, ignoring, things, and using all the other tactics that they did to reach their conclusions. Orrick has hired four(4) real experts who have no questionable backgrounds. One is a DNA attorney, like Barry Scheck of the innocence project in New York is for example. A DNA expert, a expect to refute what they say Jousha Ryen said when he was a child, and his memory. A expect on the credibility of MoFo's experts, and the attorney's at Orrick are dealing with the legal issues.

This all is taking a little longer than we first expected it to take, and that in part is because 'we' have to make sure everything is correct in what we have in our reply. We cannot put ourselves in a situation where we can be refuted... Second, some of our experts had other things planned, like court cases and such before they got the phone call from Rene, the now lead attorney of the Orrick team. With that being said, I can say that our experts, and legal team have shown, and will show to the power(s) that be that MoFo's DNA expert could not have come to the conclusion(s) that he came to, without having used 'junk science'! They, and by they I mean my entire legal team, including our experts, have done what we have done ever since Orrick took my case on in 2004, shown that all that is being said by MoFo's experts is not true, and we are once again having to show what the truth really is.

Will this work with the Governor? Who knows... 'but' we are going to try! One of our comrades, Rebecca D.   said to me, 'You and Mumia'...meaning that my case and the case of Mumia Abu Jamal are cases in which no matter what evidence comes out supporting our innocence, or prosecution misconduct, we cannot get a break. That the forces in the so called justice system won't let us go. 'Yes' she is correct about that sad to say...

Our reply will be out hopefully in the not too distant future, and that's because the people in Sacramento have been put on notice that it is coming, and why. Every one of you will receive our draft copy of the reply according to Rene because he wants feedback on it. Carole and others will send it out once they receive it. 'We' were on the verge of getting me out, and those people knew it, so they sabotaged what the Governor ordered them to do, look at all the evidence as well as the DNA evidence. They did not do that, they made this a DNA case, by doing what they did, and twisted the facts on the other issues that they dealt with.   'more later'...

In Struggle & Solidarity,

An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:

Mr. Kevin Cooper

C-65304. 4-EB-82

San Quentin State Prison

San Quentin, CA 94974

 

 

Call California Governor Newsom:

1-(916) 445-2841

Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish, 

press 6 to speak with a representative and

wait for someone to answer 

(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)

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The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system. 

See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings

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Sign the petition:

https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/

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Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale

 

I’m pleased to announce that last week our client, Daniel Hale, was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. The “Corner-Brightener Candlestick” was presented to Daniel’s friend Noor Mir. You can watch the online ceremony here. As it happens, this week is also the 20th anniversary of the first drone assassination in Yemen. From the beginning, the drone assassination program has been deeply shrouded in secrecy, allowing U.S. officials to hide significant violations of international law, and the American Constitution. In addition to the lives directly impacted by these strikes, the program has significantly eroded respect for international law and thereby puts civilians around the world in danger. Daniel Hale’s revelations threw a beam of light into a very dark corner, allowing journalists to definitively show that the government's official narrative was a lie. It is thanks to the great personal sacrifice of drone whistleblowers like Hale that public understanding has finally begun to catch up to reality. As the Sam Adams Associates note:  “Mr. Hale was well aware of the cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment to which other courageous officials have been subjected — and that he would likely suffer the same. And yet — in the manner of his famous ancestor Nathan Hale — he put his country first, knowing what awaited him at the hands of those who serve what has become a repressive Perpetual War State wreaking havoc upon much of the world.” We hope you’ll join the growing call to pardon or commute Hale’s sentence. U.S. citizens can contact your representatives here.

Happy new year, and thank you for your support! Jesselyn Radack Director Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) ExposeFacts Twitter: @JesselynRadack

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Laws are created to be followed

by the poor.

Laws are made by the rich

to bring some order to exploitation.

The poor are the only law abiders in history.

When the poor make laws

the rich will be no more.

 

—Roque Dalton Presente!

(May 14, 1935 – Assassinated May 10, 1975)[1]

---

[1] Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, political activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets.

Poems: 

http://cordite.org.au/translations/el-salvador-tragic/

About: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Dalton

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A Plea for the Compassionate Release of 

Leonard Peltier

Self Portrait by Leonard Peltier

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be

Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.

 

https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition

 

Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603

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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression

https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/

 

Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests. 

 

The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page. 

 

Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.

 

Emergency Hotlines

If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities. 

 

State and Local Hotlines

If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for: 

 

Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312

San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org

Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963

National Hotline

If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:

 

National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811

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Articles

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1) The Savagery of the War Against the Palestinian People

By Vijay Prashad, Oct. 13, 2023

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/13/the-savagery-of-the-war-against-the-palestinian-people/

Photograph Source: Trocaire from Ireland – CC BY 2.0

Who knows how many Palestinian civilians will be killed by the time this report is published? Among the bodies that cannot be taken to a hospital or a morgue, because there will be no petrol or electricity, will be large numbers of children. They will have hidden in their homes, listening to the sound of the Israeli F-16 bombers coming closer and closer, the explosions advancing toward them like a swarm of red ants on the chase. They will have covered their ears with their hands, crouched with their parents in their darkened living rooms, waiting, waiting for the inevitable bomb to strike their home. By the time the rescue workers get to them under the mountains of rubble, their bodies would have become unrecognizable, their families weeping as familiar clothing or household goods are excavated. Such is the torment of the Palestinians who live in Gaza.

 

A friend of mine in Gaza who has a 17-year-old child told me on the first night of this recent spell of Israeli bombing that his child has lived through at least ten major Israeli assaults on the Palestinians in Gaza. As we spoke, we made a list of some of the wars we could remember (because these are Israel’s wars, we are using the Israeli army names for their attacks on Gaza):

 

+ Operation Summer Rains (June 2006)

 

+ Operation Autumn Clouds (October-November 2006)

 

+ Operation Hot Winter (February-March 2008)

 

+ Operation Cast Lead (December 2008-January 2009)

 

+ Operation Running Echo (March 2012)

 

+ Operation Pillar of Cloud (November 2012)

 

+ Operation Protective Edge (July-August 2014)

 

+ Operation Black Belt (November 2019)

 

+ Operation Breaking Dawn (August 2022)

 

+ Operation Shield and Arrow (May 2023)

 

Each of these attacks pulverizes the minimal infrastructure that remains intact in Gaza and hits the Palestinian civilians very hard. Civilian deaths and casualties are recorded by the Health Ministry in Gaza but disregarded by the Israelis and their Western enablers. As the current bombing intensified, journalist Muhammad Smiry said, “We might not survive this time.” Smiry’s worry is not isolated. Each time Israel sends in its fighter jets and missiles, the death and destruction are of an unimaginable proportion. This time, with a full-scale invasion, the destruction will be at a scale not previously witnessed.

 

The Ruin of Gaza

 

Gaza is a ruin populated by nearly two million people. After Israel’s horrific 2014 bombardment of Gaza, the United Nations reported that “people are literally sleeping amongst the rubble; children have died of hypothermia.” A variation of this sentence has been written after each of these bombings and will be written when this one finally comes to an end.

 

In 2004, Israel’s National Security Director Giora Eiland said that Gaza is a “huge concentration camp.” This “huge concentration camp” was erected in 1948 when the newly created Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing policy removed Palestinians into refugee camps, including in Gaza. Two years later, Israeli intelligence reported that the refugees in Gaza had been “condemned to utter extinction.” That judgment has not altered in the intervening 73 years. Despite the formal withdrawal of Israeli settlers and troops in 2005, Israel remains the occupying power over the region by sealing off the land and sea borders of the Gaza Strip. Israel decides what enters Gaza and uses that power to throttle the people periodically.

 

Politicide

 

When the Palestinians in Gaza tried to elect their own leadership in January 2006, Hamas—formed in the first Intifada (Uprising) of 1987 in Gaza—won the election. The victory of Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) was condemned by the Israelis and the West, who decided to use armed force to overthrow the election results. Operation Summer Rains and Operation Autumn Clouds introduced the Palestinians to a new dynamic: punctual bombardment as collective punishment for electing Hamas in the legislative elections. Gaza was never allowed a political process, in fact, never allowed to shape any kind of political authority to speak for the people. Israel has tried with force to eradicate Gaza’s political life and to force the people into a situation where the armed conflict becomes permanent. When the Palestinians conducted a non-violent Great March of Return in 2019, the Israeli army responded with brute force that killed two hundred people. When a non-violent protest is met with force, it becomes difficult to convince people to remain on that path and not take up arms.

 

As this conflict takes on the air of permanency, the frustration of Palestinian politics moves away from the impossibility of negotiations to the necessity of armed violence. No other avenue is left open. Palestine’s political leadership has been either tethered by the European Union and the United States and so been removed from popular aspirations or—if it continues to mirror those aspirations—it has been sent to one of Israel’s many, harsh prisons (four of 10 Palestinian men are in or have been in prison, while the leaders of most of the left parties spend long periods there under “administrative detention” orders). Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has argued that the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians has resulted in “politicide,” the deliberate destruction of Palestinian political processes. The only road left open is armed struggle.

 

Indeed, by international law, armed struggle against an occupying power is not illegal. There are many international conventions and United Nations resolutions that affirm the right of self-determination: these include, Additional Protocol 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (1974), and UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 (1982). The 1982 resolution “reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” You could not have a stronger statement that provides legal sanction for armed struggle against an illegal occupation.

 

Why does Hamas attack Israel? Because a political grammar has been imposed on the relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis by the nature of the Israeli occupation. Indeed, any time there is a modest development for talks—often brokered by Qatar—between Hamas and the Israeli government, those talks are silenced by the sound of Israeli fighter jets.

 

War Crimes

 

Each time these Israeli fighter jets hammer Gaza, leaders of Western countries line up metronomically to announce that they “stand with Israel” and that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” This last statement—about Israel having the right to defend itself—is legally erroneous. In 1967, Israeli forces crossed the 1948 Israeli “green lines” and seized East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 sought the “withdrawal of [Israeli] armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The use of the term “occupied” is not innocent. Article 42 of the Hague Regulations (1907) states that a “territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.” The Fourth Geneva Convention obliges the occupying power to be responsible for the welfare of those who have been occupied, most of the obligations violated by the Israeli government.

 

In fact, as far as Gaza has been concerned since 2005, Israeli high officials have not used the language of self-defense. They have spoken in the language of collective punishment. In the lead-up to the ongoing bombing, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We have decided to halt electricity, fuel, and goods transfer to Gaza.” His Defense Minister Yoav Gallant followed up, saying, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Then, Israel’s Energy Minister Israel Katz said, “I instructed that the water supply from Israel to Gaza be cut off immediately.” Having followed up on these threats, they have sealed Gaza—including by bombing the Rafah crossing to Egypt—and closed down the lives of two million people. In the language of the Geneva Conventions, this is “collective punishment,” which constitutes a war crime. The International Criminal Court opened an investigation into Israeli war crimes in 2021 but was not able to move forward even to collect information.

 

The children huddle in their rooms waiting for the bombs sit in the dark because there is no electricity and wait—with parched throats and hungry bellies—for the end. After the 2014 Israeli bombardment, Umm Amjad Shalah spoke of her 10-year-old son Salman. The boy would not let his mother go, being in terror of the noise of the explosions and the death around him. “Sometimes he screams so loudly,” she says. “It almost sounds like he’s laughing loudly.”

 

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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2) UAW strike day 30: On a windy, rainy picket line, Ford workers vow to persist

By Hayley Harding, The Detroit News, Oct. 14, 2023

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2023/10/14/uaw-strike-day-30-on-a-wet-windy-picket-line-workers-vow-to-persist/71186082007/

UAW Local 900 members Justin Diegel, 22, and Gina Bennett, 44, get what warmth they can from a burn barrel while picketing Saturday, Oct. 14, 2023, outside Ford's Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne.

Wayne — Temperatures are beginning to drop after nearly a month of picketing, but those on strike with the United Auto Workers said their spirits were still high as they braved the autumn chill, wind and rain Saturday outside Ford Motor Co.'s Michigan Assembly Plant.

 

Workers made clear: They've lost a lot. They've received multiple strike paychecks of $500, which is much less than they would have made on the assembly lines. Smoke from burn barrels seemed to follow wherever people stood with a stiff breeze blowing everywhere, and a month of picketing can take a toll.

 

But so much more is at stake, the workers said as their walkout marked its 30th day. Every striker who spoke to The Detroit News has more than two decades working for Ford, and each one said they were going to stick it out to end the tier system and get back some of what they gave up to help save the company during the worst of the Great Recession 15 years ago.

 

"We helped them recover," said Ann Goodman of Adrian, who has worked for Ford for 24 years. "We'd like to start to recover too, now."

 

Goodman, 58, said she hopes the strike doesn't go on much longer. Her mood changes from day to day, she said, in part because it can be difficult to have her future feel like it's at least partially out of her hands while the company and the bargaining committee go back and forth.

 

But she wants the younger people at Ford to have the same opportunities she did, she said. Like everyone standing in the rain Saturday, she considered herself a "diehard."

 

"We have to get back what we lost," she said.

 

The Michigan Assembly Plant was one of the first three Detroit Three automaker plants to go on strike. Now, dozens across the country are on strike or idled due to strikes elsewhere. The most recent addition is Ford's Kentucky Truck Plant, where workers started striking earlier this week after the UAW said Ford "refused to make further movement in bargaining."

 

The company, in response, pointed to its most recent offer, which includes a three-year progression to the top of the wage scale, the end of wage tiers that have workers at components plants on different wage scales than assembly plant workers, restoration of the cost-of-living adjustment formula that was suspended in 2009, and conversion within 90 days of temporary workers to permanent status, among other contract improvements. The union says Ford is offering a 23% wage hike; the automaker says its offer is over 20% with a double-digit raise upon ratification.

 

“There’s no doubt our UAW workforce put us on their shoulders during the pandemic, and these same workers and their families were hit hard by inflation. We want to make sure our workers come out of these negotiations with two things — a record contract and a strong future,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a statement. “We’ve put an offer on the table that will be costly for the company, especially given our large American footprint and UAW workforce, but one that we believe still allows Ford to invest in the future.”  

 

Those on strike are holding out. Brian Dicola of Southgate, who has worked for Ford for 29 years, said he still agreed with UAW President Shawn Fain and planned to stick it out for as long as necessary.

 

As the strike grinds on, he said he's only growing closer to not only his own coworkers at Michigan Assembly but also with volunteers from other plants who have come out to demonstrate support. Dicola has met people from different plants as well as people showing up even when they don't need to be on the line just to show solidarity. Blustery weather was likely keeping away some supporters, who Fain had asked to make a show at picket lines this weekend, Dicola said, but he was quickly considering those on the line with him his second family.

 

As he's on the line, he thinks about his real family too — bills don't stop just because work did, he said. His son plays a lot of sports, with costs that can add up fast, and there's also other expenses, everything from groceries to suits for homecoming.

 

He has a second job painting, and he has spread some of the work from that to other picketers to help everyone get bills paid. The younger workers on lower wage tiers especially had a hard time putting money away in anticipation of a strike, he said. Hearing his friends talk about their financial struggles has been one of the hardest parts, Dicola said, but it keeps him motivated.

 

"I'll be out here five years if I need to be," he said, adding that in his opinion, Ford has the money to meet the UAW's demands. "They just don't want to."

 

There's an expectation that after a month of striking, the initial feelings of excitement might wane. And Sean Farnan, a 30-year employee of Ford, pointed out that the weather was a little nicer when the strikes began last month. But he said he, like Dicola, plans to be out there for as long as it takes.

 

"We'll be out here deep-frying turkeys if we need to be," Farnan said. "We'll be singing Christmas carols if we have to be out here then."

 

Farnan, 54, said it was time that companies make things right with their employees, through raises and other benefits. The tiered system that hurts younger workers has been a problem for a long time, he said, as it pits worker against worker.

 

He's eager to let the negotiators do their jobs in the "tug of war" between the union and the company. That's the only way things can improve, he said.

 

"Look at it this way," he said, pointing to a car carrier driving in front of picketers down Michigan Avenue. "Those trucks are still rolling. Ford is still making money. They can improve the economic issues, the other things, to make sure we are too."

 

Staff Writer Jordyn Grzelewski contributed.

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3) As people crowd into homes in southern Gaza, Israeli strikes take a greater toll, a doctor says.

By Nicholas Casey and Abu Bakr Bashir, Oct. 17, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/10/17/world/israel-hamas-war-biden-gaza

A man injured in an Israeli airstrike on Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip is wheeled into Nasser Hospital on Monday. Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times

A doctor in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday described dwindling resources and a mounting death toll as airstrikes surged in southern Gaza, where Israel had told Palestinians to seek safety ahead of a possible ground invasion.

 

Hundreds of thousands of people have heeded Israel’s call to flee to the south, but Israel on Tuesday announced it had carried out new strikes in southern cities, including Khan Younis and Rafah. It said its strikes were targeting Hamas, the group controls Gaza and launched the surprise Oct. 7 attack in Israel that left 1,400 people dead.

 

“Today is worse than all the previous bad days,” Dr. Mohamed Zaqout, the general manager of Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Younis, said Tuesday. “With many displaced from the north, more people share the same homes and thus there are more casualties in each strike.”

 

Gazan government officials said that strikes on Tuesday killed at least 80 Palestinians in the southern part of the strip and wounded dozens more. Some Palestinians who fled the north said they are now considering going back to their homes as strikes intensify in the south, which they thought would be safer.

 

Dr. Zaqout said his hospital had received 42 bodies from Tuesday’s strikes, 26 of which remained unidentified in the morgue hours later. The dead included 10 women and 15 children, he said. Many of the victims had come from a residential building that was hit in an early morning airstrike.

 

Nasser Hospital was also having trouble attending to the wounded, he said. The intensive care unit is full, with no beds available for patients who have undergone amputations or need surgery for brain injuries and severe burns suffered in the latest attacks. Chest tubes — meant to be disposed of after one use — are running out, so doctors are sterilizing them and using them again and again, he added.

 

“This is too much pressure on the resources,” he said.

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4) W.H.O. Chief: Doctors and Patients Face Impossible Choices in Gaza

By Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Oct. 16, 2023

Dr. Tedros is the director general of the World Health Organization.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/opinion/gaza-invasion-hospital-tedros-who.html

Outside the emergency ward of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Sunday. Credit...Dawood Nemer/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Today, Al Shifa Hospital, the largest health care facility in the Gaza Strip, is emblematic of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Already underresourced and overcrowded, it is now home to thousands of people who have sought refuge from Israeli airstrikes that rained down on their neighborhoods after the horrific and unjustified attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.

 

Al Shifa Hospital has always been under tremendous strain. When I visited in 2018, I met with patients and health workers and toured a dialysis unit and a neonatal intensive care ward, full of newborns in incubators. Their tentative grasp on life was sustained by diesel generators that powered the hospital when the electricity went off, as it did for several hours every day. Staff members, patients and their families faced difficult choices to make daily.

 

These choices are now seemingly impossible in the fallout from Oct. 7 — not just at Al Shifa Hospital but at northern Gaza’s other hospitals and clinics as well.

 

With no electricity and fuel running out in Gaza, within days hospital generators will fall silent, and the incubators, dialysis machines and other lifesaving medical equipment will shut down. Many of the most critically ill patients, including babies, whose lives have only just begun, will probably die. Attempting to move them is equally hazardous. Water scarcity is a grave concern for struggling patients, especially newborns.

 

Israel’s order to empty 23 hospitals treating over 2,000 patients in Gaza presents health workers with a horrifying choice: Force those in their care to make a journey that for many will be their last or stay and treat their patients under the impending threat of bombardment.

 

Health workers should never have to make choices like that, nor should they ever be targeted. Under international humanitarian law, all armed actors are obliged to proactively protect health facilities from intentional or collateral attack. But in this conflict, health facilities and health care have been struck repeatedly.

 

I deplore the attacks on health facilities in both Gaza and Israel, which have led to the deaths and injuries of health workers on both sides. The deaths of colleagues from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza brought even closer to home the dangers faced by humanitarian workers, including those providing health relief.

 

There’s still time and opportunity to prevent the worst-case scenario. The World Health Organization calls for the immediate and safe release of hostages seized from Israel and taken into Gaza by Hamas. According to the Israeli military, some 199 hostages seized from Israel that day — children, adults and older people — remain hostage in Gaza, many in need of medical treatment. And we hope for attacks on Israeli hospitals to cease as well; Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, which has treated both Israelis and Palestinians for years, has been hit by Hamas rocket attacks, damaging one of the few medical reference centers available to the people of Gaza.

 

We continue to appeal to all parties to abide by their obligations under international law to protect civilians and health facilities. We appeal to Israel to restore supplies of electricity and water and to support the establishment of a humanitarian corridor into Gaza.

 

In Cairo last week, I met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, who generously agreed to facilitate the delivery of medical supplies to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with the help of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

 

On Saturday, the W.H.O. delivered a planeload of supplies to Egypt from our logistics hub in Dubai, and we are working to move these supplies into Gaza as rapidly as possible.

 

We appeal for sustained, unhindered and protected humanitarian access. This will help civilians to move to safety in Gaza, health facilities to be restocked with medicines and other supplies, fuel to reach hospitals to keep generators and the lifesaving equipment they support running, and clean water and food to arrive to sustain the weak and weary.

 

To be clear, as a United Nations agency, the W.H.O. is politically impartial and is committed to supporting the health and well-being of all Israelis and Palestinians. To that end, the agency established an official presence in Israel in 2019, adding to our existing office in the occupied territory. On my visits in 2018 and last year, I met with the ministers of health of both Israel and the occupied territory to discuss how the W.H.O. can better support both governments to promote, provide and protect the health care of their people. This included a visit to the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, where I was encouraged by Israeli health specialists developing digital health initiatives in partnership with Palestinian communities.

 

Since Oct. 7, however, so many horrifying choices have been made — abhorrent attacks on civilians in Israel by Hamas and other armed groups, the seizing of hostages, the attacks on populated areas of Gaza.

 

What is needed now is another kind of decision making, one that ensures hospitals are kept operational, supplies are safeguarded and health workers and civilians in Israel and Gaza are protected and sustained.

 

Nelson Mandela once said, “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” At this fearful time, I appeal to all who have the power to make decisions that affect the health and well-being of so many people to choose, as Mr. Mandela implored, the way of hope.

 

There is still time.

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5) The First Week

Dispatch from the Palestinian Youth Movement

—The New Inquiry, October 14, 2023

https://thenewinquiry.com/the-first-week/

Taken at a pro-Palestine protest on October 13, 2023.

Gaza is the story of the Palestinian people. It is a story of displacement and refugeehood, of imprisonment at the hands of a foreign occupier. But, most importantly, it is a story of sumud (steadfastness) and resistance: resistance that is driven by a love for one’s people, a love for one’s homeland, and a love for life and freedom. Now and onwards, you must not allow your friends and comrades to turn their backs on the Palestinian liberation struggle. You must not allow them to falter in the face of the events of this week, or to devolve into insipid both-sideism or pragmatic armchair generalissimo, or to publish cowardly denunciations that do nothing more than provide a left cover for an impending genocide on the people of Gaza. Most importantly, you must not allow them to lose sight of why the oppressed people resist; that it is not only understandable, not only an occupied people’s right, but also just and true. We hope this bulletin will help guide what principled solidarity can look like right now within the imperial core, and arm those in solidarity with us with tools to resist the military-industrial complex that is hellbent on our people’s extermination.

Your priority must be communicating a set of realities clearly and unequivocally. Two-point-four million Palestinians are currently being held hostage by Zionists, who are martyring thousands with genocidal impunity. All the crossings are closed. The Zionists are indiscriminately using bombs and internationally-prohibited weapons on a densely populated concentration camp full of entrapped civilians. There is no water or electricity. Mass arrests of Palestinians across all of historic Palestine add to the hundreds of administrative detainees imprisoned without charge, who are now suffering additional retribution by the colonial regime. Gazan hospitals—which are already graveyards—are themselves being targeted, and at least thirteen have already been hit. Seven confirmed members of the press have been martyred, and news stations are regularly being cut due to the lack of electricity. Ambulances and the Red Crescent are also being deliberately targeted. Universities and mosques have been destroyed. Entire families are being wiped out—at least forty-five entire families that we have seen reported. And this is just a small sampling of what is happening in Gaza right now, owing to a reporting blackout, which is being aided and abetted by the genocidal Western media machine.

All this being said, we do not want to use abstractions to discuss Gaza: every story is one of violence and resistance and beautiful, ordinary life. But to do them proper justice, you’d have to give us a lifetime. What we can say with certainty is that the Palestinian people are unbowed. No amount of collective punishment by the Zionist entity will bend or break the will of our people to live in dignity. We know why Gaza is being targeted: because it is the heart of our resistance. And that resistance is both a strategic and moral necessity to the ordering violence’s of the Zionist system from river to sea, which seeks the extermination of the Palestinian people. We therefore maintain what the rest of our Palestinian sisters and brothers maintain: we will continue to fight, and we will win. 

The foremost demand to anyone inside the West, inside the imperial core, is to oppose the genocidal drumbeat waged by Zionist and Western leaders alike. The Palestinian people of Gaza have asked for the bombing campaign to stop, the blockade to end once and for all, and for humanitarian aid to enter. But also, and more broadly, what we are asking those who wish to be in solidarity within the West is threefold. First, struggle through organizations and your workplaces and your communities and in the streets to demand an end to both the current genocidal campaign and for an end to the entire system of settler colonialism that has strangled Palestine for the last century. Second, go on the offensive: demand sanctions against Zionism; no more weapons, no more money, no more cultural or institutional cover. We want the total anti-normalization of a Zionism that has once again shown its face to the world. Finally, understand Palestinian resistance as fundamentally just and as a means of survival for our people; it will not stop in the weeks and months to come, and you must be prepared not to waver again.

The Western governmental response has been military and economic carte blanche and material support. These nations have withdrawn much of their foreign aid to the Palestinian people at a moment of utter crisis; leaked documents suggest that the U.S. State Department has instructed its bureaucrats to avoid issuing calls for de-escalation or ceasefire. Secretary Blinken visiting the Philadelphia-born prime minister of the Zionist entity while he is initiating genocide of Palestinians is an affirmation of total U.S. government support and a guarantee of intelligence and military resources to be placed at the Zionists’ disposal. EU leaders, too, have embraced the death merchants of the “Second Nakba” in a lurid display of global settler phantasmagoria. Students and activists are being rounded up from the streets and campuses for their brave defenses of the Palestinian resistance. Germany is leading mass arrest campaigns and seeking to ban the Palestinian prisoners’ movement from their country; England and France are seeking to ban symbols and expressions of Palestinian solidarity. Your voices and your bodies are needed now.

The media gives cover to all this: they render us savage and killable. The world is watching your programs and statements and essays, and will remember your complicity, just as it did with Iraq. We demand local and national news outlets commit to honest reporting on Gaza that does not include racism and effacement designed to manufacture consent for genocide, but also, we do not hold our breaths.

Palestinians and Arabs have long understood that Zionism and Western imperialism to be intimately intertwined. At their base, the two ideologies fundamentally seek the same things: the extraction of Arab land and labor, the elimination of a Palestinian population, and the blanket of an imperial military and economic system that subjugates the world’s oppressed. The violent colonial response we are witnessing is therefore neither surprising nor random. Rather, it is the “rational,” ordered response of a system governed by counterrevolutionary and anti-Communist logic.

The bitter irony is also not lost on us, that some have chosen to speak now after decades of silence. Where were they when Gaza was put under air, land, and water siege sixteen years ago, entrapping a population of two million people, half of them children? Where were they when the Zionists implemented calorie controls to spread malnutrition and disability? Where were they when Zionist leaders told the world decades ago that their intention with Gaza was to extract maximum pain on a civilian population, to once again ethnically cleanse a people who were stripped of their lands and homes seventy-five years ago, and who now comprise the heart of Palestinian resistance? This week, these peoples’ mask has come off—such are the realities of revolution. For those who are willing and ready, we have a keffiyeh to offer in its place.

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6) A Letter from Michael Moore Regarding the Killings of Palestinians and Israelis

By Michael Moore, Oct. 17, 2023

https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/a-letter-from-michael-moore-regarding?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=320974&post_id=138030521&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=pzmjd&utm_medium=email

Actor/playwright Wally Shawn at the White House with a massive turnout of Jewish peace groups @IfNotNowOrg and @JvpAction demanding President Biden fight for a cease fire and end the killing of Palestinian and Israeli civilians.

To My Friends and Loved Ones,

 

No one ever wants to wake up on a Saturday morning to a thousand dead Jews in the street. Anywhere. 

 

SHAME!

 

I still have not been able to process this and I still can’t believe this is the world I live in. I was born 8+ years after the Holocaust. And now I sit and wait for the mass slaughter of Palestinians, a Semitic tribe, cousins to Jews. 

 

Not one Palestinian helped build Auschwitz.

 

Not one Palestinian led a Spanish Inquisition. 

 

Not one Palestinian in New York City turned away a boatload of Jewish refugees trying to dock here to escape the Nazis — and not one Palestinian escorted those Jews back to their death in Germany. 

 

And yet they, the Palestinians, will now be exterminated like something less than insects by the descendants of the very people who have suffered one extermination attempt after another for 5,784 years! Cousins! Cease! The Madness! Your only true enemy for the past 2,000 years has been and still is the White “Christians”! Ask the Native Americans.  Ask any Black American.  Ask the Mexicans.  Ask the Indigenous Peoples of the British Empire, the Vietnamese under the boot of the French, and on and on. And now this week, the people of Gaza must be wiped out or forcibly moved into the Sinai Desert? Those left behind have already had their food and their drinking water cut off (humans can only live 4 days without water). 

 

WHY?! Palestinians didn’t take your land, your water, your fruit groves. They share the same prophets with you. They eat hummus and you eat hummus.  No Palestinian ever murdered you while you were registering voters in the South. No Palestinians ever paraded with tiki torches through Charlottesville chanting “THE JEWS SHALL NOT REPLACE US!”  That was US! Why not punish us? No. Instead you’ve given us great masterpieces of music, art, comedy, literature, philosophy, film, medicine, science and a moral compass which you gave us to live by, to help create a world of love and peace with each other. Now you throw your compass away? You were supposed to be our guiding light, even in the midst of unspeakable horrors. You’ve let a fascist gang take over, a group of killers who seek genocide — and our only hope of stopping them is that there are too many smart citizens of Israel who’ve already figured it out. They are asking the right questions. Why did Netanyahu pull the army back from the Gaza border? For 6-18 hours no help arrived. People were left to be slaughtered. And now comes news from the Israeli press that Netanyahu’s administration has for years been holding secret meetings with Hamas because they wanted to use them and turn them against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Divide and conquer, one of the oldest fascist tricks in the book. 

 

But the Israeli peace movement is vibrant and loud and there is nothing like them in the U.S. When we, the few of us, tried to stop the invasion of Iraq, we were denounced and opposed by 29 Democrats in the U.S. Senate, the New York Times, and other “liberals” who called us “unpatriotic” for not “supporting the troops.”

 

But too many Israelis now know the truth about October 7th, and they will not go away. As the bank for this now in-progress-slaughter — a bank called the United States of America — the citizens of my country must support the voices against genocide in Israel. You do not defeat evil by becoming evil. Those with the most courage and humanity rise up and say, “NO! Never! Not I!! I will not do to others what has been done to me.”

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7) Bloody Blankets and ‘Lots of Bodies’ at a Devastated Gaza Hospital

“We’ve never lived through a war this intense,” said one Palestinian journalist who captured the aftermath of the blast.

By Raja Abdulrahim and Yousur Al-Hlou, Oct. 18, 2023

Reporting from Jerusalem and Cairo

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/world/middleeast/gaza-hospital-deaths-aftermath.html

The aftermath of an explosion at the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday. Hundreds were killed, Palestinian health authorities said. Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock

Charred cars lining a parking lot. A courtyard littered with bloodied blankets and backpacks. Tattered clothing where dozens of bodies had lain.

 

The devastating impact of an explosion at the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday became clearer on Wednesday through videos that witnesses posted to social media. The Health Ministry in Gaza said hundreds of people were killed. Emergency workers were collecting bodies and remains in an effort to identify the dead.

 

“There are still lots of bodies they haven’t yet collected,” said Amir Ahmed, a paramedic with the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza City. “There are too many bodies.” He said all the victims would be buried in a mass grave at a funeral later on Wednesday.

 

“There is a big possibility that they will just put a number” on the body bags without any names, Mr. Ahmed added, “because many are in pieces.”

 

Palestinian officials blamed the carnage on an Israeli airstrike, an assertion that was disputed by the Israel Defense Forces, which said it was caused by an errant rocket fired by an armed Palestinian faction in Gaza. Neither side’s account could be independently verified immediately, and the cause of the blast and the precise death toll remained unclear.

 

Many of those killed at the hospital, which is run by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, were women and children, said Dr. Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesman for the Health Ministry in Gaza. He said doctors in another hospital in Gaza City were now performing surgery on patients on the floor or in corridors, often without anesthetic.

 

“The sudden increase of hundreds of victims with complex injuries far exceeded the capabilities of medical crews and ambulances,” he said in a statement.

 

Many of the wounded could die because of a severe shortage of medical supplies, water and electricity. Israel has imposed a complete siege of Gaza since last week, cutting off food, water, electricity and fuel.

 

Since Israel’s intense bombardment of Gaza began on Oct. 7, in response to a surprise attack by Hamas that killed at least 1,400 in Israel, residents have found that nowhere is safe.

 

About half of Gaza’s population of more than two million Palestinians have fled their homes since the Israeli bombardment began, according to the United Nations. Many have sought shelter in the corridors and courtyards of hospitals, believing that they would be less vulnerable there.

 

Those wounded in Tuesday’s explosion were taken to other hospitals in the city, which were already overwhelmed after 11 days of Israeli airstrikes on the besieged coastal strip.

 

The Palestinian journalist Motasem Mortaja captured a chaotic scene at one of those sites, Al Shifa Hospital, posting videos to social media of screaming children in bloodied clothing, women wailing in pain and men kneeling in prayer.

 

Hospital staff were treating the wounded wherever they could, rushing to bandage men lying on a floor red with their blood.

 

In one video, a young child lifts his shirt to reveal a wound to his chest. His hands, hair and clothes are dusty from the blast.

 

“I hope that this war ends soon,” Mr. Mortaja said in a voice memo sent Tuesday night to The Times. “We’ve never lived through a war this intense.”

 

Under a tent outside Al Shifa Hospital, where many of the dead and wounded were taken, workers lifted the dead from the blankets they were wrapped in and placed them in white body bags. In videos posted to Instagram and verified by The Times, other bodies lay exposed, and people walked past them in search of loved ones.

 

One man, standing over the bodies of two young boys, wailed in grief.

 

“I don’t have any more children. These were my only children,” he said.

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8) How Harvard Students Became the Center of a Free Speech Fight

A truck with a billboard displayed their names and photos, and critics put out do-not-hire lists. The students say it’s a campaign to shut them up.

By Anemona Hartocollis, Oct. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/us/harvard-students-israel-hamas-doxxing.html

Student leaders in the pro-Palestinian movement at Harvard described themselves as activists for marginalized people. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

On a campus already bitterly divided, the statement poured acid all over Harvard Yard.

 

A coalition of more than 30 student groups posted an open letter on the night of the Hamas attack, saying that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence that ended up killing more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians.

 

The letter, posted on social media before the extent of the killings was known, did not include the names of individual students.

 

But within days, students affiliated with those groups were being doxxed, their personal information posted online. Siblings back home were threatened. Wall Street executives demanded a list of student names to ban their hiring. And a truck with a digital billboard — paid for by a conservative group — circled Harvard Square, flashing student photos and names, under the headline, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”

 

Campuses have long wrestled with free speech. What is acceptable to say and what crosses into hate speech? But the war between Israel and Hamas has heightened emotions, threatening to tear apart already fragile campus cultures.

 

Complicating it all: outside groups, influential alumni and big-money donors, who are putting maximum pressure on students and administrators.

 

At the University of Pennsylvania, donors are pushing for the resignation of the president and the board chairman, after a Palestinian writers’ conference on campus invited speakers accused of antisemitism.

 

At Harvard, a billionaire couple quit an executive board. Another donor pulled money for fellowships. And Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president and Treasury secretary, criticized the leadership for a “delayed” response to the Hamas attack and the student letter.

 

This is not the first time that Harvard students have taken up an unpopular view. But those involved with the letter had not anticipated that their statement would go viral and unleash such repercussions.

 

The students had to contend with “people’s lives being ruined, people’s careers being ruined, people’s fellowships being ruined,” said one student whose organization signed the letter, in an interview.

 

Many critics have little forbearance for these complaints, saying that the letter itself showed a lack of empathy. But other students and free-speech activists say that the outside pressure has created its own kind of heckler’s veto, dictating what can be said on campus and how institutions must respond.

 

“You kind of feel like you’re responsible” for the harassment, said one of the Harvard students, whose family’s personal information was released. “That’s how silencing works, right?”

 

The Letter and Its Aftermath

 

Last week, in a bland conference room on the campus, four student leaders in the pro-Palestinian movement — three women and a man, all undergraduates — sat nervously around a table. A kaffiyeh, a checkered scarf that has become a symbol of Palestinian solidarity, was tossed on a chair.

 

They were not Palestinian, they said, but activists for marginalized people.

 

The groups that signed the letter often worked together in a kind of informal support network, the students said. When one championed an issue, the others might sign on in a show of collegiality.

 

They had agreed to be interviewed but insisted on anonymity, saying that they feared for their safety. They asked that even the smallest details of their personal lives — freshman? senior? — not be published.

 

They have been avoiding publicity since posting their letter on Facebook and Instagram on the night of Oct. 7, hours after the attack.

 

As the world increasingly focused on Hamas’s trail of terror in Israel, their letter opened with the line: “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

 

After the letter went viral, and anger against it erupted, some of the groups distanced themselves from the message.

 

Attention has now shifted to Israel’s ongoing retaliation and the toll on civilians in Gaza, and these students are sticking with their stance, though they said it has been wearing.

 

One of the women found out from a friend about the billboard truck. It was parked just outside the university gates, plastered with a giant image of her smiling face. Customers sitting at a pastry shop, students looking out of their dormitory windows and commuters rushing to and from the train station could see her, along with a carousel of other students, being branded as antisemitic.

 

“I threw up in Harvard Yard,” she said.

 

The truck is operated by Accuracy in Media, a conservative group that has also deployed such trucks at other campuses, like Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.

 

“It’s ironic that students on the campus where Facebook was invented are shocked that their names are publicly available,” Adam Guillette, president of Accuracy in Media, said. “We’re merely amplifying their message.”

 

The group is not done. It has purchased domain names for Harvard students associated with the letter and is setting up individual websites for them. Each site will call for the university to punish the students.

 

Students’ names were also exposed last week through a website featuring a “College Terror List, a Helpful Guide for Employers” compiled by Maxwell Meyer, a 2022 Stanford graduate.

 

Mr. Meyer, 23, said in an interview that his information had come from public sources and tips sent to an email address. He said he had no affiliation with Accuracy in Media.

 

His website was removed by Google and Notion, the note-taking app where it was displayed, Mr. Meyer said. (The students said alumni had helped remove it.) But other sites have picked up the list and passed it around.

 

Mr. Meyer said that as a former editor of the conservative Stanford Review, he was a defender of free speech. “At one point, I defended critics of Israel against what I called right-wing cancel culture,” he said.

 

But “if you’re a member of an organization that advocates terrorism in your name, you aren’t just a sitting duck, you’re a person with agency,” he said. “You can say, ‘I disavow this.’ These are Harvard students we’re talking about. They need to be held to a higher standard.”

 

Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire and Harvard alumnus, wrote on social media that the names of students should be circulated, to avoid “inadvertently” hiring them. His more than 800,000 followers boosted Mr. Meyer’s website, and led dozens of chief executives to ask for the list, Mr. Meyer said.

 

In another social media post, Mr. Ackman said he was “100% in support of free speech.” But, he added, “one should be prepared to stand up and be personally accountable for his or her views.”

 

The doxxing, however, has extended to family members.

 

“Every single member of my family has been contacted, including my younger siblings,” said the student whose smiling face was on the truck.

 

With Free Speech, What’s the Line?

 

Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar and the dean of U.C. Berkeley’s law school, said he objected to the doxxing and believed that displaying a truck billboard of student photos was “despicable.”

 

But he did not believe the actions had prevented either side from expressing their views. Mr. Ackman and Mr. Meyer may have heightened the tension, he said, but “you can’t express your views and then say, ‘Those who criticize me are chilling my speech.’”

 

Universities have to strike a balance, he said. “The institution — the law school or university — has to help all students get jobs regardless of their views.” Employers have a right not to hire people whose views they disagree with.

 

To other free-speech advocates, however, doxxing and shaming have become a standard part of the cancel culture arsenal, and run the risk of suppressing opinion.

 

Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the students’ statement “deplorable” but said that was beside the point.

 

Collecting names sounded like a throwback to McCarthy-era blacklists, she said. The latest lists could muzzle not only these students, but also those who might share “more thoughtful and less categorical pronouncements.”

 

And threatening people’s career prospects seemed like an overreaction, she said, especially when they were young and just starting out.

 

“The concept of proportionality, elusive as it is, is very woven into the fabric of not only American law, but international human rights law,” said Ms. Strossen, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

 

Students behind the letter said that Harvard had not done enough to push back against their adversaries.

 

University officials have sent out general messages saying Harvard does not “condone or ignore” threats and intimidation. And officials said they have taken steps to ensure safety and calm anxieties over the last 10 days or so.

 

The university has urged students to report threats to the Harvard police. It has expanded shuttle service and closed the gates of Harvard Yard at night to people without university identification.

 

There is little the university can do, however, about the truck, which has been careful to stay on public streets. And the lists of names were compiled from publicly available sources.

 

Harvard has also begun dealing with the fractured mood on campus. On Tuesday, the Dean of Students Office announced open office hours for students who wanted to talk about “recent events.” Another office announced a session on “Navigating Interpersonal Conflict and Leadership.”

 

Students associated with the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee have distributed a guide for doxxed students, which they compiled after a meeting with “upper-level administrators,” according to student emails.

 

The guide said that Harvard’s career center would reach out to employers to vouch for students. And it provided contact information for a lawyer willing to help undocumented students. It also recommended avoiding the news media: “Demand anonymity — use language about ‘extreme threat to security.’”

 

At Hillel House, a Different Threat

 

At the Harvard Hillel building, Jewish students passed through locked doors guarded by a patrol car. Over the past week, they had spent more time than usual there, looking for solace and understanding. Some students knew people who had been killed in the attack.

 

To them, the anti-Israel statement sounded divorced from reality.

 

“I feel insane walking around this campus,” said Elianne Sacher, a student from Israel. Since when, she asked, are murder and kidnapping excused?

 

After the Hamas attack, more pro-Palestinian students have attended class wearing the kaffiyeh, said Spencer Glassman, another student taking refuge in Hillel.

 

He felt uncomfortable with the display. “When terrorists wear the symbol, they appropriate the meaning,” he said. “It’s not this neutral liberation symbol to me.”

 

The students said that in the past week, antisemitic comments had been uttered in dining halls and posted on social media. The app Sidechat allows students to post anonymous messages, after logging in with their Harvard email addresses.

 

Harvard Hillel’s president, Jacob Miller, pushed a sheaf of examples across a table during an interview.

 

“LET EM COOK,” next to a Palestinian flag emoji, read one.

 

“I proudly accept the label of terrorist,” read another.

 

A third replied to emojis of the Israeli flag with an emoji of a baby’s head separated from its torso.

 

Screenshots of the posts have been shared with Harvard officials, the students at Hillel said.

 

Much as he condemned the truck and the doxxing, Mr. Miller said, the screeds on social media directed at Jewish students also had a chilling effect on speech.

 

“I do think it cuts both ways,” he said. “A number of my friends tell me they feel intimidated and uncomfortable speaking on campus due to the hostile environment.”

 

“It’s tragic that students on both sides feel afraid to voice their opinions,” Mr. Miller said. “Especially at a college that prides itself on the pursuit of truth.”

 

Stephanie Saul and Vimal Patel contributed reporting. Susan Beachy contributed research.

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9) I Live in My Car

Dozens of parking lots have opened across the country for working people who can afford a car but not rent.

By Rukmini CallimachiPhotographs by Ruth Fremson, Published Oct. 17, 2023, Updated Oct. 18, 2023

Rukmini Callimachi spent three days shadowing a woman living out of her car in Kirkland, Wash. She interviewed more than two dozen people, including car dwellers and those trying to help them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/realestate/car-homeless-rent-debt-mortgage.html

Chrystal Audet and her daughter, Cierra, pictured here with her dog Coda, are among a growing cohort of working Americans living out of their cars.

Rukmini Callimachi spent three days shadowing a woman living out of her car in Kirkland, Wash. She interviewed more than two dozen people, including car dwellers and those trying to help them.

 

Chrystal Audet tried to get comfortable in what she called her “bedroom” — the back seat of her eight-year-old Ford Fusion. To stretch her legs, she had to leave a passenger door ajar, but September nights are raw in the Pacific Northwest, with sheets of rain that cut to the bone.

 

From her own “bedroom” in the front seat, her 26-year-old daughter Cierra Audet asked her to close it.

 

“We have to get out of this,” Ms. Audet said to herself as she pulled a comforter against the cold and struggled to fall asleep in a parking lot in Kirkland, Wash.

 

Ms. Audet, 49, earns over $72,000 a year as a social worker for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. But a combination of bad luck, bad debt and a bad credit score priced her out of her apartment in Bellevue, another suburb of Seattle, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. With an eviction looming, she put her furniture in storage this spring and began parking the sedan in a U-shaped parking lot outside a church in Kirkland.

 

The car, her biggest investment, became her home — the roof turned into a dining table, the trunk a closet. And a weathered stretch of blacktop provided by a Methodist church became her yard, her neighborhood and her safe place.

 

Around the country, real estate is being set aside for people like Ms. Audet in the form of parking lots. Dozens of such lots have opened in the last five years, with new ones being announced every few months, including as far east as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. They are sprinkled across the Midwest in Green Bay, Wis., and Duluth, Minn. And they dot the spine of the Pacific Northwest, providing a safe harbor for a growing cohort of working Americans who are wedged in the unforgiving middle. They earn too little to afford rent but too much to receive government assistance and have turned their cars into a form of affordable housing.

 

The idea of providing a parking lot for homeless parkers is nearly two decades old, with the first known lot opening in the shadow of Santa Barbara’s mansions in 2004. But the idea didn’t take off nationally for some time.

 

The Lake Washington United Methodist Church began experimenting with offering a beachhead for the “mobile homeless” in 2011 in response to Seattle’s “scofflaw ordinance,” which called for the impounding of cars that had accrued multiple parking tickets, a law that was disastrous for people forced to live in their cars. “Our simple idea was, ‘Hey, if they’re in our parking lot, they won’t get parking tickets. And they won’t get booted and towed,’” said Karina O’Malley, who helped create the program.

 

Now it is one of 12 in Washington State.

 

“Tens of thousands of people are living in their vehicles,” said Graham J. Pruss, an applied anthropologist studying the trend, who heads the National Vehicle Residency Collective. “It’s huge.”

 

‘One Bill Too Many’

 

In 2001, Ms. Audet posted a bad check. It went to court and ended up on her record, one of several setbacks that have damaged her credit.

 

Her free fall into unsustainable debt began last December when her car made a horrible, sputtering sound, and died. With poor credit, the only loan she could find came at a punishing cost: For the 2015 Ford Fusion with over 100,000 miles, she is being charged interest of 27.99 percent, equaling a payment of $398 per month, one-tenth of her take-home pay.

 

Medical bills in the thousands arrived for her Crohn’s disease. She missed two rent payments. And then the landlord raised her rent $248 a month.

 

“It was a case of one bill too many,” Ms. Audet said.

 

Down the spiral that led her to homelessness were a series of forks — choices between bad and very bad that she made, many in moments of desperation. She spent a week at a hotel. Expedia offered to break up her payments, which she is now paying off at the rate of $138 a month. To avoid her unpaid rent going to collections, she signed an installment plan, agreeing to pay $495 per month.

 

By midsummer, Ms. Audet’s take-home pay of nearly $4,300 a month was hollowed out by bills totaling nearly $2,600, leaving her with too little to pay for an apartment in a market where the median rent is $2,200.

 

She finally found the parking lot after seeing a news story about parking programs for homeless people. A tiny house is typically 300 square feet. For months, Ms. Audet, her daughter and their cream-colored mutt Coda lived out of a space that was no more than 30 square feet.

 

The fact that she was able to hang on to her car allowed her to maintain a semblance of normalcy. Almost no one knew her secret. Each morning, Ms. Audet used a portable toilet to get ready for work, then commuted to the downtown Seattle office of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, where she spent her day sitting behind a plexiglass partition across from some of the city’s most destitute residents.

 

“There’s no judgment here,” she told the desperate people seeking government assistance, including a man clutching a medical certificate proving that he is blind. She helped him qualify for disability benefits. “It could be me on the other side of this glass,” she told them.

 

She, in fact, was on the other side of the glass — her bank account overdrawn by more than $900, a black hole of loans and bills that ate up her paycheck the moment it landed. Because she spent her days assisting others, she knew that she earned too much to be helped herself: The cutoff for receiving housing assistance in King County is 80 percent of the median income, or $70,650, said Benjamin Maritz, a member of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority Implementation Board.

 

In many cities, the “mobile homeless” are now the majority of the homeless population — people living out of vehicles make up about 53 percent in King County, Washington, where Ms. Audet lives. About 45 percent in San Mateo, a county perched on California’s rugged northern cliffs, are in the same predicament. In Los Angeles, the number approaches 60 percent.

 

Many of them have jobs: In Denver, 135 out of the 217 people who slept in one of the lots provided by the Colorado Safe Parking Initiative earlier this year earned an average of $1,581 a month. One-bedrooms there average $1,655.

 

After losing his job in January as a purchasing agent for a gardening company in Denver, Josh, 37, who asked that he be identified by his first name only because he had not told his family about his predicament, moved into his Toyota RAV 4. Finding somewhere safe to park was a daily struggle: “I was bouncing around between gyms, hotel parking lots, light industrial areas and the side streets off of hotels or apartments,” he said. Soon after, he learned he had colon cancer.

 

One night, when he was sleeping outside a Planet Fitness, he woke up to a man trying to break in. He left after Josh pushed the emergency button on his key fob. On another night when it was snowing, he parked in the lot of a Super 8 motel and found tracks leading to his car and the snow sheared from one of the car’s handles the next morning.

 

He called the Colorado Safe Parking Initiative, one of the newest in the country which operates thirteen lots in Denver, and begged the operator for a spot.

 

Josh now lives in one of the lots and commutes to his chemotherapy appointments.

 

There are so many people in need of a place to park that most are turned away. “We can only serve 10 to 20 percent of the people who call us,” said the executive director, Terrell Curtis.

 

In other parking lots across the country, car dwellers shared the hardships that landed them there: A man who scraped by delivering pizzas in Santa Barbara ended up in his Nissan Frontier when the pizza parlor cut his hours. A 35-year-old who installed home security systems ended up in his Chevy Suburban when he lost control of the drill, snapping his radial tendon. And one woman said she had to choose between helping her mother or herself.

 

“The rent just kept going up and up and up,” said Brooke Rosales, 41, describing how she and her mother shared an apartment in Lakewood, Colo., scraping by through a delicate lean-to of wages and disability benefits. Ms. Rosales suffers from grand mal seizures while her mother has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

 

It came crashing down when the mother’s condition progressed and she was no longer able to work. Sandy Rosales, 64, now struggles to breathe. Unable to make rent, the mother moved in with her son.

 

There was no room for Brooke Rosales, who ended up in her Jeep Liberty at a lot for homeless parkers in Denver.

 

Shame

 

To try to stay ahead of the tsunami of bills, Ms. Audet worked two jobs. On a recent evening, after clocking out at the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, Ms. Audet took Bus No. 554 back to Kirkland, where her daughter, a college student, waited for her. They spent the next three hours delivering food through DoorDash, breaking for dinner and picking up the next day. The pair earned $86.05 that evening, then spent $20 on gas and $20.37 at a waffle place for a takeout dinner.

 

They ate in the empty parking lot of a middle school, the Styrofoam container laid out on the roof of the Ford.

 

“It’s the irony of working and making a nice income and still not being able to afford housing,” Ms. Audet said. “I make $32 and some change per hour, but even still, I find myself struggling.”

 

To bathe, Ms. Audet and her daughter headed to a state park the next morning. It’s inside a 489-acre forest of Douglas firs crisscrossed by trails. They found that the parking lot was roped off — an equestrian competition was underway. So they parked on the highway, across from the park entrance, next to a “Tow Away Area” sign. She and her daughter took turns walking across the highway with their toiletries; one person needed to stay with the car to make sure it wasn’t towed.

 

Ms. Audet padded across the two-lane road in the pajamas she had slept in the night before. She had bought a bucket at the drugstore in order to carry her lotions, but on this particular morning she decided to leave it in the trunk, carrying her creams, her razor and her rosewater body wash in her arms, covered by a towel.

 

“I didn’t want to draw attention to myself,” she whispered, as she passed teenage girls leading shiny horses with braided manes.

 

On the door of the public shower, someone had taped a real estate listing to the wall, advertising a $4.25 million home. It was walking distance away and featured a three-stall barn, custom millwork and heated floors. Six miles from the public restroom where Ms. Audet showers is the exclusive community where Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos live.

 

Calculated Omission

 

There are so many ways in which a person’s life becomes smaller when they are forced to fit a home into a car. To avoid using the portable toilet at night, Ms. Audet tried to limit how much water she drank, leading to dehydration. The fact that she couldn’t properly stretch out caused her ankles to swell to the point that she couldn’t fit into her tennis shoes. Mother and daughter draped sheets over the car’s windows to try to have a measure of privacy at night. When it rained, the sheets got wet and with nowhere to dry them out, they became moldy.

 

In between working two jobs and navigating the church parking lot and the public shower, Ms. Audet found time to search for apartments. She was presented with the impossible math of her life: Her pay stubs presented one picture — that of a woman earning a respectable income — but as soon as the apartment managers pulled her credit report, their expressions changed, she said. With a score of 562, considered “Very Poor” by credit reporting agencies, she was asked to find a co-signer, or else provide multiple months of deposits. She didn’t have so much as the first month’s rent.

 

Her luck changed in late August at an event inside the church, when housing activists noticed that she was being trailed by a Times reporter. Several offered their business cards. One coached her on how to approach potential landlords — what to share and what to omit.

 

Soon after, she toured a $2,360-a-month one-bedroom in Redmond, Wash. At 673 square feet, it was a palace: Bright, white countertops and shiny floors stretched over floor space 20 times the size of her car.

 

A calculated omission — one that she wasn’t proud of but felt necessary as winter approached — allowed her to clear the first hurdle. On the form requesting two years of rental history, she left off her most recent apartment. Because she had entered into a payment agreement, the unpaid rent did not appear on her credit report.

 

She was nearly in tears when she heard that she had been approved, but almost lost the apartment when she couldn’t provide the security deposit. The church where she had been parking stepped in, ending her homelessness for a little more than $2,000.

 

Ms. Audet and her daughter moved in on Sept. 23. For now she is relishing the simplest of human pleasures — the ability to drink as much water as she wants, to take a shower in a space that is fully hers and to stretch out when she sleeps. Her tennis shoes fit again. Yet the math of her life remains precarious. Her sizable debt continues to carve out her salary, leaving too little for rent.

 

“I’m always, like, on the edge,” said Ms. Audet. “At least I have a car to sit in — and a safe parking lot to be in.”

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