11/26/2023

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, November 27, 2023


The correct registration URL for the December 3 forum is: https://tinyurl.com/2k3zdmwf

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"The Rock" on top of Bernal Hill overlooking downtown San Francisco re-painted October 26, 2023, after pro-Israeli Zionist's destroyed it. 

Palestinians killed and wounded by Israel:
As of November 27, 2023the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel is now over 15,000 (over 6,150 are children and 36,000 are wounded)and more than 235 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank in the past month. 
The U.N. humanitarian affairs office estimates that about 2,700 people, including 1,500 children, are missing and believed buried in the ruins. 
8,300 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons.
Since October 7, one in every 57 Palestinians living in Gaza has been killed or injured in Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion.

Israelis killed and abducted by Hamas: 
A total of 1,200* Israelis killed by Hamas (30 of them children) and 239 abducted on October 7, 2023.
Israel has revised its official estimated death toll of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, lowering the number to about 1,200 people, down from more than 1,400, a spokesman for the country’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday night.

NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA  PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!

FOR A DEMOCRATIC, SECULAR PALESTINE!

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Ann Boyer’s Powerful New York Times Resignation Letter

November 17, 2023

Read: The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children, By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/world/middleeast/gaza-children-israel.html



According to Literary Hub[1], "[Early on November 16, 2023], the news broke that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine, Anne Boyer, has resigned from her post, writing in her resignation letter that 'the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone...'"

 

The letter in full is written below:

 

"I have resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine.

"The Israeli state’s U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

"The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted throughout decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.

"Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.

"I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.

"If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present."

—Anne Boyer




[1] https://lithub.com/read-anne-boyers-extraordinary-resignation-letter-from-the-new-york-times/

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Viva Fidel!

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PLEASE SIGN AND FORWARD WIDELY!

 

To endorse the following statement as a trade unionist, please click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd2tpd2c62Sh5YEVDOr2vmGWTuQArt-6OPQMDwd2wUnfNi_rQ/viewform

 

To endorse as other, please click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdzWaP1U_KOHlH-ou1R3OD8zsuI5BWW1b9H4gtPoFK_lIQB3g/viewform

 

The list of signers will be updated periodically

Contact: info@laborforpalestine.net

Website: laborforpalestine.net

 

Stand With Palestinian Workers: 

Cease the Genocide Now—Stop Arming Israel!

Labor for Palestine

 

“We need you to take immediate action—wherever you are in the world—to prevent the arming of the Israeli state and the companies involved in the infrastructure of the blockade.” An Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel (October 16, 2023)

 

The undersigned U.S. workers, trade unionists, and anti-apartheid activists join labor around the world in condemning the Israeli siege on Gaza that has killed or maimed thousands of Palestinians—many of them children—and stand with Palestinians’ “right to exist, resist, return, and self-determination.”

 

The latest Israeli attacks reflect more than a century of ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, racism, genocide, and apartheid—including Israel’s establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine.

 

Israel’s crimes are only possible because of more than $3.8 billion a year (or $10+ million per day) in bipartisan US military aid that gives Israel the guns, bullets, tanks, ships, jet fighters, missiles, helicopters, white phosphorus and other weapons to kill and maim the Palestinian people. This is the same system of racist state violence that, through shared surveillance technology and police exchange programs, brutalizes BIPOC and working class people in the United States and around the world.

 

In response, we demand an immediate end to the genocide, and embrace the recent Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel:

 

1.     To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel. To refuse to transport weapons to Israel. 

 

2.     To pass motions in their trade union to this effect. 

 

3.     To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution. 

 

4.     Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the U.S., funding to it.

 

We further reaffirm the call on labor bodies to respect previous Palestinian trade union appeals for solidarity by adopting this statement, and/or the model resolution below to divest from Israel Bonds, sever all ties with the Israel’s racist labor federation, the Histadrut, and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee, and respect the Palestinian picket line for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). 

 

Initial Signers on behalf of Labor for Palestine

(organizational affiliations listed for identification only)

Suzanne Adely, Labor for Palestine, US Palestinian Community Network, Arab Workers Resource Center; Food Chain Workers Alliance (staff); President, National Lawyers Guild; Monadel Herzallah, Arab American Union Members Council; Ruth Jennison, Department Rep., Massachusetts Society of Professors, MTA, NEA; Co-Chair, Labor Standing Committee River Valley DSA; Delegate to Western Mass Area Labor Federation; Lara Kiswani, Executive Director, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC); Block the Boat; Michael Letwin, Former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; Jews for Palestinian Right of Return; Corinna Mullin, PSC-CUNY International Committee; CUNY for Palestine; Clarence Thomas, Co-Chair, Million Worker March; Executive Board, ILWU Local 10 (retired.)

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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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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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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


Poetic Petition to Genocide Joe Before He Eats His Turkey 

By Julia Wright

 

Mr Genocide Joe

you have helped broker

a Thanksgiving truce

in Gaza

where your zionist partners

in war crimes

say they will stop

slaughtering "human animals"

for four days

 

but

Mr Genocide Joe

closer to home

you have your own hostages

taken in the cointelpro wars

who still languish

in cages

treated worse than animals

inhumanely

 

so

as you pardon

two turkeys

in the White House today

as you get ready to eat your military turkey

and have it too

it would at last be time

to unchain

at least two of your own "human animals" -

Mumia Abu-Jamal

and

Leonard Peltier

 

(c) Julia Wright. November 25, 2023. All Rights Reserved to Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier.


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A Plea for the Compassionate Release of 

Leonard Peltier

Self Portrait by Leonard Peltier


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.

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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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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Letter from Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

November 6, 2023

      I’m back at Red Onion. I have no lines of communication. They have me in the B-3 torture cellblock again where there is no access to a kiosk and they’re withholding my tablet anyway. Even if I had it, it’s no use with no kiosk to sync it to and send/receive messages.

      This was a hit. Came from DOC HQ in response folks complaining about my being thrown in solitary at Sussex and the planted knife thing. Kyle Rosch was in on it. The warden and AW here said he’s having me sent back out of state. In any case I don’t want be in this racist trap.

      They cut all my outstanding medical referrals to send here cuz there’s no major medical facility in this remote region. I was pending referral to the cardiac clinic at MCV hospital (Medical College of Virginia), which is on the other side of the state. Also was pending referral to urology there. They were supposed to do testing for congestive heart failure and kidney problems related to my legs, feet, and ankles chronic swelling, and other undiagnosed issues: chronic cough, fluid weight gain, sweats, fatigue, chest pain. They just cut these referrals all of which I have copies of from my medical files.

      They’ve been removing documents from my file too. Like the order I had for oversize handcuffs—which I was gassed the morning I was transferred here for asking the transferring pigs to honor. They took the order out of my file to try to cover their asses. I and others have copies of that too. At this point things are hectic. I’m back in old form now. I was somewhat in hiatus, trying to get the medical care I needed and not provoking them to avoid the bs while that was going on. But the bs has found me once again : ). I need all possible help here. At a level a bit more intense than in the past cuz I need that diagnostic care they cut the referrals for and it’s not available in this remote area. They’d have to send me back to Sussex or another prison near MCU in the VDOC’s Central or Eastern Region. I’m in the most remote corner of the Western Region. My health is not good! And they’re using the medical quack staff here to rubber stamp blocking my referrals.

      Although that lawyer may have given you a message from me, she is not helping me in any way. So no-one should assume because a lawyer surfaced that she is working on anything to aid me. Just have to emphasize that cuz past experience has shown that folks will take a lawyer’s seeming presence as grounds to believe that means some substantial help is here and their help is not needed. Again, I need all possible help here….My health depends on this call for help in a more immediate sense than the cancer situation. I’m having breathing and mobility problems, possibly cardiac related.

 

      All power to the people!

Rashid

 

We need to contact these Virginia Department of Corrections personnel to protest:: 

 

VADOC~ Central Administration; USPS—P.O. Box 26963; Richmond, VA 23261

David  Robinson Phone : 804-887-8078, Email~david.robinson@vadoc.virginia.gov

Virginia DOC ~ Director, Chadwick S Dotson, Phone~ (804) 674-3081 Email~Chadwick.Dotson@.vadoc.virginia.gov

 

Virginia Department of Corrections Interstate Compact Liaison

Kyle Rosch, Phone: 804-887-8404, Email: kyle.rosch@vadoc.virginia.gov

 

VADOC ~Central Administration

Rose L. Durbin, Phone~804-887-7921Email~Rose.Durbin@vadoc.virgina.gov

 

Red Onion~ Warden, Richard E White, USPS—10800 H. Jack Rose Hwy., Pound, VA 24279

Phone: (276) 796-3536;(or 7510)  Email~ rick.white@vadoc.virginia.gov

 

Red Onion State Prison, Assistant Warden

Shannon Fuller Phone: 276-796-7510  Email: shannon.fuller@VADOC.virginia.gov

 

Write to Rashid: 

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson #1007485 

Red Onion State Prison

10800 H. Jack Rose Hwy

Pound, VA 24279






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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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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) Gaza has become a moonscape in war. When the battles stop, many fear it will remain uninhabitable

By Isabel Debre, November 23, 2023

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gaza-become-moonscape-war-battles-135458471.html
Gaza Has Become a Moonscape in War. When the Battles Stop, Many Fear It Will Remain Uninhabitable
Israel's military offensive has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape.' (photo: AP)

Israel’s military offensive has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape. Whole neighborhoods have been erased. Homes, schools and hospitals have been blasted by airstrikes and scorched by tank fire. Some buildings are still standing, but most are battered shells.

 

Nearly 1 million Palestinians have fled the north, including its urban center, Gaza City, as ground combat intensified. When the war ends, any relief will quickly be overshadowed by dread as displaced families come to terms with the scale of the calamity and what it means for their future.

 

Where would they live? Who would eventually run Gaza and pick up the pieces?

 

“I want to go home even if I have to sleep on the rubble of my house,” said Yousef Hammash, an aid worker with the Norwegian Refugee Council who fled the ruins of the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya for southern Gaza. “But I don’t see a future for my children here.”

 

The Israeli army’s use of powerful explosives in tightly packed residential areas — which Israel describes as the unavoidable outcome of Hamas using civilian sites as cover for its operations — has killed over 13,000 Palestinians and led to staggering destruction. Hamas denies the claim and accuses Israel of recklessly bombing civilians.

 

“When I left, I couldn’t tell which street or intersection I was passing,” said Mahmoud Jamal, a 31-year-old taxi driver who fled his northern hometown of Beit Hanoun this month. He described apartment buildings resembling open-air parking garages.

 

Israel’s bombardment has become one of the most intense air campaigns since World War II, said Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor. In the seven weeks since Hamas’ unprecedented Oct. 7 attack, Israel unleashed more munitions than the United States did in any given year of its bombing campaign against the Islamic State group — a barrage the U.N. describes as the deadliest urban campaign since World War II.

 

In Israel’s grainy thermal footage of airstrikes targeting Hamas tunnels, fireballs obliterate everything in sight. Videos by Hamas’ military wing feature fighters with rocked-propelled grenades trekking through smoke-filled streets. Fortified bulldozers have cleared land for Israeli tanks.

 

“The north of Gaza has been turned into one big ghost town,” said Mkhaimer Abusada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City who fled to Egypt last week. “People have nothing to return to.”

 

About half of all buildings across northern Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to an analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. With the U.N. estimating 1.7 million people are newly homeless, many wonder if Gaza will ever recover.

 

“You’ll end up having displaced people living in tents for a long time,” said Raphael Cohen, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, a research group.

 

The war has knocked 27 of 35 hospitals across Gaza out of operation, according to the World Health Organization. The destruction of other critical infrastructure has consequences for years to come.

 

“Bakeries and grain mills have been destroyed, agriculture, water and sanitation facilities,” said Scott Paul, a senior humanitarian policy adviser for Oxfam America. “You need more than four walls and a ceiling for a place to be habitable, and in many cases people don’t even have that.”

 

Across the entire enclave, over 41,000 homes — 45% of Gaza’s total housing stock — are too destroyed to be lived in, according to the U.N.

 

“All I left at home was dead bodies and rubble,” said Mohammed al-Hadad, a 28-year-old party planner who fled Shati refugee camp along Gaza City’s shoreline. Shati sustained nearly 14,000 incidents of war damage — varying from an airstrike crater to a collapsed building — over just 0.5 square kilometers (0.2 square miles), the satellite data analysis shows.

 

Southern Gaza — where scarce food, water and fuel has spawned a humanitarian crisis — has been spared the heaviest firepower, according to the analysis.

 

Palestinians look for survivors under the rubble of destroyed buildings following Israeli airstrikes in Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled, File)

 

But that’s changing. In the past two weeks, satellite data shows a spike in damage across the southern town of Khan Younis. Residents say the military has showered eastern parts of town with evacuation warnings.

 

Israel has urged those in southern Gaza to move again, toward a slice of territory called Muwasi along the coast. As of Thursday, Israel and Hamas were still working out the details of a four-day truce that would allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and facilitate an exchange of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages.

 

“This is our nakba,” said 32-year-old journalist Tareq Hajjaj, referring to the mass displacement of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation — an exodus Palestinians call the “nakba,” or “catastrophe.”

 

Although publicly Palestinians reject the idea of being transferred outside Gaza, some privately admit they cannot stay, even after the war ends.

 

“We will never return home,” said Hajjaj, who fled his home in Shijaiyah in eastern Gaza City. “Those who stay here will face the most horrific situation they could imagine.”

 

The 2014 Israel-Hamas war leveled Shijaiyah, turning the neighborhood into fields of inert gray rubble. The $5 billion reconstruction effort there and across Gaza remains unfinished to this day.

 

“This time the scale of destruction is exponentially higher,” said Giulia Marini, international advocacy officer at Palestinian rights group Al Mezan. “It will take decades for Gaza to go back to where it was before.”

 

It remains unclear who will take responsibility for that task. At the recent security summit in Bahrain, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi vowed Arab states would not “come and clean the mess after Israel.”

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the army to restore security, and American officials have pushed the seemingly unlikely scenario of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority taking over the strip.

 

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, regarded by many Palestinians as weak, has dismissed that idea in the absence of Israeli efforts toward a two-state solution.

 

Despite the war’s horrors, Yasser Elsheshtawy, a professor of architecture at Columbia University, hopes reconstruction could offer an opportunity to turn Gaza’s ramshackle refugee camps and long deteriorating infrastructure into “something more habitable and equitable and humane,” including public parks and a revitalized seafront.

 

But Palestinians say it’s not only shattered infrastructure that requires rebuilding but a traumatized society.

 

“Gaza has become a very scary place,” Abusada said. “It will always be full of memories of death and destruction.”

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2) ‘We Went Back to the Stone Age’

Life in besieged Gaza revolves around a daily struggle to find food and water. With practically no fuel or coal, families are burning doors and window frames to cook what they can scrounge.

By Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Hiba Yazbek, Abu Bakr Bashir and Ameera Harouda, Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud, Nov. 26, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/26/world/europe/gaza-life-war.html
A person standing in the water carries a white bucket toward people gathered on the beach. Another person, partly bent down, stands on the sand near two yellow containers.

Filling containers with seawater at a beach in Deir al-Balah for washing and cooking. Since Israel imposed a siege on Gaza, clean water for drinking has also been hard to come by. Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times


Namzi Mwafi, 23, has one job, day in and day out: find water for his family.

 

Dozens of his extended family members are sheltering together in a two-bedroom apartment in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza near the territory’s border with Egypt, he says. The oldest, his grandmother, is 68; the youngest, a cousin, is 6 months old.

 

To keep them alive, Mr. Mwafi says he wakes up at 4 a.m., spending hours waiting for water at a crowded filling station. Sometimes, he has to fight to keep his place in line and sometimes there is nothing left when his turn comes.

 

When he is lucky, he pushes his heavy trolley home through the sand and the family rations the haul to about a glass a day each.

 

There is practically no gas or other fuel left in Gaza, according to the United Nations agencies operating there, so some people are building makeshift clay or metal ovens to cook. Firewood and coal have also largely run out, so families are burning stripped-down doors, shutters and window frames, cardboard and grasses. Some simply do not cook, eating raw onions and eggplants instead.

 

“We went back to the Stone Age,” Mr. Mwafi said.

 

In response to the devastating Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed what it called a complete siege — cutting off almost all water, food, electricity and fuel for the more than two million Palestinians living in Gaza. It also launched thousands of airstrikes on the enclave and sent in ground forces to try to root out Hamas.

 

A brief cease-fire, the first since the war began seven weeks ago, began to take hold on Friday, and as part of a hostage agreement between Israel and Hamas, dozens of trucks with water and other vital humanitarian aid crossed into Gaza.

 

Still, it was far less than what typically came into the territory before the war, and there was no indication that the freer flow of aid would last beyond the four-day agreed truce.

 

Before the cease-fire, little humanitarian aid — far short of what Gazans need — had been trickling in. And so, from the north to the south, in tented camps, apartments, schools and hospitals, residents crammed together in ever-shrinking spaces have been struggling every day to meet their most basic needs.

 

Surviving has become a full-time, perilous undertaking.

 

Days start well before dawn. Tasks seem simple: Fetch water. Bake bread. Buy diapers. Stay alive.

 

But people do not always succeed.

 

Mineral water trucked into the territory in aid convoys has been enough for only 4 percent of the population, according to the United Nations World Food Program. Some desalinated water is still being distributed in the south, but the north has no potable water sources left, according to the U.N. People who cannot access the scarce mineral and desalinated water rely on brackish water from wells, which the U.N. has said is not safe for human consumption.

 

Flour, too, is running out and most wheat mills have been bombed, according to the United Nations. Humanitarian agencies have managed to deliver bread, canned tuna and date bars to about a quarter of the population since Oct. 7, but distribution is hampered by fighting and the siege, the World Food Program said. Some farmers are slaughtering their animals, trading their future livelihoods for the emergency at hand.

 

The World Food Program has warned that only 10 percent of the food Gaza needs has entered the territory since the war began, creating “a massive food gap and widespread hunger.”

 

“Wheat flour, dairy products, cheese, eggs and mineral water have completely disappeared,” in the market, Alia Zaki, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, said this month.

 

The virtual collapse of the sewage system and displacement of about 1.7 million Gazans, who have poured into camps and crowded into relatives’ homes, have also brought on a hygiene crisis and illnesses that the World Health Organization warns could get much worse.

 

Diarrhea, scabies and lice are ripping through the population, hitting younger children particularly hard.

 

Shops Are Empty. Banks Are Closed. Power Is Out.

 

Mr. Mwafi said he graduated from college with a degree in computer engineering a month before the war. He dreamed of a life in Canada as a videographer and had just started dabbling in content creation. His social media before Oct. 7 shows a young man with a bright smile at his graduation, surrounded by friends and family.

 

His posts were unreservedly upbeat, full of Quranic quotes and pop culture affirmations about positive living, love, friendship and hope. Now they are all about staying alive.

 

“Our strategy right now is how to survive for the longest period possible,” he said.

 

“If before I had ambitions and hopes for a good future and fulfilling the dreams I had as a child,” he said, “now my utmost ambition is to be able to eat, drink water and sleep.”

 

Before the war began, Gaza had been blockaded by Israel and Egypt for 16 years, and the humanitarian situation there deteriorated quickly, with stocks depleting just days after the siege began in early October.

 

“Even before Oct. 7, 70 percent of the people in Gaza were relying on humanitarian aid of some form or another,” said Ms. Zaki, the World Food Program spokeswoman. “And the strip had some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the world.”

 

The vast majority of shops are now shut or empty, and people are mostly buying and selling goods informally, according to the United Nations. With electricity out and most banks closed, the few who do have funds cannot get them. Even if they could, there is not much to buy.

 

A Hygiene Crisis Grows

 

In May, Lujayn al-Borno, 35, her husband and their four children — between 1½ and 14 years old — fled Sudan, then a month into a civil war, for their native Gaza. They knew that returning to their homeland would be hard after 13 years of prosperity and relative stability in Sudan. But they had cash and family in Gaza, so they figured they were better off than most.

 

They quickly settled in an apartment in the upscale Gaza City neighborhood of Rimal in the north.

 

Then, on Oct. 7, hours after the Hamas-led attack on Israel, Ms. al-Borno said the family received a call from the Israeli military to evacuate their building because it was going to be hit in one of the war’s first airstrikes. They fled for the southern city of Khan Younis and sheltered with extended family in a small apartment that was still under construction.

 

Ms. al-Borno visits a nearby shop every day, but usually it’s empty.

 

“I go look for food for my children on foot, and I find nothing,” she said. “I cry the whole way back home.”

 

But her persistence and the cash she still has occasionally pay off. Recently, she said she managed to secure two packs of diapers for Jameel, her toddler, but only after a long trek to another part of Gaza.

 

Ms. al-Borno also bought blankets off a displaced family that had received them for free as humanitarian aid, she said. They were so desperate for food that they were prepared to go cold.

 

Aya Ibrahim, 43, is sheltering with her children in a U.N.-run school in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza.

 

“The bathrooms here are very bad. They are all blocked up because we have no water at all,” Ms. Ibrahim said. The men and boys, including her two teenage sons, sleep near the toilets, the women in a classroom one floor up.

 

“The smell is killing us,” she said. Some women prefer to relieve themselves in nylon bags in a bucket behind a makeshift curtain in the classroom where they sleep.

 

Ms. Ibrahim said the United Nations distributed one pack of sanitary pads for the 30 women sharing the classroom with her.

 

Amal, another woman in the same shelter, said she was so desperate because of the lack of sanitary pads that she had started taking birth control pills to stop her period altogether.

 

‘All Children Are Sick Here’

 

When his siblings fled northern Gaza, Ahmed Khaled said he stayed behind to keep his mother, who is unable to walk, alive. The Israeli military had warned Gazans to go south, but he said his mother was too frail to move.

 

“I can’t leave her alone,” he said by phone earlier this month. “Plus, nowhere is safe.”

 

So, as Israeli shells and bombs landed nearby, he said he moved his mother, his wife and his three daughters into a U.N. school complex in the city of Beit Lahiya, alongside thousands of other displaced people.

 

Mr. Khaled, 39, said he had been trying to make peace with that decision as the war intensified around him and life became increasingly untenable.

 

The family was surviving on rice and dirty water, he said, and the only shop still open had mostly bare shelves. Still, Mr. Khaled said, he had to go out and try to find food.

 

“I either walk or cycle to the shop, not knowing whether I’ll be back,” he said.

 

“All children are sick here,” he added. “Diarrhea and stomachache. It’s very dirty.”

 

He mentioned the hunger and illnesses almost as afterthoughts, considering the fierce warfare raging around him in northern Gaza.

 

“Bombardment is all around us all the time,” he said.

 

The day after the interview, on Nov. 18, the school where Mr. Ahmed was sheltering was bombed along with another U.N. school in northern Gaza. The U.N. secretary general said he was “deeply shocked” that two U.N. schools where families had sought shelter were struck in less than 24 hours, adding that dozens of people were killed and injured.

 

The Israeli military said it was reviewing the episode.

 

New York Times reporters have not been able to reach Mr. Khaled since.


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3) Israeli October 7 posterchild was killed by Israeli tank, eyewitnesses reveal

By Max Blumenthal, November 25, 2023

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/11/25/israels-october-7-propaganda-tank-eyewitnesses/

Eyewitnesses to the October 7 hostage standoff in Kibbutz Be’eri have exposed Israel for misleading the world about the killings of 12-year-old Liel Hetzroni, her family and her neighbors.


In a desperate bid for international sympathy, the Israeli government has sought to stir outrage over the killing of a 12-year-old girl during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7. 

 

“This little girl’s body was burned so badly that it took forensic archeologists more than six weeks to identify her,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry declared on its official Twitter/X account. “All that remains of 12 year old Liel Hetzroni is ash and bone fragments. May her memory be a blessing.”

 

Aviva Klompas, a former speechwriter for Israel’s United Nations mission and one of the country’s top English language social media propagandists, claimed on Twitter/X, “The terrorists massacred all of [the Hetzroni’s], then torched the building.”

 

Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, chimed in to proclaim that “Liel Hetzroni of Kibbutz Beeri was murdered in her home by Hamas monsters… We’re fighting the most just war: to ensure this can never happen again.”

 

Liel Hetzroni was among the noncombatants killed in Kibbutz Be’eri when the small southern Israeli community was momentarily taken over by Hamas militants seeking captives to spur a prisoner exchange. During the standoff that ensued, she was killed instantly alongside twin brother, great-aunt and several other residents of Be’eri.

 

However, the 12-year-old Hetzroni was not slain by Hamas. According to new testimony by an Israeli eyewitness to the girl’s death, she was killed by an Israeli tank shell alongside several neighbors.

 

The revelation of Hetzroni’s friendly fire death came as the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhahu attempts to shut down the Israeli newspaper Haaretz for reporting that Israeli Apache helicopters killed Israeli citizens fleeing the Nova electronic music festival on October 7. Haaretz’s reporting confirmed a viral Grayzone investigation which highlighted disclosures by Israeli helicopter pilots and security officials of friendly fire orders throughout the fateful day. 

 

One came from a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, who told Haaretz that “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”

 

A tank battalion commander recalled receiving the same orders when he arrived on the scene, stating in a video interview, “I arrived in Be’eri to see Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram and the first thing he asks me to do is to fire a shell into a house [where Hamas members were sheltering].”

 

The decision to use heavy weapons on the small homes of Be’eri wound up costing many Israeli lives. Among them was the girl whose death has been weaponized to justify Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. And for the first time, an eyewitness to the attack has come forward with the uncomfortable truth about the killing.

 

“when those two shells hit, [Liel] stopped screaming”   

 

Yasmin Porat was among the Israelis taken hostage by Hamas militants in Be’eri on October 7. She had fled the Nova electronic music festival and sought shelter in the community when the militants arrived. In a November 15 interview with the Israeli national broadcaster, Kan News, Porat provided exclusive details of the standoff which badly undercut her government’s official narrative.

 

Under the mistaken impression that they were surrounded by Israeli troops, who were actually largely absent at the time and in a discombobulated state, the Hamas gunmen sent hostages outside the home and phoned the Israeli police in an apparent attempt to negotiate their own exit. 

 

“You see that most of the kidnappings occurred in the morning, at 10, 11, 12,” Porat said. “By 3 [in the afternoon], every [Israeli] citizen thought the army was already everywhere. [The Hamas militants] could have taken us out and back [to Gaza] ten times. But they didn’t believe that was the situation, so they asked for the police.”

 

When the Israeli special forces finally arrived on the scene, Porat said, a “ceasefire” ensued between Hamas and Israeli forces, and her own captor decided to surrender. To ensure his own safety, he stripped himself naked and used her as a human shield as he made his way toward the Israeli soldiers.

 

After Porat was freed and her captor surrendered, she said 14 Israelis remained hostage under the guard of 39 Hamas militants. Among those left behind, she said, were twin girls, Liel and Yanai Hatroni, along with their great-aunt and guardian, Ayala Hatroni. 

 

“I sat there with the commander of the unit,” Porat recalled, “and I described to him what the house looks like, and where the terrorists are, and where the hostages are. I actually drew it for him: ‘Look, here, on the lawn there are four hostages that are lying this way on the lawn. Here are two that are lying under the terrace. And in the living room there is a woman lying like this, and a woman lying like this.” 

 

Porat explained, “I told [the Israeli commander] about the twins (Yanai and Liel Hatzroni) and their great-aunt (Ayala), I didn’t see them. You know what, when I left, they were the only ones I didn’t see. I heard Liel the whole time, so I know for certain that they were there.. I tried to explain to [the commander] that from somewhere near the kitchen, that’s where I heard the screams coming from. I didn’t see her, but I heard her, and I heard where the screams were coming from. I tried to explain to them where all the hostages were.”

 

Underscoring the shoddy Israeli intelligence that made the October 7 Hamas operation possible, Porat said the soldiers did not believe that so many militants could be inside one home, or that such a large force could have penetrated the high-tech siege walls Israel had constructed around Gaza. “The first time I told [the Israeli special forces] that there are about 40 terrorists, they told me, ‘It can’t be. It seems like you’re exaggerating’… I told them, ‘There’s more of them than you.’ They didn’t believe me! It was still the naiveté of our army, as well.”

 

By 4 PM, a gun battle began to rage between the militants inside the home and the Israeli special forces stationed across the street. After failing to dislodge the Hamas fighters, the Israelis called in a tank at 7:30 PM. 

 

Porat described a sense of panic as she watched the tank trundle into the small community: “I thought to myself, ‘Why are they shooting tank shells into the house?’ And I asked one of the people that was with me, “Why are they shooting?’ So they explained to me that it was to break the walls, in order to help cleanse the house.”

 

From across the street, Porat heard two loud explosions. The tank had fired a couple of shells into the home. Laying down outside the house was her partner, Tal, another man named Tal, and the couple who owned the house, Adi and Hadas Dagan. There were also the 12-year-old twins, Liel and Yanai Hatsroni, along with their great-aunt. 

 

When the dust cleared, only Hadas Dagan emerged from the house alive.

 

Porat said Dagan later told her, “‘Yasmin, when the two big booms hit, I felt like I flew in the air… It took me 2-3 minutes to open my eyes, I didn’t feel my body. I was completely paralyzed. When I opened my eyes, I saw that my Adi [Dagan] is dying… Your Tal also stopped moving at that point.”

 

Dagan confirmed that the tank shells killed Liel Hatsroni: “‘The girl did not stop screaming for all those hours,” she told Porat, referring to Liel. “She didn’t stop screaming… [but] when those two shells hit, [Liel] stopped screaming. There was silence then.”

 

Porat concluded, “So what can you take away from that? That after that very massive incident, the shooting, which concluded with two shells, that is pretty much when everyone died.”

 

Dagan emphasized to Porat that none of the hostages had been intentionally killed by the Hamas fighters. “There were no executions, or anything like that. At least not the people with her,” Porat said.

 

In a separate interview on October 15, Porat insisted the Palestinian militants “did not abuse us. They treated us very humanely.” 

 

It is impossible to know if the standoff between Israeli and Hamas forces at the Dagan home could have been resolved without bloodshed. But it is clear that the Israeli decision to shell the home with tanks wound up killing almost everyone inside, including the child who has become a centerpiece of Israel’s international anti-Hamas propaganda campaign. All the Israelis left behind, Porat said, was “a house full of corpses.”


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4) Vermont police arrest a suspect in the shooting of 3 Palestinian students.

Emma Bubola, Amanda Holpuch and Rebecca Carballo, Nov. 27, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/27/world/israel-hamas-hostages-gaza-war




The police in Burlington, Vt., have arrested a suspect in the shooting of three students of Palestinian descent that the city’s mayor said was being investigated as a possible hate crime.

 

The suspect, identified by the police as Jason J. Eaton, 48, was expected to be arraigned Monday in connection with the shooting of the students, three men in their 20s who attend American universities. They were shot and wounded on Saturday by a white man with a handgun while they were walking near the University of Vermont, the police said. Two of the victims were wearing Palestinian kaffiyehs, a traditional headdress.

 

The young men told family members they were speaking a hybrid of English and Arabic before the man shot at them four times without saying anything before the attack, according to a family spokeswoman.

 

Two of the victims were in stable condition, the authorities said. The third sustained much more serious injuries.

 

In a statement after the arrest, the police said authorities had conducted a search of Mr. Eaton’s residence, adding that the shooting occurred in front of his apartment building.

 

No other details were available, but earlier on Sunday, the chief of the Burlington police, Jon Murad, said that, “In this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it may have been a hate-motivated crime.”

 

Mayor Miro Weinberger of Burlington added in an earlier statement that the possibility that the shooting could have been motivated by hate was “chilling” and that the investigation was focusing on that.

 

It was unclear early Monday whether Mr. Eaton had legal representation. The Burlington police said earlier Sunday that other than the fact that the students are of Palestinian descent and that two of them were wearing a kaffiyeh, they had “no additional information to suggest the suspect’s motive.”

 

And Mr. Murad earlier had urged the public to avoid drawing conclusions.

 

The Burlington police did not release the names of the victims but said that two of them are American citizens and the third is a legal resident. The families of the men identified them in a statement as Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed.

 

The Ramallah Friends School, a private school in the West Bank, said in a Facebook post that all three men had been students there. They are now juniors in college. Mr. Awartani studies at Brown University, Mr. Abdalhamid at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Mr. Ahmed at Trinity College in Connecticut.

 

The three were walking to the house of Mr. Awartani’s grandmother for dinner, according to Marwan Awartani, a great-uncle and a former education minister of the Palestinian Authority. He said that the three took a picture together and sent it to Hisham’s parents minutes before they left for dinner.

 

Marwan Awartani added that the bullet that hit Hisham touched his spinal cord and that he lost feeling in the lower part of his body. He remained hospitalized on Sunday evening and was “expected to survive his injuries,” according to a statement from Christina H. Paxson, the president of Brown University.

 

Mr. Ahmed was shot in the chest, and Mr. Abdalhamid had minor injuries, according to a statement from the families of the victims.

 

The families urged authorities to investigate the shooting as a hate crime.

 

“Why would anyone shoot kids who were wearing Palestinian kaffiyeh?” Marwan Awartani said in an interview.

 

Nikolas P. Kerest, the U.S. attorney for the District of Vermont, said in a statement that his office would work with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to determine if the shooting constituted a federal crime.

 

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said that its offices have seen a huge rise in reports of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias since Oct. 7, the day that Hamas attacked Israel. The Anti-Defamation League said in late October that there also had been a considerable increase in reported cases of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault compared with the year before.

 

“This has to stop,” Husam Zomlot, head of the Palestinian Mission to the United Kingdom and a friend of the families, said in a phone call on Sunday, pointing to the 6-year-old boy who was fatally stabbed last month in Illinois in what authorities said was an anti-Muslim attack.

 

The federal government opened discrimination investigations this month at half a dozen universities following complaints about anti-Muslim and antisemitic harassment. The Biden administration opened the investigations as part of “efforts to take aggressive action to address the alarming nationwide rise in reports of antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and other forms of discrimination.”

 

The White House said on Sunday that President Biden was briefed on the students and would continue to receive updates.

 

On X, the platform previously known as Twitter, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said it was “deeply upsetting that three young Palestinians were shot here in Burlington, VT. Hate has no place here, or anywhere. I look forward to a full investigation.”

 

Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting.


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5) Russian Women Get a Fresh Warning About Their Rights

By Vasilisa Kirilochkina, Nov. 27, 2023

Ms. Kirilochkina is an independent journalist based in New York City covering social issues and a former chief editor of Forbes Life Russia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/27/opinion/feminist-witch-hunt-russia.html
An illustration of a raised fist behind bars.

Illustration by Vanessa Saba. Photograph via Getty Images


It has been more than six months since the Russian playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and the theater director Zhenya Berkovich were arrested and jailed for their work on “Finist, the Bright Falcon,” an acclaimed play sympathetic to women recruited by ISIS.

 

The charge? “Justifying terrorism.”

 

The plaintiffs have appealed being held in pretrial detention three times; each time, the court has denied it. The prosecution, on the other hand, has asked the court three times to postpone the trial “to interview important witnesses”; each time, the court has granted the request.

 

Being a feminist is not against the law in Russia. But if Ms. Berkovich and Ms. Petriychuk are found guilty, that could change, lawyers say. As President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on civil society continues, this case has sent a fresh warning — both to artists, who could be persecuted directly for their art, and to women. Expressing feminist views in Russia has become an increasingly dangerous thing to do.

 

The play at the heart of the case is based on the true stories of Russian women who were recruited by ISIS terrorists. (There were, at one point in 2018, some 7,000 of them in Syria, according to one human rights activist who has been documenting their cases.) The play’s title refers to a folk tale about a woman named Maryushka who fell in love with Finist the Bright Falcon, a prince in the body of a magical bird living in a faraway kingdom.

 

But unlike the fairy tale, in which Maryushka rescued Finist from captivity and brought him to her home to live with her happily ever after, these women found themselves in the midst of a war, deceived and abused. Those who managed to escape back to Russia were met with public insults and prison sentences.

 

In “Finist, the Bright Falcon,” Ms. Berkovich and Ms. Petriychuk, who have both advocated women’s rights in their work, mixed this folklore with the dry language from real interrogations to tell the back stories of these modern Maryushkas, who left their homes and families to unite with “Finists” they met online.

 

The play premiered in Moscow in 2021 to rave reviews, which also widely noted its antiterrorism message. Ms. Berkovich’s production, which was funded by the Ministry of Culture, won prestigious theater awards. The play was widely discussed on social media and workshop productions ran around the country, including a reading at a women’s prison.

 

But the play’s success ran afoul of another phenomenon unfolding in Russia: the Kremlin’s crusade against feminism, a campaign that has been gaining traction alongside the state’s broader suppression of dissent since the invasion of Ukraine.

 

The Kremlin has never been especially fond of feminist ideas. More than a decade ago, members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for performing an anti-Putin song in a Moscow church. But pressure against feminist thought and activity has been ratcheting up. A domestic abuse law introduced in the State Duma in 2019 went nowhere. The next year, authorities designated the prominent Russian nonprofit Nasiliu.net, which supports domestic violence victims, as a foreign agent, a label regularly applied to critics of Mr. Putin’s politics. (Nasiliu.net’s founder, Anna Rivina, was personally deemed a foreign agent.) In 2021, they shut down a major national feminist festival, Moscow FemFest. “They didn’t refer to any laws but simply said, ‘We need to clear the space,’” the festival’s founder, Lola Tagaeva, told me.

 

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Feminist Antiwar Resistance quickly formed and became one of the loudest protest movements in the country. More than 100 of its activists have faced various forms of persecution, the organization says. In one of the most high-profile cases, the artist Alexandra Skochilenko was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for swapping price tags in a St. Petersburg supermarket with statements highlighting civilian deaths in the conflict. Other political and social women’s initiatives have gained momentum since then, including mothers worrying about their sons being sent to war.

 

This summer, Russia’s health minister, Mikhail Murashko, criticized women putting their education and careers ahead of having children as “improper” and announced a national initiative to control the circulation of abortion-inducing drugs in pharmacies. At least two Russian regions have already outlawed “coercing” women into abortion, and in two other places, annexed Crimea and Kursk, private clinics have nearly stopped providing abortions altogether. Women nationwide have been panic-buying emergency contraception pills amid fears of a national ban.

 

Until now, the Russian state has typically opposed women’s groups by blocking their efforts to change laws or by issuing “black marks,” such as the foreign agent designation, designed to complicate lives bureaucratically. But a month before Ms. Berkovich and Ms. Petriychuk were arrested, a Russian lawmaker, Oleg Matveychev, claimed he had drafted a bill recognizing feminism as “an extremist ideology.” The bill has not advanced in the Duma.

 

Officially, the pair have been accused of violating a Russian law that forbids “public calls for terrorist activities, public justification of terrorism or propaganda of terrorism,” an offense punishable by up to seven years in prison. The state’s case against them is based on a document whose authors include the historian Roman Silantiev. He and his co-authors wrote that the play contained “signs of ISIS ideology” and “radical feminist ideology”; the document was presented as evidence the play supported terrorism.

 

Konstantin Dobrynin, a Russian lawyer based in Britain, said that under that law, it is possible that an official charge of radical feminism might stick, given “the darkest times we live in today.” If that happens, he said, it could very likely lead to the criminalization of feminism as an ideology in Russia. It would be, he said, “a witch hunt and the Holy Inquisition in the most literal form.”

 

Despite growing government suppression, Russian women persevere in their fight. Ms. Tagaeva of Moscow FemFest has since started Verstka, a media outlet that is gaining attention for its investigative work. Ms. Rivina, the nasiliu.net founder, countered receiving foreign agent status by starting a new national help line for domestic violence victims. Behind bars, Ms. Skochilenko has defiantly declared her own freedom. “I am freer than you,” she said in court on Nov. 11. “I can make my own decisions and speak my mind.”

 

As for Ms. Berkovich and Ms. Petriychuk, their trial is now set for Jan. 10. Regardless of whether it is postponed again, their defense lawyers say they are confident they will win. “We will prove to them that we are in the right,” Ms. Berkovich’s attorney, Ksenia Karpinskaya, told me. “Even if not right away, we will prove it.”


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6) Why Warblers Flock to Wealthier Neighborhoods

In the unequal distribution of birds and other species, ecologists are tracing the impact of bigoted urban policies adopted decades ago.

By Hillary Rosner, Nov. 21, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/science/birds-cities-redlining.html
Madhusudan Katti wears a tan jacket with a pouch at his chest and holds a pair of binoculars to his face as he gazes into a tree in a wooded area.

“We need to start thinking about humans and wildlife together in the landscape and mitigate things that will help both,” said Madhusudan Katti, an ecologist at North Carolina State University. Credit...Cornell Watson for The New York Times


At a meeting of urban wildlife researchers in Washington, D.C., in June, one diagram made it into so many PowerPoint presentations that its recurrence became a running joke. The subject, though, was serious: The diagram illustrated the links between structural racism, pernicious landscape features such as urban heat islands, and impacts to biodiversity, and it came from a study published in the fall of 2020 in the journal Science.

 

That study was “Ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments,” led by Christopher J. Schell, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. It synthesized what a handful of urban ecologists around the country had begun demonstrating: that patterns of bigotry and inequality affect how other species experience life in cities.

 

Dr. Schell, who is Black and from Los Angeles, said he grew up with an understanding that “there is a ton of heterogeneity that exists in a city, and it’s not by accident that it’s that way.” Those variations could include the numbers of parks and street trees in different neighborhoods, whether a highway or rail line ripped through a community or whether an oil refinery spewed toxins into the air.

 

As a discipline, urban ecology is only about a quarter-century old, and until very recently its practitioners tended to treat cities mainly as a contrast to rural areas, without considering the wild disparities between and within cities. Dr. Schell wanted to show that urban heterogeneity in turn “is driven by systemic inequities,” he said, like “oppression, residential segregation, gentrification and displacement, unjust zoning laws, homelessness, so on, so on, so on.” Those issues don’t only impact people, he added: “How we operate influences the rest of the natural world as well as the social world.”

 

Over the past few years, a widening group of urban ecologists has been fanning out to study the overlap between environmental justice and biodiversity conservation, fields that had previously tended to keep to their own corners. Dr. Schell said that, in his lab, researchers “oftentimes do our own version of ‘six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon’” to show how human actions ripple out to wildlife.

 

“Air pollution isn’t just restricted to people,” he said. “Other animals have lungs. Why would we not expect them to also be inhaling the same amount of pollutants that we generate?”

 

Madhusudan Katti, an ecologist at North Carolina State University who has worked at the intersection of biodiversity conservation and human well-being for most of his career, agreed. “Often the interests of other species and marginalized humans align,” he said. “It’s very much a colonial perspective to think about humans and wildlife as separate. We need to start thinking about humans and wildlife together in the landscape and mitigate things that will help both.”

 

Ecological fingerprints

 

This growth of urban ecology has been aided, in part, by Mapping Inequality, a sprawling, multiuniversity project from the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. It created a digital archive of “redlining,” the New Deal-era housing policy that enforced and perpetuated neighborhood segregation in the United States.

 

In 1933, the federal government created the Home Owners Loan Corporation, or HOLC, whose intent was to help Americans recover from the Depression. HOLC issued accessible home loans or refinanced mortgages to prevent default. To do this, it mapped more than 200 U.S. cities based on the perceived risk of lending money in various areas, grading neighborhoods from A to D and outlining them in corresponding colors, from green to red. Grades were based on the condition of the housing stock and on the race, ethnicity and income of residents. Neighborhoods with newer homes and more U.S.-born, white residents were usually graded A and outlined in green. Those with older homes and more immigrants and people of color were generally graded D and outlined in red. The redlined neighborhoods were deemed “hazardous” to invest in.

 

Ninety years later, nearly three-quarters of the redlined neighborhoods are still struggling financially, and nearly two-thirds are “majority minority,” according to a study from 2018. The human legacy of redlining is vast: poverty, unemployment, health problems, decades of lost wealth and opportunities.

 

The policy also left ecological fingerprints on many cities, effects that urban ecologists are now eagerly bringing to light. “There are just more people who have hardcore wildlife training who are starting to look at cities as a place to do their work,” said Eric M. Wood, an ornithologist and urban ecologist with California State University in Los Angeles and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “If you’d told me as a Ph.D. student, ‘Go study birds in L.A.,’ I’d have said, ‘No way. I’m going to Borneo.’”

 

When Dr. Wood first moved to Los Angeles in 2015, he was keen to apply his field skills in a big city. “I’m a birder and a natural history person, and for 25 years I’d gone out and identified all the birds and plants and insects,” he said. He planned to do the same thing in Los Angeles. To measure biological diversity in a given landscape, an ecologist needs to capture the range of environmental variability there — the heterogeneity. In a natural setting, that might mean looking at different elevations, hills that face north versus south or areas with wetter or drier soil. In Los Angeles, Dr. Wood soon found, the environmental variability was also based on neighborhoods’ socioeconomic status.

 

He and others recently surveyed birds across the sprawling metropolis and analyzed the findings against redlining maps. They found that predominantly white neighborhoods, which were often the ones “greenlined” on the HOLC maps, hosted a greater abundance of birds that generally live in forests, such as warblers, wrens and bluebirds.

 

In contrast, areas that today are predominantly Hispanic and were previously redlined have fewer of those forest birds and more “synanthropic” species, those often found in dense urban areas. (These include pigeons and sparrows but also crows and ravens, mourning doves, house finches and even a type of hummingbird.) In an article last month in the journal Ornithological Applications, the researchers wrote that the distribution of birds in Los Angeles today reflected “patterns of income inequality, both past and present, that carry over to influence urban biodiversity.”

 

As examples, Dr. Wood compared Beverly Hills, where the average home price is more than $3.6 million, according to Zillow, with Boyle Heights, a largely Hispanic neighborhood where the average home price is $628,000; it shows up as a large red blob on the HOLC map and has far fewer trees and green spaces. “You get loads of these birds that require insects for their life history, and they go to a place like Beverly Hills because there are trees and flowers,” he said.

 

These differing landscapes clearly matter to the birds. But is it important to people if they share their neighborhoods with a common raven rather than a yellow-rumped warbler? “The point is that there are just so many differences” between communities like Beverly Hills and Boyle Heights, Dr. Wood said. The birds were “an indicator of these broader conditions that are effectively bad for people.”

 

Another study, published in 2022, used publicly available genetic data from nearly 7,700 individual animals belonging to 39 species of vertebrates. It found that across 268 urban locations in the United States, the wildlife in neighborhoods with greater proportions of white residents had higher levels of genetic diversity and more evidence of connected populations of animals, which interbreed and exchange DNA. Genetic diversity is essential for wildlife populations to weather a catastrophe like a pandemic or a wildfire.

 

The finding revealed a blunt truth: Like a wall or a highway, systemic racism creates a barrier to wildlife movement. “The whole process changes your view of the world, honestly,” Chloé Schmidt, the paper’s lead author and a senior scientist at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, said of the study.

 

Dr. Schmidt, who is of mixed race, said that when she was growing up in New Jersey, her parents sometimes mentioned that the original deed to their house “said Black people couldn’t live there.” For her Ph.D. research, she had been assembling a database of genetic information about biodiversity, and when she read Dr. Schell’s paper, she realized that she had the data to test his ideas. “Redlining was so consistently practiced for so long in the U.S., we thought we could find a signal,” she said. Still, she was surprised by her own findings. “It was like, oh, god, how bad must this have been to still find a signal even when redlining was stopped in the ’60s,” she said.

 

From red line to redstart

 

Since the Industrial Revolution, wildlife across the planet has lost about 6 percent of its genetic diversity. The evolutionary effects of redlining are percolating through urban wildlife populations, but they are not yet set in stone. “There is still time to make positive change with environmental interventions that promote gene flow from more genetically diverse populations across the urban racial mosaic,” Dr. Schmidt wrote in a 2022 paper.

 

One way to spur that change, Dr. Katti and others argue, is to recognize and remedy a related problem: inequity in wildlife observation. Not only does the composition of wildlife differ between neighborhoods, but so does the incidence of people looking for wildlife. Diego Ellis Soto, a Ph.D. student at Yale, found that across the country, historically redlined neighborhoods were the least studied areas for bird diversity. Mr. Ellis Soto, who is from Uruguay, said he was shocked when he arrived in New Haven and saw how segregated the city was. In research published last month in the journal Nature Human Behavior, he found that neighborhoods that had been graded D had 74 percent fewer bird observations than those graded A, a fact that could affect conservation agendas. “How can we protect what we don’t have information for?” Mr. Ellis Soto said.

 

Dr. Katti, who has organized local bird counts in three urban areas during his career, has found ways around this challenge. Because birders tend to be white, with higher incomes, data from both National Audubon Society counts and the popular citizen-science birding app eBird are “skewed spatially in representation of higher-income neighborhoods,” Dr. Katti said. While eBird does receive a lot of data from urban sites, “it’s very patchy and unequal sampling,” he said.

 

The methodology for Audubon’s annual Christmas Bird Count varies by location, but in most places coordinators divide a count area into blocks and let volunteers pick a location anywhere within that block. “It’s all up to the volunteer where they want to visit,” said Jin Bai, a Ph.D. student in Dr. Katti’s lab. “And most likely, they want to visit somewhere more natural like a preserve, or somewhere away from people.” If you’re going out for a morning of birding, you’re unlikely to go to the park by the train tracks with trucks rumbling by. Unless you’re Mr. Bai: He goes birding in many formerly redlined neighborhoods and has documented several surprising species, including a yellow-billed cuckoo, an American redstart and a magnolia warbler.

 

Data recorded on eBird is widely used in scientific research and conservation, affecting projects like habitat restoration or captive breeding and decisions about whether to allow infrastructure. So gaps in bird observations based on socioeconomic factors have huge implications.

 

“The point we’re trying to make,” Dr. Katti said, “is that to use it for any kind of planning decisions, the data set is not reliable.” His bird-count methodology divides an urban area into grids of one square kilometer and then randomly chooses one point in each grid — and that’s where the volunteers go.

 

The influx of urban ecologists fanning out across these understudied landscapes is likely to shed new light on the twinned fates of humans and their nonhuman neighbors. Practitioners of urban ecology say their discipline is brimming with the potential to make discoveries with real-world impact. Mr. Ellis Soto, for example, is working with students in underserved New Haven schools, making hip-hop and bachata music from bird songs as a way to connect youngsters to the wildlife living around them.

 

“Now people are saying, ‘Heck yeah, I want to work in the toughest neighborhoods,’” Dr. Wood said.


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