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‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 349
Nasrallah says ‘we wish’ Israel invades Lebanon
Following the Lebanon pager explosion attacks, Nasrallah said an Israeli invasion would be a “historic opportunity” to target Israeli forces. Earlier in the week, Israel razed an entire residential block in central Gaza, killing at least 40 people.
By Qassam Muaddi, September 19, 2024
Casualties
· 41,272 + killed* and at least 95,551 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 32,280 of the slain have been identified, including 10,627 children and 5,956 women, representing 60% of the casualties, and 2,770 elderly as of August 6, 2024. Some 10,000 more are estimated to be under the rubble*
· 708+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes 146 children.**
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140.
· The Israeli army recognizes the death of 714 Israeli soldiers and the injury of at least 4,100 others since October 7.***
* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on September 18, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of September 19, 2024.
*** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
Source: mondoweiss.net
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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.
U.S. Parole Commission Denies Leonard Peltier’s Request for Freedom; President Biden Should Grant Clemency
In response to the U.S. Parole Commission denying Leonard Peltier’s request for parole after a hearing on June 10, Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, made the following statement:
“Continuing to keep Leonard Peltier locked behind bars is a human rights travesty. President Biden should grant him clemency and release him immediately. Not only are there ongoing, unresolved concerns about the fairness of his trial, he has spent nearly 50 years in prison, is approaching 80 years old, and suffers from several chronic health problems.
“Leonard Peltier has been incarcerated for far too long. The parole commission should have granted him the freedom to spend his remaining years in his community and surrounded by loved ones.
“No one should be imprisoned after a trial riddled with uncertainty about its fairness. We are now calling on President Biden, once again, to grant Leonard Peltier clemency on humanitarian grounds and as a matter of mercy and justice.”
Background
· Leonard Peltier, Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), was convicted of the murders of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He has always maintained his innocence. Amnesty International joins Tribal Nations, Tribal Leaders, Members of Congress, former FBI agents, Nobel Peace Prize winners and former U.S. Attorney James Reynolds, whose office handled Peltier’s prosecution and appeal, in urging his release.
· Parole was also rejected at Peltier’s last hearing in 2009. Due to his age, this was likely the last opportunity for parole.
· A clemency request is pending before President Joe Biden. President Biden has committed opens in a new tab to grant clemency/commutation of sentences on a rolling basis rather than at the end of his term, following a review of requests by the White House Counsel’s Office and the Department of Justice.
Amnesty International has examined Peltier’s case extensively for many years, sent observers to his trial in 1977, and long campaigned on his behalf. Most recently, Amnesty International USA sent a letter to the U.S. Parole Commission urging the commission to grant him parole.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/u-s-parole-commission-denies-leonard-peltiers-request-for-freedom-president-biden-should-grant-clemency/
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.
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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Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom.
Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.
"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."
—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency
Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography
These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting
Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love.
Excerpt from the book:
"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains." —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader
Get the book at:
https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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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
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
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:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
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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Daniel Hale UPDATE:
In February Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale was transferred from the oppressive maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois to house confinement. We celebrate his release from Marion. He is laying low right now, recovering from nearly 3 years in prison. Thank goodness he is now being held under much more humane conditions and expected to complete his sentence in July of this year. www.StandWithDaniel Hale.org
More Info about Daniel:
“Drone Whistleblower Subjected To Harsh Confinement Finally Released From Prison”
https://thedissenter.org/drone-whistleblower-cmu-finally-released-from-prison/
“I was punished under the Espionage Act. Why wasn’t Joe Biden?” by Daniel Hale
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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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1) With world’s attention shifting, some in Gaza fear they will be forgotten.
By Raja AbdulrahimReporting from Jerusalem, September 20, 2024
A Palestinian man carries the body of a relative killed in Israeli strikes Tuesday in central Gaza. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
After nearly a year of war, fear marks everyday life for Palestinians in Gaza. There is fear of the Israeli warplanes that tear through the skies and carry out deadly airstrikes. There is fear of famine with only a trickle of aid coming in. There is fear of being displaced, yet again, by Israeli evacuation orders.
And now, there is increasing fear of being forgotten.
International attention has been diverted, first by deadly Israeli military raids into Palestinian cities in the occupied West Bank this month, and this week by coordinated attacks against the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel’s leaders have increasingly signaled that they intend to shift their focus from the Gaza Strip to their northern border with Lebanon, in what the country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, described this week as a “new phase of the war.”
But the war it is already waging in Gaza has not gone away. Israel, which says it wants to eradicate the armed group Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attack, has not stopped its airstrikes or ground attacks.
And some Gazans worry that the already sputtering efforts to reach a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas will be sidelined as tensions rise in other areas of the Middle East.
“Unfortunately, people see the attention going to the West Bank or Lebanon,” said Muhammad al-Masri, a 31-year-old accountant who has been forced to flee numerous times. “We don’t know what is going to happen here. It’s not just depression or misery. It’s a catastrophe in a terrifying way, and the situation is getting worse all the time.”
He played a brief clip that showed him and his family fleeing recently in the back of a truck, his sunburned face covered in sweat. “The displacement,” he said, letting the camera take in a road packed with people fleeing by vehicle and donkey carts, is “the worst thing people can live through.”
With humanitarian access restricted, about 96 percent of the population in Gaza still faces high levels of acute food insecurity, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a partnership of U.N. agencies and international humanitarian groups, reported this month.Nearly half a million people are facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity, meaning families are suffering from an extreme lack of food and face starvation, the group reported.
A separate coalition of aid groups working in Gaza analyzed recent data on aid entering the territory and said that Israel has “systematically blocked” entry of food, medicine, medical supplies, fuel and tents since the war began.
The organizations’ analysis found that as a result of the Israeli government’s restrictions on aid, 83 percent of the food Gazans need is not getting in. Gazans have gone from having an average of two meals a day earlier in the war to just one every other day, the group reported.
COGAT, an Israeli Defense Ministry body that implements government policy in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, did not respond to a request for comment on the aid groups’ report.
In August, an average of only 69 humanitarian trucks entered Gaza each day, well below the average of 500 trucks, including those carrying commercial goods, before the war, according to the United Nations.
Some 1.87 million people are in need of shelter, with at least 60 percent of homes damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations.
“With the onset of the winter season, any gust of wind sends all the tents flying because they are all just blankets,” Mr. Al-Masri said. “If we human beings have collapsed, we are tired, we are falling apart, how is a tent going to stay together for an entire year?”
Just a few months ago, Gazans followed every new development in cease-fire negotiations. But now, people have given up hope.
“We wake up and go to sleep, and the airstrikes don’t stop,” aid Rawoand Altatar, who lives with her parents in Gaza City. “Additionally, there’s little food and little water and spread of diseases. People walk through the streets talking to themselves.”
But Ahmed Saleh, a 44-year-old civil servant in Gaza City, said it didn’t matter if the international community shifted its attention elsewhere, because for nearly a year “the world did nothing for Gaza.”
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.
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2) What Lies Beneath Canada’s Former Indigenous School Sites Fuels a Debate
Despite possible evidence of hundreds of graves at former schools for Indigenous children, challenges in making a clear conclusion have given rise to skeptics.
By Ian Austen, Photographs by Amber Bracken, Reporting from Tk’emlups te Secwepemc, British Columbia, Sept. 20, 2024
The Kamloopa Powwow in Tk’emlups te Secwepemc, British Columbia. Canada’s government believes a significant number of unmarked graves of children lie beneath former residential schools.
A line of children’s clothing set along a highway in British Columbia in 2021 represented the children who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The revelation convulsed all of Canada.
Ground-penetrating radar had found possible signs of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in British Columbia run by the Catholic Church that the government had once used to assimilate Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families.
It was the first of some 80 former schools where indications of possible unmarked graves were discovered, and it produced a wave of sorrow and shock in a country that has long struggled with the legacy of its treatment of Indigenous people. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to fly at half-staff, as many Canadians wore orange T-shirts with the slogan “Every Child Matters.”
Three years later, though, no remains have been exhumed and identified.
Many communities are struggling with a difficult choice: Should the sites be left undisturbed and transformed into memorial grounds, or should exhumations be done to identify any victims and return their remains to their communities?
While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.
Three years after the announcement about the former Kamloops residential school site, they ask, why has no proof of any remains been uncovered anywhere in the country?
“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.
“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”
The arguments by Mr. Flanagan and other skeptics have been roundly denounced by elected officials across the political spectrum who say evidence clearly suggests that there are many sites of unmarked burials.
Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, who made the announcement about the Kamloops site, said, “The denialists, they’re hurtful. They are basically saying that didn’t happen.”
Security guards protecting the potential gravesites in her community have turned away people who have turned up late at night with shovels, she said.
Chief Casimir recalled holding the piece of paper in her hands about the potential gravesites that she read from to deliver the news and knew it would reverberate.
“I was thinking to myself, ‘This is horrible,’” she said.
Now her community is moving slowly and deliberately before deciding what to do next.
“We’ve had many conversations about whether to exhume or not to exhume,” Chief Casimir said. “It is very difficult and it is definitely very complex. We know that it’ll take time. And we also know that we have many steps yet to go.”
“We have to know for sure,” she added, “that we did everything that we can to determine: yes or no, anomaly or grave?”
The Canadian government and Pope Francis have apologized for the gruesome treatment of Indigenous people and the residential schools where children suffered so much abuse.
But the work to try to establish a precise number of potential graves will likely be difficult.
Murray Sinclair, a former judge who headed the National Truth and Reconciliaton Commission to investigate the residential schools system, estimates that at least 10,000 students never made it home from the schools, which were established by the government and operated from the 1880s to the 1990s.
During that period the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 Indigenous children from their communities and sent them to residential schools, most of which were run by the Roman Catholic Church. Indigenous languages and cultural practices were forbidden, sometimes using force.
And when the children died the government refused to pay to return their bodies to the communities where they came from.
In Ontario, a search of records by investigators working for the province’s chief coroner has so far identified 456 students who died while attending 12 residential schools. Some records show where remains may be buried, the coroner said, but there’s uncertainty about those findings.
At the Kamloops school site, where one of the largest number of potential gravesites was reported, Chief Casimir said her tribe was still analyzing the results of its ground and document searches before deciding whether to conduct exhumations.
Doing so, she added, would be “very intrusive.”
Kimberly Murray, a lawyer and a member of a Mohawk First Nation, was appointed by the federal government in 2021 to examine the issues surrounding potential Indigenous graves and make recommendations about protecting and commemorating the sites.
She says she reminds communities that the work they are doing is because “the government purposely disappeared” Indigenous children, “by not proper record keeping, by not telling the families, by refusing to send them home.”
Many communities, Ms. Murray said, have expanded their physical searches and have employed additional methods to find remains.
One involves placing probes into the ground to detect specific soil acidity that is created by buried human remains.
Another process involves using short pulses of laser light to scan the surfaces of areas where government and church records, as well as the memories of former students, suggest there were burials. The process, using a technology known as lidar, can reveal patterns consistent with burial sites.
Some Indigenous communities have also brought in dogs trained to find remains.
In some cases, Ms. Murray said there was evidence that schools resorted to burying students in mass graves because of disease sweeping through the institutions or to store bodies until the spring thaw made digging graves possible.
Still, Indigenous communities have faced obstacles finding graves, Ms. Murray said, as they struggle getting access to records about the children who died at the schools from the Canadian government and the Catholic Church, despite pledges of cooperation.
Even if exhumations uncover remains, identifying individual bodies or determining a cause of death will likely be impossible, said Dr. Rebekah Jacques, a forensic pathologist who has been working with Indigenous communities that have potential gravesites.
Dr. Jacques has met members of Indigenous communities while serving as a member of a national committee on potential graves at school sites, and she said the question of exhumations hangs heavy over many groups.
“I don’t always have consensus myself about what to do,” she said. “So for me to expect for our communities to have consensus — well, I can really relate to that.”
She also believes that nothing Indigenous communities do, including exhumations, will satisfy skeptics.
For Mr. Flanagan and others who share his viewpoint, their disbelief that there are many gravesites is part of a broader argument against the key conclusion of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission: that the residential schools were a system of brutality that led to “cultural genocide.’’
“The narrative that’s been constructed pulls out all the bad stories and retails those and minimizes the benefit of residential schools,” Mr. Flanagan said, adding that converting Indigenous people in nations colonized by Europeans to Christianity and eradicating their cultures was once common worldwide.
“The churches believed that it was their religious duty, and the politicians thought that it helped to civilize the Indians,” He said. “Would we do that today? No. But our understanding wasn’t available to these people of 150 years ago.”
Government officials and experts say such views are driven by bias and a lack of understanding and sensitivity over what Indigenous children endured for over a century, until 1996.
“There is simply no question about the horrific impact that the residential schools policy had on Indigenous peoples,” said David Lametti, who was Canada’s justice minister and attorney general when Chief Casimir announced the findings at the Kamloops school site.
Government officials, he added, have little doubt that many of the radar anomalies found on school grounds will prove to be gravesites.
“Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” Mr. Lametti, a former law professor now practicing law in Montreal, said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.”
Many Indigenous people who favor exhumations want their communities to move more quickly to find remains.
On his ranch in the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, Garry Gottfriedson, a poet, retired academic and rodeo rider, said that as a former residential school student he wants more openness and progress from leaders.
“It can drag on and on and on and in the meantime, it dies out,” Mr. Gottfriedson said of the discussion about what to do about the gravesites.
“I’m saying: something needs to happen, let it happen,” he added. “But right now, it seems like nothing’s happening.”
Vjosa Isai contributed research.
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3) Karl Marx, Weirder Than Ever
What good is one of the communist thinker’s most important texts to 21st-century readers?
By James Miller, Sept. 19, 2024
James Miller teaches at the New School for Social Research. His latest book is “Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/19/books/review/capital-volume-one-karl-marx.html
Jack Smyth
Indifference was the world’s first reaction to Karl Marx’s magnum opus. In 1867, when the first volume of “Capital” was published in German, it was greeted with such silence that the author’s best friend and patron, Friedrich Engels, submitted pseudonymous reviews, most of them combative, to the leading German newspapers, in a futile effort to drum up publicity.
“Capital” had been decades in the making, with Marx producing countless notes, drafts and mathematical equations he couldn’t make work to clinch an argument that capitalism would self-destruct, after creating the basis for something better. As the biographer Francis Wheen relates, Marx’s long-suffering wife, Jenny, was embittered by the public’s mute response to the book’s publication. “If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes,” she complained to a friend, “they would perhaps show a little more interest.”
Frustrated, Marx asked Engels, in one of the German reviews he wrote, to summarize “Capital” simply, using language that Marx helpfully supplied: It showed how “present society, economically considered, is pregnant with a new, higher form,” and it revealed in human civilization “the same gradual process of evolution that Darwin has demonstrated in natural history,” thus confirming the “doctrine of progress.”
It’s a sign of our times that the editor and translator of an eagerly anticipated new English edition of the book — the first major translation in half a century — largely ignore both Darwin and the idea of progress in their copious notes.
Still, no previous English version of “Capital” has featured such an erudite critical apparatus or such an exacting translation. It’s a remarkable achievement that forces readers to attend to the philosophical subtleties of Marx’s argument.
“‘Capital’ is weird,” the editor Paul North writes in his introduction to the new edition (Princeton University Press, 857 pp., $39.95). The book’s translator, Paul Reitter, concurs, explaining how he has chosen to highlight what he calls every “programmatically weird moment in the text.” In “Capital,” Marx deploys neologisms that sound strange even in German, Reitter argues, with the goal of reflecting the way “capitalism makes the relations between people and things, and the relations among people, extremely unnatural and incompatible with human flourishing.”
For example, the novel German term Werthding — literally “value-thing” — suggests how useful physical objects have nonphysical aspects: They represent (in Marx’s words) “gelatinous blobs of undifferentiated human labor” that help define their worth and enable them to be exchanged. Emphasizing the weirdness of the language underlines the idea that capitalism inevitably produces alienation between factory workers and the thing they’ve helped make, as Marx writes elsewhere, “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
Born in 1818 in what is now southwestern Germany, Marx was trained as a philosopher and employed as a journalist before striking up a friendship with Engels in the 1840s and joining a roiling bohemian underground of unruly writers and professional insurrectionists. Together Marx and Engels wrote “The Communist Manifesto” and lived through the European revolutions of 1848, only to see their hopes for radical change deferred if not dashed. By then, Marx, in part under the influence of Engels, had already begun what became a lifelong study of political economy and the shameful conditions created for workers by the rise of industrial capitalism.
Marx had exacting standards: He was too scrupulous to finish “Capital” — Engels published subsequent volumes based on Marx’s notebooks — and he wanted the difficult opening pages of the first volume to force readers to think for themselves. “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits,” he wrote in the preface to the first French translation. Fortunately, the body of the text, which makes judicious use of British government reports detailing the wretched lives of its working classes, is easier to follow, and more literary in its ambitions. It’s partly a simple horror story of unjustifiable human suffering at the hands of a faceless monster more fearsome than Hobbes’s Leviathan — the shadowy system of capital, in Marx’s view, was more soul-sucking than any of the laws imposed by sovereign rulers.
The first English translation of “Capital” was supervised by Engels and appeared in 1887, four years after Marx’s death. By then, “Capital” had belatedly reached a large and rapidly growing audience, thanks to Marx’s notoriety as an activist and a leader in the International Workingmen’s Association; his pitiless defense of the bloody Paris Commune of 1871 as one model of what a proletariat revolt against capital might look like; and the subsequent rise of socialist political parties and militant trade unions. “The bible of the working class,” Engels proudly called it.
Once consecrated, “Capital” was easy to treat as an evidence-based lodestar for ongoing direct action. This was certainly how the translator Ben Fowkes and the Belgian economist Ernest Mandel approached the second major English edition, a Penguin paperback published in 1976 after the Russian Revolution of 1917; the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949; the student uprisings of 1968; and in the wake of pitched struggles for radical self-determination in former colonies like Algeria, Vietnam and Nicaragua.
“It is most unlikely,” Mandel wrote, “that capitalism will survive another half-century of the crises (military, political, social, monetary, cultural) which have occurred uninterruptedly since 1914. It is most probable, moreover, that ‘Capital’ and what it stands for — namely a scientific analysis of bourgeois society which represents the proletariat’s class consciousness at its highest level — will in the end prove to have made a decisive contribution to capitalism’s replacement by a classless society of associated producers.”
Five decades later, with capitalism still firmly intact, the American political theorist Wendy Brown briskly lays aside such hopes in the preface of the new Princeton translation, calling them a “fantasy.” She also worries that if the workers of the world were ever to use freely what Marx called “the free gift of nature” in order to create more abundance for human beings, they might trigger an “ecological catastrophe,” something that she says the author of “Capital” only considers in passing. Brown suggests that the main contemporary value of Marx’s text is as a “critical theory” that reveals the system of capital as “a philosophical object.” In other words, it might not be the best guide for political practice.
Certainly, “Capital” is a cerebral read and the dangers of the world Marx lived in are not all the same as ours. Still, it’s a bit weird (if that’s the right word) that the scholars working on this new English edition of Marx’s most revered text should downplay Marx’s own deepest hopes, not just for a future classless society, but also for an ongoing process of upheaval that results, yes, in suffering, but also in ongoing technological and moral progress.
For if capital is just “extremely unnatural and incompatible with human flourishing,” and inexorably leading toward the destruction of the planet, what’s the point? Marx couldn’t predict the future, and neither can we. But, as he once put it, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
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4) With Death Toll Rising, Tensions Run High After Israeli Strike in Beirut
By Erika Solomon and Liam Stack, September 21, 2024
Missiles, rockets and artillery shells flew back and forth over the Israel-Lebanon border on Saturday, as families in Beirut awaited news of loved ones who were missing after an Israeli airstrike that killed senior Hezbollah commanders in a residential building a day earlier.
The Israeli military said it struck 180 targets in southern Lebanon in one hour on Saturday, including thousands of rocket launcher barrels that “were ready for immediate use to fire into Israeli territory.”
Hezbollah fired 90 rockets into Israel, the military said, sparking brush fires near the city of Safed and in the country’s far north, from which most residents were evacuated over the last year.
Hezbollah released the names of members who were killed in the strike in Beirut on Friday, including the leader of its elite Radwan Force, Ahmed Wahbi. The Israeli military said it had “eliminated the senior commanders of the Radwan Force,” accusing that group of planning to infiltrate Israel in an echo of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. It did not name Mr. Wahbi specifically.
On Friday, Hezbollah confirmed the death of the force’s founder, Ibrahim Aqeel, who oversaw its operations against Israel. He was wanted by the United States for his role in two 1983 bombing attacks in Beirut that killed more than 350 people at the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine Corps barracks.
Friday’s strike leveled two buildings in a suburb of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway. Lebanon’s health ministry said the death toll had risen to at least 37, including three children. At least 68 more people were wounded, the ministry said.
At the scene of the attack, people worried about their missing family members, huddling in crowds just beyond the remains of sidewalks that had been ripped away by the force of the blast.
It was the latest in a string of attacks attributed to Israel that have stoked the risk of escalation. The region is awaiting signs of how Hezbollah, Iran’s most important regional ally, might respond.
Here’s what else to know:
· A shift in focus: Israel has been signaling for days that it plans to shift some of its military focus toward Hezbollah in Lebanon and away from the war in Gaza. Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging fire since October, and the intensifying exchange has displaced tens of thousands of people.
· Device attacks: Friday’s airstrike followed two days of chaos across Lebanon, when pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members exploded en masse. Hospitals were filled with thousands of wounded, with many missing eyes or fingers, and anger and panic has spread across the country. At least 37 people were killed in those operations.
· Calls to investigate: Members of the United Nations Security Council called on Friday for an investigation into the operations in Lebanon — widely attributed to Israel — that detonated the pagers and walkie-talkies. The nature of the attacks, which transformed ordinary objects into weapons, drew widespread condemnation at the meeting.
· Hezbollah scrambles: Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, said in a speech on Thursday that the group would not cease its strikes against Israel. But analysts said it was struggling to formulate a response to the pager and walkie-talkie attacks. Mr. Nasrallah said it had formed committees to investigate how the pagers and radios were compromised.
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5) Israeli strike on former school kills 22 people, Gazan health officials say.
By Erika Solomon and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, September 21, 2024
Israel said it struck a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City on Saturday because it believed Hamas militants were using the building as a command center. Palestinian health authorities said the attack killed 22 people, mostly women and children, who had sought shelter at the school, and did not confirm any combatant deaths.
Israel has conducted dozens of airstrikes on schools across the Gaza Strip, structures that thousands of Gazans have sought shelter in as they are displaced by fighting across the embattled enclave. The Israeli army said the compound was being used as a Hamas “command and control center,” a claim it has repeatedly made in justifying its increasingly frequent strikes on schools serving as shelters.
Gaza’s rescue services said the Saturday strike on the Zeitoun School killed mostly women and children, including a 3-month-old infant. Gaza’s health ministry, which usually does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its counts, also said 22 were killed, saying “the majority” of the dead were women and children.
In a statement on Saturday, the Israeli military said it conducted “a precise strike on terrorists” operating at the Al Falah School, which according to statements from the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, is connected with the Zeitoun School.
The military did not say whether the strike had killed any Hamas militants, as such statements often do.
Since the 11-month war in Gaza began, schools in the territory have been closed and have instead housed those fleeing the fighting. More than 90 percent of Gaza’s nearly 2 million residents have been displaced in the war — many of them several times.
This is not the first time the school complex has been hit. UNRWA condemned a previous strike on the complex in November.
Although schools have become regular targets of Israeli strikes, they continue to draw Palestinians seeking shelter because they offer some limited access to plumbing and are seen as somewhat safer than other places in the enclave, which has suffered increasing lawlessness.
The media office for the Gazan government, which is controlled by Hamas, said that many widows and orphaned children had been at the school to receive a small payment to help cover food costs. Hunger is a pervasive problem in Gaza, with experts warning this summer that almost half a million people in the territory faced starvation.
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6) How the Powerful Outmaneuvered the American Protest Movement
By Zeynep Tufekci, Opinion Columnist, Sept. 21, 2024
Sophie Park for The New York Times
The year 2024 started out looking as if it would be a momentous one for political protests. All winter and spring, college campuses were aflame in anger and conflict and as summer approached, the Democratic National Convention threatened to be engulfed by street demonstrations in a potential repeat of the tumultuous 1968 party convention.
The year was momentous, all right, but not for the reasons it seemed. Mass protests had already been showing diminishing returns, sometimes drawing big crowds but rarely getting proportionally big results. Now, 2024 looks like the end of the road, at least for the kind of power that such mass protests once had, a power that has defined political action in America and in democracies around the world for decades.
Look at the campuses that seized so much attention last winter and spring. Over the summer, while protesters scattered to pursue internships or wait tables or help out at home, many institutions quietly changed the rules regarding political action. Mother Jones reported that dozens of institutions of higher education, in charge of nearly 100 campuses, were “effectively banning many forms of protest” with new regulations going far beyond the “time, space and manner” restrictions that were already in place.
Students will still raise their voices, of course, but don’t count on seeing many big encampments, nor administrators paralyzed for months on end, unsure how to deal. The balance of power has tilted sharply back in their favor, where it is likely to stay for a while.
The Democratic convention, meanwhile, saw sizable, energetic marches most days opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza — a stance that Democrats overwhelmingly support. But when the dust settled, there was no sign of any shift in policy from the Kamala Harris camp. It wouldn’t even let a single Palestinian American, a Georgia state legislator, give a brief speech mentioning the plight of Palestinians while wholeheartedly endorsing Harris.
If anything, the antiwar movement departed Chicago in a weaker position, with less leverage than it had when it arrived.
Thousands of people surging into the street or taking over college campuses, cheering on fiery speeches, presenting demands, chanting slogans — that familiar model won’t go away entirely. Especially not if a certain former president wins re-election, an event that could prompt millions to march. But as much as it pains me to say it, protesting just doesn’t get results anymore. Not the way it used to. Not in that form. It can’t.
Those in power have figured out how to outmaneuver protesters: by keeping peaceful demonstrators far out of sight, organizing an overwhelming police response that brings the threat of long prison sentences, and circulating images of the most disruptive outliers that makes the whole movement look bad.
It works. And the organizers have failed to keep up.
The digital platforms they rely on make it difficult to impose any discipline on the message being communicated. Crackpot agitators and off-the-wall causes attach themselves more easily than ever. Conflict erupts. Fueled by the drama-loving algorithms of social media platforms, the movements descend into ugly public bickering.
Hell, no, we won’t go! The whole world is watching! No justice, no peace! R.I.P. the era when big protest marches, civil disobedience and campus encampments so often changed the course of history. It was a good run, wasn’t it?
The irony is that the very tool that has undermined the power of the protests — the internet — initially contributed to some of the most spectacular protests in history, starting with the convention of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999.
I had gotten word about the Seattle demonstrations the same way most of the protesters did: through email lists, a major novelty at the time.
It was magical. Tens of thousands of demonstrators assembled from seemingly out of nowhere. They took everyone — elected officials, the news media, the delegates in the convention center — by surprise, in a way that would previously have been impossible. The police were bewildered by the protesters’ ability to communicate among themselves at scale, in real time, to take over intersections and deftly circumvent obstacles and keep everyone else several steps behind. The whole thing brought the W.T.O. proceedings practically to a halt and gave the world a new way to think about globalization: Whom does it actually benefit?
In 2011, that model expanded to include occupations. Protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, inspired similar occupations around the world, with the same spirit of anarchic fun also playing out online. That movement gave the world a new way to think about inequality: the 1 percent versus the 99 percent.
But considering the popularity and energy of these movements, they didn’t change the world that much. Two decades later, globalization still favors corporations. Wealth is as inequitably distributed as ever. Other large protest movements — the Iraq antiwar movement, which I participated in, and the Arab Spring, which I studied and observed — were ground down or ignored.
By 2024, the authorities had the response down pat. In Chicago last month, protesters were assigned a circular marching route at least half a mile away from the convention site. The area was secured by two concentric fences and several more barriers. Protesters could be as loud as they wanted to be and they still wouldn’t even be heard anywhere near the arena.
It was quite a decent crowd — not as many as some had expected, but I counted thousands of people energetically marching on multiple days.
But big numbers alone can’t have the impact they once did because they no longer signal the same threat. The 1963 March on Washington took several months of extensive effort and planning, a show of immense strength and organizational ability that could keep the pressure on long after the protest ended. By comparison the Occupy movement came together much more easily, in just a few weeks. It produced one of the largest ever days of global protest, but what does that even mean when the internet juices so much of the prep work? “Biggest ever” protests keep occurring to little avail. The Women’s March in 2017 was considered the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, but Donald Trump is once again back as the Republican nominee in a toss-up race.
The factors that have defanged big marches have made direct action and confrontational tactics lose their bite, too. With police officers responding in overwhelming numbers and courts doling out lengthy sentences, today’s disrupters often lack the discipline and preparation required to pull off effective civil disobedience.
In Chicago, the few protesters who tried to defy the barricades were arrested immediately. Police officers vastly outnumbered them.
With the news media swarming them, those protesters got some publicity but it was a double-edged sword: In addition to news outlets, right-wing media personalities and streamers flocked to the scene to try to use it to portray Chicago as a city in chaos.
As a scholar of social movements and an alumna of more protests than I can count, I know that to distance itself from discordant voices, a movement needs designated spokespeople who make clear what it stands for and what it denounces. That kind of message discipline is always hard, but it’s an even bigger challenge when participants all have their own social media accounts and people are quick to say they are being silenced. In 2024 it became almost impossible.
In the few weeks before the convention, a lot of drama erupted — especially on TikTok — between some Black activists and those with Palestinian or Arab heritage. These groups had previously worked in tandem, but now recriminations and ugly accusations spread virally as pro-Palestinian voices decried Harris as a warmonger and Black voices accused them of undermining a candidate of color — all fueled by ever more strident comments.
Who were these commenters inflaming the conflict? Why did so many appear not even to live in the United States? Did TikTok’s Chinese corporate overlords pick the winners? Whatever the answers, the venom was online but the results were felt on the streets: Black Lives Matter protests, so visible in Chicago in 2020, seemed almost completely absent during the Democratic convention.
The internal tensions that social movements have always faced become especially paralyzing when they play out in public, amplified by the algorithms that favor conflict. Without a counterbalancing organizational structure, there’s no way to bridge those differences and build consensus.
All of this might help explain why, during the Republican convention in Milwaukee, there were no big protests at all, despite the provocations of Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Maybe the odds were stacked so high against protesters that they didn’t even bother.
That’s not necessarily how it will play out on college campuses. Students have already begun making their voices heard. But many campus administrations (no doubt at the fervent behest of trustees) have spent the summer carefully preparing. They intend to return student protests to the status they occupied before this last extraordinary year: a common occurrence with little impact beyond the campus gates.
History, of course, is full of innovation and counter-innovation. Protests will reinvent themselves eventually. So what form does the future of political protest take? If the past is any indication, the answers will surprise us all.
After a tumultuous century of uprisings and conflict, in the mid-19th century, Paris imposed a new street plan that turned narrow roads into majestic boulevards — not merely for the aesthetics but also to make them harder for protesters to barricade. A century later, however, those boulevards were where the 1968 movement exploded with flair, creativity and impact.
For activists, finding a way forward will mean figuring out new ways to leverage the power of social media without surrendering to its destructive effects. It will mean a new understanding of impact that goes beyond virality and self-expression. It will mea — ah, what do I know?
I don’t have an easy answer, and I know that the protesters probably wouldn’t listen to me even if I did, just as I wouldn’t have listened to some scholar of protest movements when I was in their shoes. Each generation needs to creatively, purposefully find its own way.
All I know is that protests and mass demonstrations of dissent are a necessary part of a healthy democracy. I can’t wait to see what this generation comes up with.
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7) Her Children Were Sick. Was It ‘Forever Chemicals’ on the Family Farm?
Pastures were fertilized with toxic sewage decades ago. Nobody knew, until the cows’ milk was tested.
By Hiroko Tabuchi, Sept. 21, 2024
Allison Jumper with her husband, Cullen Jumper, at home in Durham, N.H. Credit...Greta Rybus for The New York Times
Allison Jumper’s family was a picture of healthy living. Active kids. Wholesome meals. A freezer stocked with organic beef from her in-laws’ farm in Maine.
Then in late 2020, she got a devastating call from her brother-in-law. High levels of harmful “forever chemicals” had been detected on their farm and in their cows’ milk, and they were getting shut down.
At first, Mrs. Jumper worried only about her in-laws’ livelihoods. But soon, her mind went somewhere else: to her own children’s mysterious health issues, including startlingly high cholesterol levels.
“Then it hit me,” she said at her home in Durham, N.H. “Could it be the beef?”
Unknown to them, her family’s beloved organic farm had been fertilized decades earlier with sewage sludge tainted by a dangerous class of chemicals linked to certain cancers, liver disease and a host of other health problems. Their cattle had grazed on contaminated pastures, making the beef and milk too dangerous to eat. Yet her family had been eating it for several years.
The ordeal has transformed the Jumper family and the Dostie farm into one of the earliest and clearest test cases of the health consequences of eating food that came from farmland contaminated by fertilizer sludge laced with these dangerous chemicals, known collectively as PFAS. The Dosties are now working with the state of Maine on a host of research into how much of the chemicals are getting into farm produce, for example, as well as possible ways forward for farmers affected by PFAS contamination.
The crisis of contaminated sludge fertilizer is starting to raise concerns about the safety of the American food supply as it hits farms and families nationwide. Wastewater treatment plants produce immense amounts of sewage sludge, and for decades the federal government has encouraged farmers to spread it on millions of acres as fertilizer.
Today, an increasing body of scientific evidence is showing that sludge fertilizer can be heavily contaminated by PFAS, synthetic chemicals that are used widely in nonstick cookware, raincoats, firefighting gear and other products, and that essentially never break down. They can build up over time in the blood and tissue of people and animals that are exposed to the chemicals. The most common way that people are exposed is quite likely by eating contaminated food or water, according to the federal government.
This year, the Environmental Protection Agency said there’s no safe level of PFAS exposure for humans, and imposed strict new limits on some PFAS in drinking water.
For Ms. Jumper, the discovery triggered a frightening monthslong mystery as she and her husband methodically tried to figure out if the beef from their family farm had been making their kids sick.
She thinks of wider questions, too. “If PFAS was in our beef, and we didn’t know, who’s out there guaranteeing that PFAS isn’t in other meat and food that we buy at the store?” she said.
These chemicals have been manufactured in vast quantities for decades, even as evidence of their dangers mounted. It’s unclear how much of them are reaching the food supply, whether from sludge or elsewhere, and what that means for public health. The Food and Drug Administration does not set limits on PFAS levels in food. Since 2019, however, the agency has tested nearly 1,300 samples and said the vast majority were free of the types of PFAS the agency is able to test for.
Still, some public health experts and advocacy groups have questioned the F.D.A.’s methodology, and the agency itself warns that “PFAS exposure from food is an emerging area of science and there remains much we do not yet know.” This year, Consumer Reports said it had detected PFAS in some milk, including organic brands. Researchers have found the chemicals in products as varied as eggs, fruit juice and seafood.
“We’re learning that we’ve had PFAS in our food supply for a long time and been unaware of it,” said Courtney Carignan, an environmental epidemiologist at Michigan State University. “We just haven’t been monitoring for these chemicals,” she said. “And if you don’t look, they’re not there.”
A freezer full of bad beef
PFAS was the last thing the Jumpers had expected to find in the beef from Dostie Farm, their family farm in Fairfield, Maine. There, Egide Dostie Jr. and his father, Egide Dostie Sr., practiced organic farming, supplying milk exclusively to Stonyfield Organic, the New Hampshire-based dairy company.
They had never used sludge fertilizer on the land.
So in late 2020, when the call came from Stonyfield that tests had found high levels of a type of PFAS chemical in their milk, he couldn’t believe it. “We’re an organic operation,’” the younger Mr. Dostie told them.
The Dosties later learned from state officials that the previous owners of their land had used PFAS-contaminated sludge fertilizer decades earlier, in the 1980s and 1990s.
“They shut us down. Said, ‘You guys are done,’” he said.
But in the meantime, Mrs. Jumper immediately stopped using beef from Dostie farm, which they had cooked for the family perhaps once a week. Steaks, hamburgers and Sunday pot roast stews. “I didn’t want my children to eat that anymore,” Mrs. Jumper said. “I knew that for sure.”
She worked with her pediatrician to get specialized blood tests for her children. But even something that basic proved tricky, as only a few labs offer PFAS testing. And she and her husband were largely on their own: There’s no playbook for this kind of health scare.
The test results confirmed her suspicions. Her then-10-year-old son had levels of PFOS, a well-studied variation of the chemical, higher than more than 95 percent of Americans. “My child who always cleaned his plate had the highest levels,” Mrs. Jumper said.
Her two younger children had levels higher than 75 percent of Americans, according to test results reviewed by The Times, as did she and her husband, Cullen, a urologist.
Perhaps luckily, she hadn’t thrown out the beef in her freezer. So she had it tested for 16 types of PFAS with the help of Maine officials and a Department of Agriculture scientist. Those results, also reviewed by the Times, were clear: The meat was not safe for children to eat because of high levels of PFOS, a type of forever chemical that the government says is likely to be carcinogenic to humans.
Mrs. Jumper also tested their drinking water, which comes from a private well. But there were no detectable levels, ruling that out as a potential source. (One recent government study detected PFAS chemicals in nearly half of the nation’s tap water.)
Rachel Criswell, an environmental health researcher and family physician in Skowhegan, Maine, who works with people affected by PFAS exposure, particularly from sludge fertilizer, said she was most concerned about farming communities and families. They were most likely to eat meat from a single cow or herd, for example, putting them at particular risk.
“This is a slow-moving environmental disaster that’s going to turn people’s lives upside down,” she said.
Maine’s unusual strategy
The Jumpers learned of the problem for a simple reason: Maine is the only state that is systematically testing farms for PFAS. It has discovered contamination on at least 68 farms so far under a program that began after the chemicals were found on a dairy farm in 2016.
The picture nationwide is less clear. Industry data shows that more than 2 million dry tons of sewage sludge were used on 4.6 million acres of farmland nationwide in 2018.
Maine officials say that their state is quite likely just the tip of the iceberg. “We’re just the ones doing the right thing and investigating,” said Nancy McBrady, deputy commissioner of Maine’s Department of Agriculture.
Farms like Dostie Farm are now at the forefront of research into how PFAS from contaminated soil and water moved into crops, livestock and the human food chain. Some early findings: Cattle can become contaminated with PFAS if they eat or drink contaminated feed or water. Cows purge the chemicals through their milk.
In plants, PFAS uptake is higher in leafy greens and the chemicals seem to accumulate in leaves and stems more than in the roots, fruits or grains. Still, a 2021 study estimated that eating a single radish grown in soil with elevated PFAS levels could mean surpassing daily exposure guidelines set by the federal government.
The E.P.A. has more recently said that no level of certain kinds of PFAS is safe.
“We’re starting to find out that agricultural soil is a big source of PFAS,” said Samuel Ma, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Texas A&M University who studies emerging contaminants. But regulators “seem to only be focusing on drinking water.”
This year, the E.P.A. started requiring municipal water systems to remove six types of PFAS from their drinking water supplies.
In 2022, Maine banned the use of sludge fertilizer entirely and is offering income support for affected farmers. The state, alongside a group of local organic farmers, is also working to help farmers with contaminated land pivot from dairy or vegetables to flowers or solar installations.
“The positive news is that most of the farms that have had contamination are still in business,” said Sarah Alexander, executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. “It’s still been extremely stressful, especially for the ones that have had contamination levels beyond being able to pivot.”
A new normal
One promising but perhaps contentious line of research showed that livestock could purge themselves of PFAS relatively quickly. So it was conceivable, state officials said, that a cow could still be raised on a contaminated pasture, then sent to a clean environment for the last 6 months of its life to purge the chemical from its body before being sent to market.
“These forever chemicals aren’t necessarily forever in livestock,” said Andrew Smith, Maine’s state toxicologist.
In fact, the Dosties managed to avoid culling their dairy cattle using a variation on that technique. They brought in clean feed and water for their cows, and for months dumped their contaminated milk into a manure pit, until PFAS levels in the milk were undetectable, down from an extremely high 800 parts per trillion. They then shipped the cows out of state.
Still, that was a partial solution. The bulk of their pasture remains contaminated, which is far trickier to clean up. They’re exploring the possibility of installing solar panels on the contaminated pasture but still don’t know whether they can make that work.
Mr. Dostie said it still breaks his heart to look out across his pasture every day knowing he’ll never farm on those acres again. “It’s just a wasteland now,” he said.
In New Hampshire, the Jumpers are adjusting to a new normal. The children go for annual tests for PFAS, which have slowly started to come down in their blood. But two of the three children still have consistently high cholesterol levels, a problem linked to PFAS. And all three have had weak responses to vaccines, a condition that has also been linked to PFAS.
“I’m just really sad,” Mrs. Jumper said. “This was beef we thought was as safe as it comes.”
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