Beloved tenured History professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on September 10th by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr. Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme rightwing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist, who tries to monetize exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people ‘chose to die in the Holocaust’, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s ‘exposure video’ reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr. Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy which requires a formal due process procedure.
After the fascist’s ‘exposure video’ reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr. Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy which requires a formal due process procedure.
What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable?
The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr. Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed here, in no way calls for violence.
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favor of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organizing politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views reflect those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40% favor socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive, they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists, and capitalists.
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer Texas State University that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom– a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the President of the Texas State University system so easily–who else will they go after?
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr. Tom Alter to his teaching position.
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr. Tom Alter to his teaching position.
The termination of Dr. Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in-line with that of Donald Trump who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents.
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left.
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Color, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole . It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war while a handful accumulates ever growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr. Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe.
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr. Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom, and equality. We will also continue building the organization that it will take to win it.
Dr. Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organizations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as Associate Professor of History.
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organizations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
What you can do to support:
*Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
*Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
*Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Dear Friend,
Since March 2025 the prison administration and the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections was aware that Mumia's eyesight deteriorated to 20/200 (legally blind). Mumia was not able to read, including his mail, nor retrieve phone numbers, or proceed with his research and writing to complete his Phd dissertation.
For over seven months no treatment was provided. On September 2, Mumia was treated for complications from cataract surgery a few years ago. However, he remains disabled and at risk of loss of sight in his other eye, damaged by severe diabetic retinopathy. He needs that treatment immediately.
This is an outrageous attack on an innocent prisoner serving a life-without-parole sentence! A long history of Mumia’s 43 years imprisoned (29 of them on death row), have shown that prison authorities, who are required to provide adequate health care, failed to do so, leading Mumia’s supporters to the conclusion that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has actively tried to disable and even kill him. (They tried this in 2015 by failing to diagnose and treat Hepatitis C, sending Mumia into a near-fatal crisis.)
A loud and determined public response is required to win immediate treatment to restore Mumia’s full eyesight.
Please join this effort, do your part, and share this information.
Sincerely,
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  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 KagarlitskyWe, 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 Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) Here Is the Full Text of the Gaza Plan Released by the White House
“If both sides agree to this proposal, the war will immediately end,” the White House proposal says.
By The New York Times, Sept. 29, 2025
Smoke billowed in Gaza City during Israeli military operation on Monday. Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters
The White House released a lengthy plan on Monday calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and laying out plans for the territory. The conditions include many proposals that have long been rejected by Hamas.
Here is the full text of the proposal provided by the White House.
· Gaza will be a de-radicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.
· Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough.
· If both sides agree to this proposal, the war will immediately end. Israeli forces will withdraw to the agreed upon line to prepare for a hostage release. During this time, all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment, will be suspended, and battle lines will remain frozen until conditions are met for the complete staged withdrawal.
· Within 72 hours of Israel publicly accepting this agreement, all hostages, alive and deceased, will be returned.
· Once all hostages are released, Israel will release 250 life sentence prisoners plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after Oct. 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context. For every Israeli hostage whose remains are released, Israel will release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans.
· Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.
· Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip. At a minimum, aid quantities will be consistent with what was included in the Jan. 19, 2025, agreement regarding humanitarian aid, including rehabilitation of infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage), rehabilitation of hospitals and bakeries, and entry of necessary equipment to remove rubble and open roads.
· Entry of distribution and aid in the Gaza Strip will proceed without interference from the two parties through the United Nations and its agencies, and the Red Crescent, in addition to other international institutions not associated in any manner with either party. Opening the Rafah crossing in both directions will be subject to the same mechanism implemented under the Jan. 19, 2025, agreement.
· Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee, responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people in Gaza.
· This committee will be made up of qualified Palestinians and international experts, with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body, the “Board of Peace,” which will be headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members and heads of State to be announced, including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
· This body will set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020 and the Saudi-French proposal, and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza. This body will call on best international standards to create modern and efficient governance that serves the people of Gaza and is conducive to attracting investment.
· A Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East. Many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas have been crafted by well-meaning international groups, and will be considered to synthesize the security and governance frameworks to attract and facilitate these investments that will create jobs, opportunity, and hope for future Gaza.
· A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.
· No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.
· Hamas and other factions agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form. All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt. There will be a process of demilitarization of Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors, which will include placing weapons permanently beyond use through an agreed process of decommissioning, and supported by an internationally funded buy back and reintegration program all verified by the independent monitors. New Gaza will be fully committed to building a prosperous economy and to peaceful coexistence with their neighbors.
· A guarantee will be provided by regional partners to ensure that Hamas, and the factions, comply with their obligations and that New Gaza poses no threat to its neighbors or its people.
· The United States will work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary International Stabilization Force (I.S.F.) to immediately deploy in Gaza. The I.S.F. will train and provide support to vetted Palestinian police forces in Gaza, and will consult with Jordan and Egypt who have extensive experience in this field. This force will be the long-term internal security solution. The I.S.F. will work with Israel and Egypt to help secure border areas, along with newly trained Palestinian police forces. It is critical to prevent munitions from entering Gaza and to facilitate the rapid and secure flow of goods to rebuild and revitalize Gaza. A de-confliction mechanism will be agreed upon by the parties.
· Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza. As the I.S.F. establishes control and stability, the Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.) will withdraw based on standards, milestones, and time frames linked to demilitarization that will be agreed upon between the I.D.F., I.S.F., the guarantors, and the United States, with the objective of a secure Gaza that no longer poses a threat to Israel, Egypt, or its citizens. Practically, the I.D.F. will progressively hand over the Gaza territory it occupies to the ISF according to an agreement they will make with the transitional authority until they are withdrawn completely from Gaza, save for a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat.
· In the event Hamas delays or rejects this proposal, the above, including the scaled-up aid operation, will proceed in the terror-free areas handed over from the I.D.F. to the I.S.F.
· An interfaith dialogue process will be established based on the values of tolerance and peaceful coexistence to try and change mind-sets and narratives of Palestinians and Israelis by emphasizing the benefits that can be derived from peace.
· While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the P.A. reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.
· The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous coexistence.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) President Tells Top Brass American Cities Should Be ‘Training Grounds’ for Military
By Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Shawn McCreesh, Reporting from Washington, Sept. 30, 2025
President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned more than 800 of the country’s top brass to a military base in Virginia on Tuesday to voice a familiar litany of culture war talking points and criticize a military that they complained had become distracted by political correctness.
The rare and highly anticipated call-up drew the country’s military commanders, who flew in from Asia, Europe and points between on short notice. The president delivered a rambling address that including familiar talking points and critiques, and also Mr. Trump’s revelation that he had told Mr. Hegseth to use American cities where he has deployed troops as “training grounds” for the military.
It was unclear why, with a shutdown of the federal government looming, Mr. Trump and his defense secretary needed to gather the country’s senior military leaders from overseas deployments to tell them face to face that they were straight out of “central casting,” as Mr. Trump characterized the gathering.
“I’m thrilled to be here this morning to address the senior leadership of what is once again known around the world as the Department of War,” Mr. Trump said. (Though Mr. Trump has renamed the department, Congress has not yet approved the change.)
Mr. Trump praised his own tariff and border policies and insulted former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Discussing his efforts to send troops to American cities, he said: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
Mr. Hegseth spoke first, telling the assembled generals and admirals that he was tightening standards for fitness and grooming, cracking down even more rigorously against “woke garbage” and getting rid of attacks on “toxic” leadership that he said had gone too far.
In his address, Mr. Hegseth railed against what he called “stupid rules of engagement” that he said limited soldiers and commanders in the field. He defended his firing of more than a dozen military leaders, many of them people of color and women.
And he said that, from now on, promotions would be based on merit, complaining that, in his view, they previously were not.
“We’ve already done a lot in this area, but more changes are coming soon,” he said.
It was standard fare for Mr. Hegseth, who will undoubtedly come under criticism for the expense of flying the commanders to the Washington area as a federal shutdown looms. President Trump acknowledged the cost of the gathering as he boarded a helicopter to head to the Marine base at Quantico, where the gathering was being held.
“These are our generals, our admirals, our leaders, and it’s a good thing, a thing like this has never been done before, because they came from all over the world,” the president said. “And there’s a little bit of expense, not much, but there’s a little expense for that. We don’t like to waste it. We’d rather spend it on bullets and rockets.”
The generals and admirals assembled were mostly quiet during the remarks by Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Trump. It is tradition for the military to present a nonpartisan posture.
When Mr. Hegseth summoned the senior officers last week, he gave no reason for the meeting, which has no precedent in scope and scale in recent memory. The military leaders were told to expect a speech from the secretary heralding a so-called war-fighter culture he has championed since taking office, but they were given little other information.
The event took a new twist on Sunday when Mr. Trump said he would attend. That raised alarm among military specialists over his tendency as commander in chief to use U.S. troops as political props and visits to bases as occasions to bash political rivals, Democrats and the news media. During a speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., in June, Mr. Trump led troops to boo journalists and Mr. Biden.
Mr. Trump has sought to downplay the gathering, telling NBC News on Sunday, “It’s just a very nice meeting talking about how well we’re doing militarily.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has ordered National Guard soldiers to Los Angeles, Washington and Portland, Ore., over the objections of local political leaders, to assist immigration efforts and combat crime. He also directed the military to attack boats in the Caribbean that he said were carrying drugs to the United States, but he offered no detailed legal justification.
The top four-star combatant commanders and Joint Chiefs of Staff typically meet at least twice a year in Washington, often holding a working dinner with the president. But the large number of lower-ranking generals and admirals at Tuesday’s meeting was highly unusual, military officials said.
In the days before the event, Democratic lawmakers and military specialists questioned the cost and disruption to daily operations caused by the meeting, as well as the security risks of concentrating so many top military commanders in one place. All, it appeared, for Mr. Hegseth to be able to lecture military leaders with decades of combat experience on an enhanced “warrior ethos” in a forum that was televised live.
“It appears to be one more demonstration of Secretary Hegseth mistakenly believing our military leadership needs to be directed to focus on fighting wars,” said Kori Schake, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) ‘A Hard Moment’: Memphis Braces for an Influx of Federal Force
Drained by years of crime and conservative criticism, Memphis is set to receive a wave of federal agents that residents are divided over.
By Emily Cochrane, Reporting from Memphis, Sept. 30, 2025
Demonstrators participated in a “No Cooperation with Occupation” march in Memphis on Saturday. Brad J. Vest for The New York Times
Miriam Cordero, a longtime Memphis resident who owns a downtown flower shop, sounded torn last week about the arrival of federal forces in the city in the coming days.
“If they come to help with the crime, I think we can be OK with that. But if they’re going to scare people?” Ms. Cordero said. “It’s so vague, the information we have.”
President Trump’s decision to send the National Guard and other agencies into the city has many residents feeling similarly uncertain: They are weary of the crime rate, one of the highest in the nation, and open to some federal help. Yet some are also wary of more heavy-handed policing that fails to address systemic problems.
Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican who supports the plan, has offered few specifics about personnel or assignments, beyond that at least 13 agencies would be present in the city beginning this week to help with local law enforcement. The National Guard will act in a support role to the local police and deputies, he has said, without the authority to arrest people.
For some, the prospect of troops in fatigues has invoked one of the city’s most fraught periods, during the sanitation workers’ strike and the aftermath of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, when the Guard was sent to quell unrest. Even among residents who are open to the idea of federal help, there are concerns about optics and skepticism about how effective it will be.
“I don’t want it to just be a show, because we’ve got real issues in our community,” said Charlie Caswell Jr., a commissioner in Shelby County, home to Memphis, who represents some of the neighborhoods with the highest crime rates. He added, “My people, they want to see the change.”
More than the National Guard, some people have asked questions about possible fallout from the involvement of a number of federal agencies in the intervention, including the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration and the United States Marshals Service.
Sharon Becton, 66, who was taking a break from selling flavored popcorn in the Midtown neighborhood last week, said simply, “I just hope and pray it helps.”
Few, if any, will deny the challenges Memphis faces, especially related to crime rates in some of its neighborhoods. But in one of the nation’s largest majority-Black cities, many of those challenges can also be traced to decades of racist oppression and disinvestment.
A University of Memphis analysis published in 2024 found that the city’s poverty rate of 22.6 percent was among the highest in the nation, with Black residents disproportionately affected. Wages tend to be low and have stayed stagnant.
The city’s pride is evident in its artistic ingenuity, investments by local philanthropists and even the local N.B.A. franchise. As readily as they acknowledge its challenges, some residents still bristle at outsiders defining Memphis by its worst moments, like the King assassination or the high-profile beating of a motorist by members of its police force in 2023.
Memphis is “a city that has so much potential, so much opportunity, so much talent, but yet and still the resources aren’t there,” said K. Durell Cowan, the founder and head of Heal 901, a local nonprofit. He questioned why his organization had lost access to federal grants this year, yet money remained for an influx of agents and officers.
Violent crime has decreased in the city recently, slowly mirroring a national trend, after a series of high-profile murders and carjackings in 2022 and 2023. In some neighborhoods, however, there is a desire for more progress.
“Maybe they are trying, but trying is not keeping these people alive,” said Pastor Leon Jones Jr., who works in the neighborhoods of Raleigh and Frayser in north Memphis, where crime rates often outpace those of the rest of the city. “We need some help.”
As recently as August, Governor Lee told reporters that there were no plans to send the National Guard to Memphis. He had already sent state troopers in to help the local police, and the F.B.I. had coordinated a crime reduction operation that led to nearly 500 arrests.
But by mid-September, the governor was in the Oval Office, standing next to Mr. Trump as the president signed an executive order creating a Memphis-specific federal task force to help address crime in the city.
At a news conference last week, Mr. Lee said that “it was never off the table” that the National Guard would be deployed to Memphis and that there was a broader conversation about more federal assistance.
“It became evident that it’s exactly what needs to happen,” he said, “because we know that if we have access to those resources, this problem can be solved.”
The announcement was quickly welcomed by Tennessee Republicans.
“I think the show of force is hugely important to reinforce the idea that we are getting control of the problem,” said Luke Cymbal, the vice chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party. He added, “we’re not trying to infringe on people’s rights here. We’re just trying to arrest criminals.”
Among some Democrats, there is a desire to challenge the federal intervention. But the political dynamics are different in Memphis, compared to Democratic-led California, Oregon or Illinois. The Republican supermajority in the state legislature has been quick to threaten or overrule the Democratic-led city and its leaders over policies it opposes, making the deployment feel inevitable.
Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat who has focused on public safety in his first term, has said that he does not think the National Guard is the best solution, but has stressed that the city should work with the federal government regardless. At the news conference last week, he stood alongside Mr. Lee, along with the police chief and other officials.
“Crime still exists — I never said crime was over,” Mr. Young said. He added that “we have a lot of work to do to get crime at a level where people really, really feel” a change for the better.”
Some organizations have railed against what they have described as a looming militarization of the city, uniting behind a “Free the 901” campaign, a reference to the Memphis area code. Community leaders are quietly reminding neighbors of their rights and to address any unpaid tickets or minor infractions.
“This is going to do untold damage to this community’s ability to govern itself and to make its own decisions,” said Josh Spickler, the executive director of Just City, a criminal justice organization.
There are also fears about federal agencies taking a punitive approach in certain communities, including as part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign to detain undocumented immigrants. And there are questions about what an uptick in arrests would mean for a clogged court system and an overcrowded county jail with a record of poor conditions.
At a moment when household and business costs are already rising, business owners also worry that the visible presence of federal troops could scare residents into staying home and tourists into staying away.
Ms. Cordero’s flower shop revenue has dropped by at least 35 percent in recent months, she estimated, citing higher costs and fewer sales driven by tariffs and inflation.
“This is a hard moment,” she said.
There is also some distrust of the Memphis Police Department. Senator Brent Taylor, who has led a call for a more aggressive crackdown on crime, and State Representative John Gillespie have asked for an audit of the department’s crime data, while others have questioned its transparency.
After the 2023 beating and death of Tyre Nichols, a Justice Department investigation found that the department had a pattern of excessive force, particularly against Black residents. The report, issued shortly before President Biden left office, was retracted after Mr. Trump returned to the White House. (Mr. Young and Chief Cerelyn Davis said the department has made changes in response to Mr. Nichols’s death.)
Even those who are cautiously open to the infusion of federal resources said they were conflicted over ceding some local control on the issue of crime.
“Aren’t we the best people to solve the problem?” asked Leslie Taylor, co-founder of the nonpartisan Memphis Crime Beat, which focuses on tracking the city’s court system. “And yet we haven’t been able to, so here we are.”
Ms. Taylor added, “Somebody asked me the other day, ‘What’s your goal in five years?’” referring to her organization. She said her response was, “Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to talk about crime all the time?”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) U.S. Deports Planeload of Iranians After Deal With Tehran, Officials Say
The deportation flight to Iran is the most stark push yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants even to places with harsh human rights records.
By Farnaz Fassihi and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 30, 2025
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly last week, President Trump insisted that the United States would double down on efforts to deport masses of migrants. Doug Mills/The New York Times
The Trump administration is deporting a planeload of about 100 Iranians back to Iran from the United States after a deal between the two governments, according to two senior Iranian officials involved in the negotiations and a U.S. official with knowledge of the plans.
Iranian officials said that the plane, a U.S.-chartered flight, took off from Louisiana on Monday night and was scheduled to arrive in Iran by way of Qatar on Tuesday at the earliest. The U.S. official confirmed that plans for the flight were in the final stages. All the officials spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details publicly.
The identities of the Iranians on the plane and their reasons for trying to immigrate to the United States were not immediately clear.
The deportation is one of the starkest efforts yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants no matter the human rights conditions in countries on the receiving end. The expanding deportation campaign has sparked lawsuits by immigrant advocates, who have criticized the flights.
For decades, the United States had given shelter to Iranians fleeing their homeland, which has one of the harshest human rights records in the world. Iran persecutes women’s rights activists, political dissidents, journalists, lawyers, religious minorities and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, among others.
In the past several years, there has been an increase in Iranian migrants arriving at the southern U.S. border and crossing illegally, including many who have claimed fear of persecution back home for their political and religious beliefs.
Hossein Noushabadi, the director general of parliamentary affairs in Iran’s foreign ministry, said on Tuesday that U.S. immigration authorities planned to deport 400 Iranians living in the United States back to Iran over the coming months.
“In the first phase, they decided to deport 120 Iranians who entered the U.S. illegally, mostly through Mexico,” he told Tasnim News Agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards force.
Some who will be deported held U.S. residency, he said, adding that all of those being deported left Iran legally.
The United States had long hesitated or had trouble deporting migrants to certain countries like Iran because of a lack of regularized diplomatic relations and an inability to get travel documents in a timely manner.
That had forced American officials to either hold migrants in detention for long periods or release them into the United States. The United States deported more than two dozen Iranians back to the country in 2024, the highest number in years.
The two Iranian officials who spoke to The Times said the deportees included men and women, some of them couples. Some had volunteered to leave after being in detention centers for months, and some had not, they said.
The officials said that in nearly every case, asylum requests had been denied or the people had not yet appeared before a judge for an asylum hearing.
The deportation is a rare moment of cooperation between the United States and the Iranian government, and was the culmination of months of discussions between the two countries, the Iranian officials said.
One of the officials said that Iran’s foreign ministry was coordinating the deportees’ return and that they had been given reassurances that they would be safe and would not face any problems. Still, he said, many were disappointed and some even frightened.
“Iran will certainly welcome migrants who, for any reason, had previously emigrated to the United States,” Mr. Noushabadi told Tasnim.
In addition to inflicting political oppression, Iran is in the throes of an economic and energy crisis with a plunging currency, sky-high inflation, unemployment, and water and power cuts.
The economic situation is bound to get even worse with the return of United Nations Security Council sanctions, which went into effect on Saturday.
Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) With New U.S. Proposal to End Gaza War, a Rare Moment of Triumph for Netanyahu
In President Trump’s plan, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got almost everything he hoped for in the end, despite mounting international isolation.
By David M. Halbfinger and Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 30, 2025
President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel outside the White House in Washington on Monday. Doug Mills/The New York Times
Heading into their meeting on Monday, the question was whether President Trump would apply enough pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to end the war in Gaza.
Ultimately, Mr. Netanyahu got almost everything he could have hoped from Mr. Trump’s proposal — a demand that Hamas release the hostages immediately and lay down its weapons, without which Israel would have carte blanche to keep pummeling Gaza.
As for Israeli troops, they would get to remain in Gaza’s perimeter for the foreseeable future. There was such a stinting nod to the aspiration of statehood for Palestinians that the proposal all but suggested they just keep dreaming. And the Palestinian Authority would be left playing no role in Gaza anytime soon.
It was a rare moment of triumph that showed Mr. Netanyahu could still get much — if not all — of what he wanted despite Israel’s mounting international isolation. Just last week, several European countries recognized a Palestinian state over Israeli objections, while a diplomatic walkout left Mr. Netanyahu addressing a mostly empty room at the United Nations.
On Monday afternoon, standing alongside Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu praised the U.S.-backed plan as fulfilling his own conditions for ending the war with Hamas. And Arab and Muslim governments, including the Palestinian Authority, appeared ready to fall in line.
As for Hamas, it would have no say at all in the future governance of the Gaza Strip, making explicit what had been left vague in earlier attempts at ending the conflict.
Still, the group and its leadership have been so decimated by the war, and it faces so much apparent pressure from Muslim countries including its patrons in Qatar and Turkey, that its acquiescence is not impossible to imagine.
Hamas’s leaders now must decide whether to accept Mr. Trump’s plan, negotiate its terms or reject it outright. All the options carry serious risks for the Palestinian armed group, which has managed to survive two years of an Israeli onslaught by fighting a dogged insurgency.
Hamas negotiators were expected to meet with Turkish officials on Tuesday in the Qatari capital, Doha, “to push for an end to the war through this plan,” according to Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for Qatar’s foreign ministry.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump told reporters in Washington that he would give Hamas “three or four days” to respond to the proposal.
Hamas would struggle to accept a deal that would amount to surrendering its rule in Gaza, but brushing off a clear path to ending the conflict would risk further angering Palestinians who have lived through nearly two nightmarish years of killing and devastation. Some Gazans accuse Hamas of fighting a war for its own political survival at their expense.
Ibrahim Madhoun, a Palestinian analyst close to Hamas, said the Trump plan was “based on excluding Hamas,” making it difficult for the group to accept. Hamas officials have previously said key elements, such as surrendering their weapons, would be a red line.
Hamas could still agree to the proposal — or at least accept it as a basis for negotiations — to end the war, he said. But many of the plan’s 20 other points were downright unclear, meaning that they would require protracted talks to hammer out, he added.
“Each clause is such a minefield as to require its own separate agreement,” Mr. Madhoun said.
After hearing the terms of the proposal, Mahmoud Abu Matar, a 27-year-old sheltering in central Gaza, said a vast majority of Palestinians living there would most likely support the deal so as to put an immediate end to the violence.
“We don’t want any more war and bloodshed,” he said. “The ball is now in Hamas’s court.”
Some of the most important players in the Trump-Netanyahu vision for Gaza did not speak at the White House on Monday. Among them were Arab and Muslim nations that have offered to provide troops or funding for a peacekeeping force to provide security in Gaza, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.
Those countries had laid down clear conditions for their postwar involvement, including that Israel fully withdraw from Gaza and commit to a pathway to a Palestinian state. They also stipulated that the Palestinian Authority must invite them to Gaza, so they would be seen as supporting the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people rather than as another occupying power.
The plan outlined by Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu met none of those conditions. Not only would Israel retain a security buffer inside Gaza’s borders, but the multinational peacekeeping force would also take possession of territory directly from the Israeli military. The Palestinian Authority, for its part, would be cut out of the picture until it so completely reformed itself that Mr. Netanyahu scoffed at the prospect as a “miraculous transformation” unlikely to happen.
As for a Palestinian state, the proposal said only that as Gaza is rebuilt, “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” — if the Palestinian Authority’s reform program “is faithfully carried out.” Yet nothing was said about who would determine this or how.
As favorable as the proposal appeared to Mr. Netanyahu, it did entail concessions that he could find politically costly to make. The references to Palestinian statehood someday, the encouragement that Palestinians remain in Gaza and the flat rejection of Israeli annexation of Gaza “completely shatter the far right’s dreams,” Nadav Eyal, a columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, a centrist Israeli newspaper, wrote on Tuesday.
The foreign ministers of eight Arab or Muslim-majority countries offered a qualified embrace of the Trump-Netanyahu proposal in a joint statement early Tuesday, affirming their readiness to cooperate with it. They made it clear, however, that they still insisted on a “full Israeli withdrawal” and on the establishment of “a just peace on the basis of the two-state solution, under which Gaza is fully integrated with the West Bank in a Palestinian state.”
To Nimrod Novik, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator and envoy for former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, that “yes, but” was unsurprising.
“We could be in for very prolonged negotiations during which the war goes on, the hostages are at risk, Palestinians die and the ball — in terms of the need to argue with Trump — is in the Arab court,” Mr. Novik said.
More surprisingly, the Arab ministers said nothing about the Palestinian Authority.
Without any role planned for it in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority nonetheless welcomed Mr. Trump’s “sincere and determined efforts” to end the war and affirmed its “confidence in his ability to find a path toward peace.” It went on to say that it wanted “a modern, democratic and nonmilitarized Palestinian state.”
The P.A. also said that it was committed to changing textbooks that critics say demonize Israel and to abolishing the payment of stipends to Palestinian prisoners and their families. It said it would invite international scrutiny of those changes.
That response showed how much has changed since 2020, when Mr. Trump released a peace plan for the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was similarly skewed toward Israel’s preferences. Back then, in an American election year, the P.A. rejected Mr. Trump’s proposal out of hand, and he was voted out of office that November.
Today, the P.A. is being allowed by Mr. Trump to cling to the hope of a future for itself. Hamas is not.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) Five Takeaways About the Culture of Lawlessness in the U.S. Special Forces
Until now, many of the troubling events that took place during the war in Afghanistan have been shrouded in secrecy.
By Matthieu Aikins, Sept. 30, 2025
Green Berets training support staff at Camp Mackall in North Carolina in May. Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
In Afghanistan, during the United States’ longest war, special operators like the Green Berets shouldered a disproportionate share of the fighting. At home, they were held up as heroes for their highly publicized exploits. But behind the glory, there was a dark side the public did not see: a culture of rule-breaking that led to war crimes and, eventually, a vigilante ethos openly embraced by leaders at home.
This troubling history has been shrouded by the Army’s intense secrecy around its operators. In the past four years, I interviewed two dozen current and former members of Army Special Operations, including some who were willing to publicly accuse the organization of misconduct. The Times filed lawsuits that yielded thousands of pages of previously unpublished investigations, detainee files and other military records. To track down and interview scores of local witnesses, I made multiple trips to Afghanistan, where I have been reporting since 2008.
A spokeswoman for Army Special Operations, Lt. Col. Allie Scott, defended the organization. “We have fully investigated and adjudicated the cases you cover,” she wrote. “We are confident our actions stand up to the strictest scrutiny.”
Until now, it hasn’t been possible to reckon with many of these events because they were kept secret. Doing so helps us to understand not only the toll of the war on the U.S’s elite forces but also our current political moment, as the Trump administration loosens restraints on the military, orders lethal military strikes on alleged Venezuelan “narco-terrorists” in the Caribbean and deploys troops to American cities.
Here are five takeaways from the four-part magazine investigation.
The Special Forces’ culture of rule-breaking emerged from the pressures of an unconventional war.
Deployed on isolated firebases in violent enemy territory in Afghanistan, some Green Berets developed practices that skirted or even broke Army regulations, ones that were often tolerated by commanders for the sake of the mission. But rule-breaking could escalate into more serious crimes. The operators I spoke to told me they had employed Afghan guards and translators for offensive firepower and used local forces to hold detainees. Some soldiers carried “drop guns” that they could plant on bodies.
A number of Green Berets were convicted in corruption-related cases. Others were accused of extrajudicial killings. Many of them came from the Third Special Forces Group, which had a lead role in the mission in Afghanistan.
Special Operations commanders overlooked evidence of what might have been one of the worst war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
After a team of Green Berets and their secret Afghan proxy force were accused in 2012 of killing nine detainees in Nerkh, a farming district in Wardak Province, Special Operations commanders carried out three investigations — and cleared the unit.
But after local protests, the Special Forces were pushed to leave Nerkh, and human remains identified as the missing nine were found outside their base. The Army opened a criminal investigation that lasted for nearly a decade. Until now, its results have never been revealed.
To understand what really happened in Nerkh, I traveled there and spoke to scores of local witnesses and former detainees. I also interviewed two Afghans who worked for the Green Berets, Zikria and Kazem, who admitted to having abused and killed detainees and said Americans had been involved as well.
Through a lawsuit, I also obtained files from the military’s three initial investigations, which show that commanders ignored clear evidence of misconduct by the team. A retired Green Beret brigadier general I spoke to agreed.
The Army’s aggressive prosecution of Maj. Mathew Golsteyn reveals how it could pursue Green Berets, if it chose to.
At a job interview with the C.I.A., Maj. Mathew Golsteyn admitted to killing a bombmaking suspect in Afghanistan in 2010. Golsteyn — who told me he had done the right thing for his men and his mission — was kicked out of the Special Forces. When he went public, the Army pushed to court-martial him for murder.
I obtained previously unreported files from the Golsteyn investigation that show how Army commanders pressured former members of his team into confessing their role in dismembering and burning the body of the bombmaking suspect. The Army’s actions stand in stark contrast to the Nerkh case, in which the bodies of nine detainees were found outside a former U.S. base. The case file I obtained showed that investigators amassed substantial evidence of misconduct, but the case was quietly closed by the Army without charges in 2022. Members of the Nerkh team were decorated and promoted.
Golsteyn told me he believed that his true crime was breaking the Green Berets’ code of silence.
This wartime culture of lawlessness has reverberated in a wave of domestic crimes committed by soldiers with Army Special Operations.
In recent years, Army Special Operations has been plagued by murders, drug-trafficking, fraud and sex crimes committed by its soldiers. Many of these were committed around Fort Bragg, N.C., headquarters to both Army Special Operations and the Third Special Forces Group.
To understand the scale of the problem, I collected news and police reports of incidents around Special Forces bases and obtained the personnel records of the soldiers involved, as well as vital records and court documents. The picture was one of serious crime at all levels, from young operators to senior leaders.
The problem of crime has led to questions in Congress, where military leaders promised accountability. Yet Special Forces commanders whose soldiers were involved in misconduct have been repeatedly promoted.
The operators’ vigilante ethos has been embraced by leaders like Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, rose to prominence in part through his vociferous defense of Golsteyn and other service members accused of war crimes. “They’re not war criminals; they’re warriors,” he said in 2019, shortly before Golsteyn and others received a pardon from President Trump.
In the current administration, Trump and Hegseth have pushed to loosen legal restraints on the armed forces, both abroad and in the United States, and to expand the role of the military at home. They have purged the military’s top lawyers, deployed active-duty troops to patrol American streets and authorized lethal strikes on those they designate as “narco-terrorists,” summary killings that experts say violate international law.
The article reveals that the vision of unbridled power held by the Trump administration has its roots in the lawlessness of the United States’ wars overseas.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) As Israel Pounds Gaza City, an Overwhelming Exodus
The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing Israel’s expanded ground offensive are further straining services, aid groups say. Hospitals are overflowing, water is low and diseases are spreading.
Written by Liam Stack, Visuals by Saher Alghorra, Oct. 1, 2025
Liam Stack reported from Tel Aviv and Saher Alghorra from Al-Mawasi and Nuseirat in the Gaza Strip.
Since Israel’s ground assault on Gaza City began, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sheltering there have fled to the south of Gaza.
As Israel’s full-scale assault in Gaza City began last month, Khitam Ayyad fled from her home there barefoot and without her possessions, heading to an area in southern Gaza that the Israeli military had designated as a “humanitarian zone.”
The military said that tents, food and medical care would be provided to those fleeing the fighting in the north.
But when Ms. Ayyad reached the southern city of Khan Younis, one of the humanitarian areas, she said she found it overcrowded with desperate people who were being offered little help.
“We are exposed to the sun and the heat,” she said. There was no space for her to build a shelter, she added, and “no proper food or water.”
The Israeli military has said that its ground assault to take control of Gaza City, which began on Sept. 16, is an effort to rout one of the last remaining Hamas strongholds in Gaza.
Before the operation, the military said that the humanitarian infrastructure in southern Gaza was prepared for “the expected population volume moving from northern Gaza.”
This week, the military said that 780,000 people had left Gaza City since an evacuation order was issued on Sept. 9.
The huge influx of Gazans into the south has further strained humanitarian services that aid groups say were not sufficient even before the arrival of thousands more people.
Olga Cherevko, a spokeswoman for the United Nations’ humanitarian office who is working in a designated humanitarian zone, said there were “hundreds of people just sitting on the side of the road looking shellshocked, without anything.”
On Monday, President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel backed a proposal to end the war, which was ignited by a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The plan stated that “full aid” would be sent “immediately” to Gaza once the plan went into effect, but it remained unclear if Hamas would accept the deal.
The Israeli military agency that coordinates aid to Gaza, known as COGAT, reiterated that the humanitarian facilities in the south were prepared for the new arrivals. “Accordingly, the transfer of food, medical equipment and shelter supplies has been increased,” COGAT said in a statement on Sept. 25. “Steps have been taken in the fields of water and medical response in the southern Gaza Strip.”
But two weeks into the offensive, there appeared to be little sign of that infrastructure, a visit by a New York Times photographer to the humanitarian zone showed and Palestinians and aid groups said in interviews. They said the facilities there were far from sufficient.
“The hospitals are completely overflowing,” Ms. Cherevko said. “The water production is at some of the lowest levels that we’ve ever seen. There’s all kinds of diseases.”
Since the ground offensive in Gaza City began, aid agencies say, efforts to alleviate a worsening humanitarian crisis across Gaza have been plunged into chaos.
In the north, where hundreds of thousands of people are still sheltering in Gaza City, the delivery of food and aid has been severely disrupted, aid agencies say.
The United Nations’ humanitarian office said the Israeli military closed the Zikim crossing on Sept. 12, days before the Gaza City operation began, cutting off an important entry point for aid and goods.
When asked about the closure, the Israeli military said the entry of aid trucks through Zikim was “subject to operational considerations.”
The United Nations said the Israeli authorities had also denied or impeded about half of its attempts to bring aid from the south to the north of Gaza in recent weeks. That, Ms. Cherevko said, had severely hampered the work of community kitchens in the north, meaning they were able to prepare about a third of the meals they had before the offensive.
The Israeli military said in a statement that aid deliveries from southern to northern Gaza were “facilitated through internal coordination” between itself and aid groups, and that the delivery of aid “continues on an ongoing basis.”
Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza City has also devastated health care there.
On Wednesday, the Red Cross said it would suspend operations and move its staff out of the city, days after Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity, announced a similar move saying that Israeli forces had “encircled” their facilities. At the weekend, the United Nations said that fighting had rendered four hospitals in the north unusable over the past month.
Israel’s conduct of the war, and its effect on civilians, has been widely criticized and has left the country isolated internationally.
Last month, a U.N. commission investigating the war said Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians, an accusation that Israel has denied.
In August, a U.N.-backed panel of food experts found that Gaza City and its surrounding area were officially under famine, with at least half a million people facing starvation, acute malnutrition and death. Israel has denied the report’s findings and criticized the panel’s methodology.
Israeli officials have said they let enough food into Gaza but argue that it is stolen or that aid agencies struggle to distribute it. The United Nations and other aid groups say that Israel frequently denies or delays requests to pick up supplies waiting at the border and move them into Gaza safely, among other challenges.
The persistent lack of security across Gaza has also made it difficult for aid agencies to reach people.
Before the Gaza City offensive, UNICEF delivered specialized treatment for malnourished children to northern Gaza twice a week, but it has delivered only one since the offensive began, said Tess Ingram, a spokeswoman for UNICEF. And last week, the United Nations said in a report that it had succeeded in getting a shipment of malnutrition treatment into Gaza City, only to have the supplies, which included enough treatment for 2,700 children, stolen by armed men.
The United Nations said that 73 percent of aid entering Gaza in September had been stolen from its trucks by desperate civilians or armed gangs. Some of that pilfered aid is then sold in local markets across the territory for inflated prices.
In Gaza City, some markets had stayed open in the earliest days of the Israeli ground offensive as vendors tried to offload their stocks before they fled. But residents said many markets now appeared to be closed or picked clean.
Amani al-Hessi, 40, a journalist for Al Madina, an Arabic-language newspaper based in Israel, who was sheltering in a badly damaged house in Gaza City, said there was nowhere left to buy food in her area.
“I went yesterday to what used to be the market in Shati, but no one was selling a thing there,” she said, referring to one of Gaza City’s neighborhoods. “We have food enough for one more week at best.”
Aid agencies say the Israeli military appeared to have been unprepared for the exodus of people its Gaza City offensive would unleash.
“Is there food and water in al-Mawasi? Yes,” Ms. Ingram, the UNICEF spokeswoman, said, referring to one of the designated humanitarian zones in the south. “Is it sufficient for the people who are currently here? No. Will it be sufficient if hundreds of thousands of more people come? Definitely not.”
Bassem al-Qedra, 43, said he and his children slept on the street for three days after he fled to Khan Younis from Gaza City. He said that, eventually, he found an empty patch of sand and paid someone almost $100 to pitch a tent for his family there.
“No water, no food, no money,” said Mr. al-Qedra, who worked as a taxi driver before his car was destroyed in the war. “No one could help.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) Tony Blair, Tapped by Trump for Gaza Plan, Brings Peace Expertise and Baggage
After helping negotiate peace in Northern Ireland, the former prime minister’s reputation was tarnished by his role in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Is he stepping into another diplomatic quagmire?
By Mark Landler, Reporting from London, Oct. 1, 2025
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, has been focused for months on a post-conflict plan for Gaza. Andrew Testa for The New York Times
When Tony Blair published a how-to book for newly elected leaders last year, one of his tips was to tend to their legacies while still in office — something he said he neglected in his 10 years as Britain’s prime minister.
Now, Mr. Blair is seizing another chance to define his legacy, in a region that has preoccupied, even tormented, him since he backed George W. Bush’s war in Iraq 22 years ago. With a central role in President Trump’s new plan to end the war in Gaza, Mr. Blair could reshape a narrative that was tarnished by Iraq and unredeemed by a frustrating stint as a Middle East peacemaker after he left 10 Downing Street.
His odds of success are perilously slim. Mr. Trump’s perseverance as a peacemaker is unpredictable. If Mr. Blair thrusts himself into Gaza as a kind of colonial viceroy, critics warn that it will only inflame tensions. Far from ending the war, he could find himself stuck in the middle of another intractable conflict.
Much of Mr. Trump’s plan reflects ideas in Mr. Blair’s own 21-page blueprint for peace in Gaza, including a high-level transitional board, on which Mr. Blair will serve as a member. He drew up the plan over the past several months and had been a candidate for a leadership role, according to people familiar with the process. But in a last-minute twist, Mr. Trump took the chairman’s seat.
“Good man, very good man,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Blair on Monday, after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He said nothing about Mr. Blair’s responsibilities or his contributions to the plan.
Still, if the plan gains traction — a major if, given the unremitting hostility between Israel and Hamas — Mr. Blair would be one of those most responsible for delivering it. It is a striking turn for a 72-year-old retired politician, who has since built a lucrative business advising governments, banks and other clients on issues like the transformative power of A.I., and who remains a polarizing figure on Middle East issues.
And yet, it is entirely in keeping with Mr. Blair’s statesmanlike ambitions.
“Tony’s been at this issue for a long time, proposing ideas, sometimes having those ideas thrown back at him. He wants to keep trying,” said David M. Satterfield, an American diplomat who served as the Biden administration’s special envoy for humanitarian issues in Gaza in 2023 and 2024.
Mr. Satterfield recalled meeting Mr. Blair in Israel in January 2024, when diplomats from several countries began shaping the concept of an interim authority for Gaza. Mr. Blair, he said, was a regular visitor to Jerusalem, as well as to Arab capitals, where he has broad ties from his seven years as the envoy of the Quartet, a diplomatic group composed of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, which was trying to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
During the Biden administration, Mr. Blair traveled to the United Arab Emirates to sell its leaders on a post-conflict plan for Gaza. After the presidential election, he pivoted from lobbying Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken to Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who helped develop the plan announced by the president on Monday.
“He believes in the possibility of a resolution, and he’s never been far away from the issue,” said Mr. Satterfield, now the director of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston.
Mr. Blair’s office declined to discuss the plan.
Few people have the former prime minister’s credentials in resolving a seemingly insoluble conflict. In 1998, he helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Allies of Mr. Blair said that experience, in which he won the trust of both Irish republicans and unionists, would be invaluable in forging a settlement between Israel and Hamas.
“Tony Blair learned that it has to be give-and-take; it can’t be all take,” said Monica McWilliams, an academic and former politician who was involved in the Good Friday negotiations, which grappled with some of the same challenges, from governance to the disarming of militants, that are at issue in Gaza.
But Ms. McWilliams added, “I often asked myself how much Blair learned from Northern Ireland after he made the disastrous decision to go into Iraq.”
For Mr. Blair, the backlash over Iraq has hung over his post-government life. On the day he stepped down as prime minister in 2007, he was named as special envoy for the Quartet, and set about trying to repair the foundational rift in the Middle East — between Israel and the Palestinians.
Working out of rooms at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, Mr. Blair dug into issues like dismantling Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and nurturing a more vibrant Palestinian economy.
But Mr. Blair’s Iraq history seeded suspicions of him in the region. He also never shook the perception among Palestinians that he was tilted in Israel’s favor. Far from being a force multiplier in brokering a deal between the two sides, the Quartet was often a bystander to those talks.
Mr. Blair is nevertheless proud of his work in the Middle East. In the London offices of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, he keeps a signed photo of himself with John Kerry, the former secretary of state, thanking him for his efforts. By the time he stepped down as envoy in 2015, however, he had ceased to be much of a presence in a peace process that was, in any event, moribund.
“The Palestinians said, ‘good riddance,’” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, who wrote a critical study of the Quartet in 2012.
“Now, to parachute in as the viceroy or high commissioner of this colonial project in Gaza?” Mr. Elgindy said. “That’s not going to go over well at all.”
Iraq should serve as a warning to Mr. Blair, according to analysts. The interim authority that he and Mr. Trump envision for Gaza, they said, has many of the characteristics of the Coalition Provisional Authority, established in Iraq by the United States after its troops toppled Saddam Hussein.
Lacking legitimacy with the Iraqi people, that transitional government failed to stabilize the country, which fell into a bloody insurgency. It is remembered mostly for financial mismanagement and a disconnection from the population that drew comparisons to an arrogant colonial-era administration.
Mr. Blair’s plan for a Gaza International Transitional Authority, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, tries to avoid some of those traps. It calls for the creation of a Palestinian executive authority that would provide services like health, education and policing. It says the interim government should coordinate with the Palestinian Authority on the sensitive issue of disarming militants.
On Monday, Mr. Blair welcomed Mr. Trump’s plan, calling it “bold and intelligent.” He said in a statement that Mr. Trump’s decision to chair the so-called Board of Peace was a “huge signal of support and confidence in the future of Gaza.”
But Mr. Trump made clear he does not plan to play a day-to-day role. That will leave the heavy lifting to Mr. Blair, whose institute already works with some 40 countries around the world, including Saudi Arabia, and whose donors include the Silicon Valley billionaire, Larry Ellison, known for his ardently pro-Israel views.
Mr. Blair has long insisted he is committed to the Palestinian cause. He told colleagues recently that he has viewed Gaza as a potential prototype for a fully-fledged Palestinian state since 2005, when, as prime minister, he hosted a conference in London after Israel’s withdrawal from the enclave.
Robert Danin, an American diplomat who worked for Mr. Blair at the Quartet and has been a longtime adviser, said his former boss “has had a lot of experience in trying to move bureaucracies and governments.” But he questioned how engaged other players, notably the United States, would be over the long haul.
“So many of the parties will just want to move on,” he said. “What they’ve laid out is such an ambitious agenda. To make it work will require so much.”
Adam Rasgon contributed reporting from Jerusalem and Maggie Haberman from Washington
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) A Doctor in Sudan Described the Horror of War. Days Later, He Was Killed.
Dr. Omar Selik’s raw, urgent testimony from a besieged city cut through the fog of war and crystallized the depravity of the conflict. And then he was gone.
By Declan Walsh, Oct. 1, 2025
When Declan Walsh couldn’t reach the besieged city of El Fasher, he contacted residents using limited satellite internet connections, reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.
When Declan Walsh couldn’t reach the besieged city of El Fasher, he contacted residents using limited satellite internet connections, reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.
Dr. Omar Selik wanted to be seen, literally.
At the end of a harrowing, hourlong interview about life in the besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher, where he spoke via a rare satellite internet connection, he asked to switch on his camera. An exhausted, war-weary face appeared, then broke into an enormous grin.
“This is a good day for me,” Dr. Selik said, relief washing across his features. “I feel like a human being again.”
I found myself smiling too.
That simple moment of connection was enough to provide him with fleeting relief after 500 days of horrific siege. Dr. Selik, 43, was one of the last health workers in El Fasher, a city of a quarter-million desperate residents in the western region of Darfur, where death fell from the sky and starvation was a constant companion.
Moments earlier, Dr. Selik had been crying as he described how a pregnant woman had bled to death in his care for want of simple medicines. Now he tilted his camera down, inviting me to look at his lunch. I could hardly believe my eyes.
He held a plate of lumpy brown mush, animal fodder normally fed to camels and cows. It had become the main source of food for most people in El Fasher, he explained — a disturbing sign of how both a doctor and the people he was trying to save had been stripped of their humanity.
That was why it felt so good to speak with someone on the outside, he said: “People are dying, and nobody is even watching.”
For me, it was also a moment of clarity. Since Sudan’s civil war started in April 2023, I had been unable to enter Darfur, ground zero of a nationwide famine and the site of a crushing siege. Now, through the fog of war, I had found someone whose raw, urgent testimony crystallized the depravity of the conflict.
And then he was gone.
Days later, Dr. Selik left his home to attend dawn prayers at a nearby mosque. A missile slammed through the roof, exploding among the worshipers and killing about 75 people. Dr. Selik was among them.
It was the latest example of the toxic mix of technology, brutality and impunity that have come to characterize a war that has killed as many as 400,000 people, by some expert estimates. Witnesses said the missile was fired by a drone, one of many supplied by the United Arab Emirates to the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group laying siege to El Fasher. The Emirates denies backing either side in the war.
For the city’s embattled residents, it was another devastating loss. “My heart is broken,” said Salwa Ahmed, a university lecturer who had taken shelter in Dr. Selik’s house.
Like other residents, Ms. Ahmed said she felt abandoned by the outside world, and was skeptical that help would ever come. One faint glimmer of help, though, is on the horizon, led by President Trump’s senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos.
For weeks, Mr. Boulos has been negotiating with the R.S.F. to allow international aid into El Fasher, and last week he told the Financial Times an aid convoy could arrive “very, very soon.”
A senior U.S. official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the convoy would like comprise about 45 U.N. trucks, and could set out as soon as next Monday. But the details are still being worked out, including, crucially, how any aid would be distributed once it reached the stricken city.
The U.S. official said it was unclear if the R.S.F. would allow the aid to reach neighborhoods held by its enemy, the Sudanese military — the same areas that have borne the brunt of the siege.
A State Department declined to comment on the talks, and referred to Mr. Boulos’s earlier statements about his efforts in Sudan.
The siege began in April 2024 as the R.S.F., whose fighters mostly come from Darfur, tried to drive Sudan’s military out of the sprawling region. The siege intensified in March after the R.S.F. was expelled from Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.
As others fled, Dr. Selik stayed. “He said, ‘I can’t leave these people behind,’” said Omer Eltahir, a fellow doctor living in Ireland, who spoke to him in July.
Dr. Selik took up at the city’s last functioning hospital, which had been bombed 30 times, where he quickly retrained as a combat medic. “Head trauma, chest trauma, punctured abdomens,” he told me, rattling off a list of typical injuries he treated. “Anything caused by a bullet or a bomb.”
This summer, the crisis intensified after R.S.F. fighters built a high earthen wall around El Fasher that is now 42 miles long. Fighters shot dead anyone who tried to cross it at night.
At the hospital, supplies of food and medicine ran out. Surgeons used mosquito nets as medical gauze to carry out operations. Cholera and malaria swept through wards.
One day, at a small clinic he ran in the north of the city, Dr. Selik encountered a group of Colombian mercenaries fighting alongside the R.S.F. “They were speaking Spanish,” he said. Later, the bodies of Colombians killed in battle were brought to the hospital, he said.
Dr. Selik sent his wife and children to Khartoum, for their safety. But his sister stayed behind, only to be killed with her three children in August, when a shell crashed into their home. “That’s just one story,” he told me. “In this city, there are so many like it.”
A Starlink terminal, provided by a relative, offered a lifeline to the outside world. Yet even there, the conflict found him. On WhatsApp groups of Sudanese medics, Dr. Selik was dismayed by bitter disputes that erupted along political or ethnic lines, Dr. Eltahir said.
“People were calling each other pigs,” he said. “Omar asked them to stop.”
But the Starlink terminal also provided him a means of calling for help. What worried him most, Dr. Selik told me, was what would happen if the R.S.F. completely overran the city. “They will kill everyone,” he said.
Aid workers and American officials have similar concerns. The city could fall to the R.S.F. within weeks or even sooner, the U.S. official said. Many worry about a repeat of the massacre in El Geneina, in western Darfur, in late 2023, where R.S.F. fighters killed as many as 15,000 people, according to the United Nations.
“We fear that as the battle for the city intensifies, the worst is yet to come,” Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said at the United Nations in New York last week. “We should not allow this to happen.”
Abdalrahman Altayeb contributed reporting from Khartoum, Sudan.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
10) Mourn, or Else
By Tressie McMillan Cottom, Opinion Columnist, Oct. 1, 2025
Jamie Lee Taete
I learned that Charlie Kirk was dead by seeing a video of his assassination on social media. It is an unfortunate sign of our times, when “If it bleeds it leads” has been replaced with “Monetize misery.” I hate it. I also hated the feelings of the next few days, of watching so many professional thinkers, writers and public figures serve, whether intentionally or unwittingly, the president’s agenda.
A text from a smart, well-informed friend snapped me out of my emotional paralysis. “Who,” she asked incredulously, “was this guy?” She had never heard of Kirk, his organization or the political infrastructure that had produced him, but his grand public funeral rites and the lionization that accompanied them were inescapable. With few exceptions, people looking for an answer to that question found that broadcast, legacy, print, digital, cable, streaming and independent outlets were speaking with a remarkably singular voice.
Her confusion was also a sign of the times. Whether you want to call it authoritarianism or not, the president is criminalizing dissent, from regular people and comedians to political rivals. The culture of retribution breeds a natural but regrettable human impulse to self-censor in our public squares. Some of us fight that impulse by anxiously learning vocabularies to track Trump 2.0’s destruction — tariffs, shadow dockets, self-deportation, unitary executive theory. But we must acknowledge that it is becoming harder to be informed, and that is by design.
For years, I’ve taught students how to vet the quality of information, how to check sources against their biases and how to triangulate competing facts. It is part of being a responsible citizen, I tell them. If you want to consume a balanced media diet, you might read international news through your local library’s online platform. Or you might tune into public radio or television. Maybe you would contextualize today’s news with the long perspective at a museum, a university lecture or a deeply researched book.
Reading and research aren’t yet illegal or impossible. But they are in danger of becoming so. President Trump has defunded museums, libraries and public media. He has directed public parks, memorials and cultural institutions to remove historical references to slavery, Indigenous people, women, trans and queer people and anything else that he doesn’t like. Conservative activists have criminalized reading lists in schools, backed conservative centers on university campuses to sanitize critical thinking and funded social media influencers to promote right-wing talking points.
Intellectuals once mocked the campy partisanship of Fox News, but the joke’s on us. Corporate consolidation and deep-pocketed tech executives are making it so we’re all living in the information world that Fox News built.
Of the 19 centibillionaires on Forbes’s wealth tracker, at least six have significant control of American media. Some of them want more. One of them is Larry Ellison, the second-richest man in the world and a certified friend of Trump. The Ellison family is poised to make a series of deals that would make it one of the most powerful dynasties in the history of corporate media. The question of who will own TikTok — a platform that has more than 170 million users in the United States — looks as though it’s finally going to be resolved, after Trump signed an executive order that will hand control over to a coterie of his admirers that will probably include Ellison.
Ellison’s son, David, took control of Paramount this summer in a deal that reportedly came with political concessions. The Paramount portfolio includes CBS, among other media brands. Credible reporting says another merger is on the horizon, between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns — among many things — CNN. If this merger goes through (and industry watchers expect it will face little opposition), CNN, CBS News and a host of lifestyle stations will all be under Ellison family leadership. They aren’t pitching this deal as the MAGA Media Empire industry analysts see it as, but the Ellison family also hasn’t signaled a commitment to remain nonpartisan or independent.
Major media changes usually sound like just inside baseball. But the consolidation happening now — which used to be anathema to antitrust regulation — is bigger than simply industry gossip. It is part of a larger trend of monopolistic control that weakens our civic health. It is also a sign of this administration’s direct influence over the press, of citizens’ First Amendment rights and our very sense of reality. This consolidation wave isn’t only about amassing wealth; it is also part of a political project to make all information partisan.
The past two weeks showed us what that future looks like. The administration and its deep-pocketed allies sent up a trial balloon: Mourn, or else.
Trump is known for saying a lot of things that he can’t or won’t back up. This time, the threats are real.
The president of the United States said that he believes critical stories about him are “illegal.” (They are not.) The State Department gave that message teeth, with its leaders saying the United States would penalize visa seekers and holders who celebrated or rationalized Kirk’s killing. Attorney General Pam Bondi promised to target protesters for speech acts she considered hate speech, before walking that back a few steps. Universities fired professors. School districts fired teachers. MSNBC fired an analyst. JD Vance condemned so-called leftist celebrators for dividing a nation. A now defunct website appeared with the name Exposing Charlie’s Murderers, marking for harassment or doxxing ordinary people who did not, in someone’s opinion, appropriately grieve. And we can be almost certain that an army of accounts — some controlled, presumably, by China, Russia and other countries — sprang into action to stoke our national division.
What we have seen in the wake of Kirk’s assassination is an old Red Scare playbook, when corporate antagonism to New Deal reforms dovetailed with political witch hunts. Once again, state forces are colluding with corporations to erase ideas they do not like by harassing people who represent ideas that they don’t want to exist. This time, the witch hunt for bad people with bad ideas is guided by an unhinged theory of unitary executive power, a rapaciously illegitimate Supreme Court and corporate interests that control both the medium and the message. If you have not experienced the kind of supercharged harassment this environment breeds, count yourself lucky. But don’t count yourself safe. Academics, professors, teachers, librarians and other civil servants have been living under the censorious threat of defamation, stalking and politically motivated violence since Red Scare techniques went digital. Trump is promising to do the same to anyone else he considers an enemy.
For at least the past 15 years, my colleagues in academia have grappled with angry letters to university officials for doing their jobs. They have weathered campaigns for their firing. They have contended with an internet army obsessed with doxxing them, their parents, their kids. I’ve been contacted by the F.B.I. more than once in my career. Not because I hold any important state secrets or know a biker gang but because one of my colleagues has lived with so much sustained harassment from right-wing “activists” that it has become a matter of federal concern. Watch lists (one of which was constructed by Kirk’s organization) do not distinguish between public intellectuals at wealthy enclaves and hoi polloi who teach popular classes at cash-strapped schools. In either case, an army of trained provocateurs stands ready to destroy their lives to prove their bona fides as conservative activists. That threat has been chilling speech on campuses for years. Now it’s coming for all of you.
That anyone with a rudimentary understanding of history, politics, economics or even pragmatic common sense would call the way these provocateurs operate civil debate says just how poorly prepared any of us are for what lies in front of us.
Debate is a luxury of norms and institutional safety, two things that Trump’s second administration has systematically destroyed. So many Americans love the idea that debate solves tough political problems because we love the idea of American exceptionalism. Forget the bloody wars of independence, secession and expansion and remember the epistolaries. We flatter ourselves. There was never a time when rank-and-file Americans perfected the ideas of the Republic without violence or oppression. Debates among founding fathers were games among similarly classed white male property owners. Women, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, disabled people, poor people, some immigrants — they were all excluded from the civic sphere we valorize now as the height of American civility.
If our obsession with debate was merely a romantic delusion, it would be one thing to misapply it to our current political reality. But it is worse than that. An obscene amount of money has turned debate into a weapon, deliberately honed to punish good-faith participation by making us feel like fools for assuming the best of an ideological opponent who only wants to win. Since the days when the conservative scion William F. Buckley Jr. started planning for a conservative resurgence, activist organizations have spent millions of dollars to teach conservative foot soldiers the art of coercive “debate.” Over decades, the right has methodically built institutional safe spaces for conservative thought, poured millions into training young conservatives, legitimized first talk radio and then conservative TV news and then the alt-right blogosphere. This machine built, in some respects, Charlie Kirk, and then he built others like him.
The weaponization of debate is so well known that it is a meme: a guy with a table and a sign that says “Change my mind.” On the day he was killed, Kirk was sitting in a tent with a similar label, “Prove me wrong.” Sounds harmless enough in theory, but performative debate metastasizes. Whether in the form of abortion opponents who show up to “debate” women about why bodily autonomy is a sin or scientific racists who show up to “debate” Black and Indigenous thinkers about the rational arguments of their human depravity, the aim isn’t debate but debasement.
You can be forgiven for not knowing this. Professional intellectuals and political observers cannot be forgiven for pretending not to know this. It is not hidden history.
The conservative apparatus that went on to write the authoritative Project 2025 weaponized “debate” to hijack institutions. Its strategy holds centrist liberals to their romantic notion of themselves as rational (and, yes, their hubris about their superiority) while it is committed only to sowing chaos. Steve Bannon, the alt-right’s major-domo, once called this “muzzle velocity.” Create chaos at all costs. Confuse people as to the difference between ethical objections and legal claims. Confuse them about the bounds of womanhood so as to capture their angst about changing expectations of manhood. Confuse people about whether the sky is blue or the grass is green while you shape their fear into rage and then commodify their rage into profit.
If you were someone who had long lived with the consequences of this kind of debate, then you recognized it for what it is: its own kind of political violence.
But if you were someone who was just trying to understand what some people thought was so bad about Kirk, you were largely out of luck. The best evidence of what Kirk wanted to talk about were his own words, conspicuously absent from so many of the hagiographies that followed his killing. Instead, you almost certainly would have heard the loudest claim: that the left and the Democrats and the professors and the universities are violent, irrational anti-Americans mocking the death of a good old boy who just wanted to talk.
If you are more sophisticated than the average media consumer, you probably turned to social media. Your internet feeds are probably curated, even vetted for legitimate news sources. But that vetting is also wholly ineffectual in a world where algorithms have their thumb on the scale of media dissemination. And when those algorithms are controlled — or are poised to be controlled — by deeply conservative social media conglomerates, what could once have been a digital public square becomes a battleground for ideological intimidation. Every good-faith questioner is now a dissenter. You either open yourself up to harassment or, like most people, you choose silence. And if silence is the only logical choice, then authoritarianism has arrived.
I’ve not wanted to say this next bit. It should be someone else’s job. Someone who has not been living for the better part of 15 years with the violence of a well-trained, deeply financed army of gotcha ideologues who hijack classrooms, comment sections, corporate-controlled social media and now many of the biggest and most powerful media and political institutions in the world. Frankly, I feel I have written enough about the way culture shapes political power, why the internet is not a twee political concern and how much violence is trucked into the discourse by ironic humor.
But I feel compelled to tell you that if the past two weeks have unsettled you, there is a very good reason.
The president of the United States has both direct coercive power of the state and, by and large, indirect power over communication institutions. He has shown how he will use that power. He will punish enemies, yes. And if you agree that teachers, librarians, professors, left-leaning journalists and anyone who isn’t white, conservative and Christian are enemies, you may enjoy this comeuppance. But he has also shown that he will punish people who agree with him — but not enough or not in the right way or just because it is a Tuesday.
The merging of state power and economic power around one man who accepts that power as his due would not be possible without the algorithmic grift that has so all-consumingly captured our attention. The internet and the people who, for all intents and purposes, now own it have excelled at making Trump good at authoritarianism. They commodified information. They quelled regulation. They escaped blame for degrading collective action while raking in profits for spectacles of violence that degradation predictably produces. Now, via their president, they are using it to crush the First Amendment, to supercharge the Second Amendment, to stand up bot armies and real armed militias to defend their ownership of your civil liberties.
They turned that power against the late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. Many of you will have taken heart in the fact that Disney’s suspension of him shocked the public’s sensibilities enough that users could change his fate. After he was yanked off the air, a consumer boycott of Disney+ and Hulu followed, as people canceled services en masse. Reporting by Marisa Kabas suggests that Disney reinstated Kimmel because the company was poised to raise subscription prices for those streaming services; a consumer boycott would have impeded those plans.
But at the risk of harshing our high, even with Kimmel back on the air, we should still contend with how the right used media’s many affordances — the algorithms, the manufacturing of consent, the suppression of dissent — to carry out a presidential grudge.
A rage farmer who monitors late-night shows for supposed liberal bias harvested one of Kimmel’s milquetoast comedy bits and posted it on X, where it was amplified by a network of conservative influencers and radio and television hosts until the administration had an opportunity to silence its enemies. The message, delivered by an F.C.C. chairman and overreaching broadcasters, was simple: Shut Kimmel up, or we will shut you up. Disney made the cool, calm, rational decision to violate this country’s most deeply held beliefs in First Amendment speech because the company read the room. Trump is the state, and the internet is the market that gives Trump his power to rule it. To rule all of us.
Now imagine that power being wielded by a family — certified friends of Trump — that owns the news you consume, the entertainment you watch and the social media platform half of Americans use, which a substantial portion of them use as their primary source of information. That threat is still looming.
So by all means, celebrate a burst of collective action that reinstated a TV show host and vote the bums out if you get the chance. But voting won’t be enough, just as canceling the Disney app won’t be enough. When I look at the consumer response to Disney censoring Kimmel, I don’t see an allegory for America’s salvation. I see a threat — that we will see ourselves as the authoritarians see us, users whose only power is in our pocketbook.
We can’t just reject the threat. We have to reject the idea that our only, best power is our pocketbooks. That’s a desecration of civics, as corrosive as the idea that debate is the pinnacle of civil discourse. It cheapens our actions by degrading what we believe is possible. Our power isn’t in making one of the choices that are presented to us. Our power is in shaping the choices available to us.
The fusion of corporate control and government power that empowered this administration will need to be unmade. Courts will need to be reconfigured. Market power will need to be subsumed to electoral power. Bureaucratic legitimacy will need to be restored. Information will need to be competitive and available.
To achieve any of those goals, we will have to become far less complacent and far less scared. We also will have to organize. Because no citizen who simply settles for being a consumer of democracy should expect to have a real democracy ever again.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
11) What Happened to Human Rights for Palestinians?
By Agnès Callamard and Federico Borello, Oct. 1, 2025
Ms. Callamard is the secretary general of Amnesty International. Mr. Borello is the acting executive director of Human Rights Watch.
Ben Hickey
When the world emerged from the horrors of World War II and vowed “never again,” nations laid the foundation for the system of international justice that now exists to address the planet’s worst crimes. Today, the United States is actively trying to dismantle it.
The Trump administration on Sept. 4 imposed sanctions on three leading Palestinian human rights organizations: Al Haq, founded in 1979 and a pioneer in documenting violations in occupied Gaza and the West Bank; Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, which for more than two decades has meticulously chronicled laws of war violations in Gaza; and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which has long provided legal aid to victims, particularly from Gaza.
In June, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on another leading Palestinian rights group, Addameer, under a different set of measures.
This is part of a broader Trump administration effort aimed at those who support justice for Palestinians. The stated reason for the September sanctions was that the three groups had helped the International Criminal Court in its investigation of Israel “without Israel’s consent.” But the U.S. government has also gone after officials of the court, which has taken on an investigation that covers allegations of grave crimes by Israeli forces in Gaza; it has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The administration has placed sanctions on the I.C.C. prosecutor, deputy prosecutors and six of the court’s judges, as well as Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Gaza and the West Bank.
Beyond what has been done to the Palestinians, the Trump administration has undermined the rule of law, protection of human rights and international justice, which all lie at the heart of a rules-based global order. The administration has slashed funding to the United Nations and threatened more cuts while disengaging from the U.N. Human Rights Council. It abruptly terminated nearly all U.S. foreign aid, which had supported human rights defenders and provided lifesaving humanitarian assistance around the world. Cuts to grants by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and offices on refugees, women and global justice further downgraded America’s commitment to human rights.
Al Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Center are award-winning organizations that in extraordinarily difficult circumstances have exposed violations of human rights and environmental law by Israeli and Palestinian authorities, armed groups and businesses. They are the voice of Palestinian victims, amplifying stories of injustice that would otherwise remain unheard.
The groups have continued their courageous work in Gaza over nearly two years. Al Mezan and the Palestinian Center are based in Gaza, and Al Haq, based in Ramallah in the West Bank, has staff there as well. They have faced bombardment that has resulted in the killings or wounding of staff members and hundreds of their relatives as well as starvation and forced displacement. On Sept. 7, Israeli bombings flattened the high-rise building that housed the Palestinian Center’s headquarters. The offices of Al Mezan across Gaza were damaged and destroyed in 2024.
The U.S. sanctions will not only disrupt the critical work that they are still able to do but also send a chilling signal to human rights defenders whose work implicates powerful actors or their allies. The Palestinian groups have been vocal in their support of the I.C.C.’s investigation into Israeli conduct and have made submissions to the court’s prosecutor.
Our organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have worked closely with these groups for decades and, consistent with our longstanding and independent mandates to speak out in protecting human rights, we can attest that their work is indispensable to the human rights community not only in the region but internationally.
This work is part of a broad global movement advancing justice for victims and survivors of the human rights abuses. A credible system of international justice that addresses genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity is an essential element of building respect for human rights.
The International Criminal Court is a central pillar of this system. Created through a treaty in 1998, the court is a forum of last resort. Governments intended to deliver on the post-World War II promise of “never again” by establishing such a permanent institution. The system is not perfect, but its capacity to seek to hold accountable even those in the highest positions of power can help end cycles of abuses. This power of the law is now at risk.
Further sanctions or other actions by the United States, including extending sanctions to the court as a whole, would jeopardize the rights of victims across the globe. Governments should rise to the occasion to protect the system they created.
When Israel designated leading Palestinian human rights groups including Addameer and Al Haq as “terrorist organizations” in 2021, nine European Union member states rejected the allegations as unsubstantiated. That pushback was likely a major reason Israel did not go further.
So far, other governments have carefully balanced their reactions to the U.S. sanctions for fear of provoking the Trump administration. This is a flawed strategy and out of step with the urgency the situation demands.
Governments need to condemn efforts to undermine the I.C.C.’s independence and to silence those who are documenting abuses. They should use regional and national laws, like the European Union Blocking Statute, which can be employed to nullify external laws in the union, to mitigate the impact of U.S. sanctions on those working with the court. Those who helped establish the international court and claim to uphold the values underpinning it must step up to defend them.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
