Daily Archives: 18 July 2024

Israel using water as weapon of war as Gaza supply plummets by 94%, creating deadly health catastrophe: Oxfam 

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Israel damaged or destroyed five water and sanitation sites every three days since the start of this war

A new Oxfam report reveals how Israel has been systematically weaponizing water against Palestinians in Gaza, showing disregard for human life and international law.  

The report, Water War Crimes, finds that Israel’s cutting of external water supply, systematic destruction of water facilities and deliberate aid obstruction have reduced the amount of water available in Gaza by 94% to 4.74 litres a day per person – just under a third of the recommended minimum in emergencies and less than a single toilet flush.   

 Oxfam analysis also found:  

  • Israeli military attacks have damaged or destroyed five water and sanitation infrastructure sites every three days since the start of the war.  
  • The destruction of water and electricity infrastructure and restrictions on entry of spare parts and fuel (on average a fifth of the required amount is allowed in) saw water production drop by 84% in Gaza. External supply from Israel’s national water company Mekorot fell by 78%.  
  • Israel has destroyed 70% of all sewage pumps and 100% of all wastewater treatment plants, as well as the main water quality testing laboratories in Gaza, and restricted the entry of Oxfam water testing equipment.  
  • Gaza City has lost nearly all its water production capacity, with 88% of its water wells and 100% of its desalination plants damaged or destroyed.  

The report also highlighted the dire impact of this extreme lack of clean water and sanitation on Palestinians’ health, with more than a quarter (26%) of Gaza’s population falling severely ill from easily preventable diseases.  

In January, the International Court of Justice demanded that Israel immediately improve humanitarian access in light of a plausible genocide in Gaza. Since then, Oxfam has witnessed firsthand Israel’s obstruction of a meaningful humanitarian response, which is killing Palestinian civilians.  

“We’ve already seen Israel’s use of collective punishment and its use of starvation as a weapon of war. Now we are witnessing its weaponizing of water, which is already having deadly consequences.”  

Oxfam Water and Sanitation Specialist Lama Abdul Samad said it was clear that Israel had created a devastating humanitarian emergency resulting in Palestinian civilian deaths.  

“We’ve already seen Israel’s use of collective punishment and its use of starvation as a weapon of war. Now we are witnessing its weaponizing of water, which is already having deadly consequences.  

“But the deliberate restriction of access to water is not a new tactic. The Israeli Government has been depriving Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza of safe and sufficient water for many years,” she said.   

“The widespread destruction and significant restrictions on aid delivery in Gaza impacting access to water and other essentials for survival, underscores the urgent need for the international community to take decisive action to prevent further suffering by upholding justice and human rights, including those enshrined in the Geneva and Genocide Conventions.”  

 Monther Shoblak, General Manager of the Gaza Strip’s water utility CMWU, said:   

“My colleagues and I have been living through a nightmare these past nine months, but we still feel it’s our responsibility and duty to ensure everybody in Gaza is getting their minimum right of clean drinking water. It’s been very difficult, but we are determined to keep trying – even when we witness our colleagues being targeted and killed by Israel while undertaking their work.”   

Oxfam is calling for urgent action including an immediate and permanent ceasefire; for Israel to allow a full and unfettered humanitarian response; and for Israel to foot the reconstruction bill for water and sanitation infrastructure.  

Read Oxfam’s “Water War Crimes” full report.

Continue ReadingIsrael using water as weapon of war as Gaza supply plummets by 94%, creating deadly health catastrophe: Oxfam 

Just Stop Oil supporters receive huge sentences for participating in a Zoom call

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UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention Michel Forst attended the trial of five Just Stop Oil supporters at Southwark Crown Court. He attended as an observer because of his serious concerns.

Five Just Stop Oil supporters were handed multi-year prison sentences today for nothing more than participating in a Zoom call. Many UK news reports are claiming that they were jailed for blocking the M25 which is untrue. They were jailed for conspiring to block the M25 by participating in a Zoom meeting.

At Southwark Crown Court, Judge Christopher Hehir jailed Roger Hallam (57, from Wales) for five years, whilst Daniel Shaw (38, from Northampton), Lucia Whittaker De Abreu (34, from Derby), Louise Lancaster (58, from Cambridge) and Cressida Gethin (22, from Hereford) were each sentenced to four years.

They were convicted last week of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance in relation to the M25 motorway disruption in November 2022.

At last week’s trial, Judge Hehir ruled that climate issues were ‘irrelevant and inadmissible’, dismissing them as mere ‘political opinion and belief’. Although the legislation includes a defence of ‘reasonable excuse’ and despite the prosecution acknowledging the imminent catastrophic and irreversible harm from burning fossil fuels, the judge prevented the jury from considering whether the defendants had a reasonable excuse and directed them to ignore any evidence about the climate crisis. 

When the defendants insisted on honouring their oaths to tell the jury the whole truth about their actions and refused to leave the witness box until they had done so, the judge repeatedly had them arrested and jailed throughout the trial.

The judge also refused the defence request to call Professor Bill McGuire as a witness, one of the world’s leading experts on climate impacts.

Today Professor McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, said:

“The trial and verdict were a farce. They mark a low point in British justice and they were an assault on free speech. The judge’s characterisation of climate breakdown as a matter of opinion and belief is completely nonsensical and demonstrates extraordinary ignorance. Similarly to suggest that the climate emergency is irrelevant in relation to whether the defendants had a reasonable case for action is crass stupidity.” 

Continue ReadingJust Stop Oil supporters receive huge sentences for participating in a Zoom call

Zarah Sultana: I call on Keir Starmer to suspend arms sales to Israel and end Britain’s complicity in the killing

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/17/keir-starmer-suspend-arms-sales-israel-kings-speech-amendment

Destruction caused by an Israeli airstrike in Al-Maghazi refugee camp, central Gaza Strip, 15 July 2024. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

International law is clear: we have an obligation to prevent genocide. That is why I have tabled an amendment to the king’s speech

Whenever I see the heart-wrenching aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza – a Palestinian mother cradling the lifeless body of her child; a refugee camp engulfed by fire – I ask myself the same question. Were British-made weapons used to inflict this horror?

Almost certainly, the answer at times is “yes”. Raining down hell on Gaza is Israel’s fleet of F-35 fighter jets, described by their manufacturer as the “most lethal fighter jet in the world”. Each jet is made, in part, in Britain, in a deal the Campaign Against the Arms Trade estimates to be worth £368m.

This is just one example of Israel’s use of British-made arms in its assault on Gaza. But after almost 10 months and 38,000 Palestinians killed, to their eternal shame the Conservatives left office refusing to suspend arms sales. This responsibility now falls to Labour.

Our new government must do the right thing and stop enabling Israeli war crimes. That is why today, as a backbench Labour MP, I am tabling an amendment to the king’s speech calling on colleagues to uphold international law and suspend arms sales to Israel.

There is no time to waste. This past week has been “one of the deadliest” since Israel’s assault began, according to Unrwa, the UN aid agency for Palestinians. We must urgently pull every lever and strain every sinew to pressure the Israeli government to abide by international law and end this assault. This is not simply a moral duty, but a legal one too.

Consider again the F-35. The Israeli military has armed these jets with 2,000lb bombs, explosives with a lethal radius up to 365m – an area the equivalent of 58 football pitches. A recent UN report identified these bombs as having been used in “emblematic” cases of indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on Gaza that “led to high numbers of civilian fatalities and widespread destruction of civilian objects”. In lawyerly understatement, the UN said this raises “serious concerns under the laws of war”.

And this is where our arms export laws come in. As our new foreign secretary, David Lammy, himself said a few months ago: “The law is clear. British arms licences cannot be granted if there is a clear risk that the items might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.” Without doubt this threshold has been met, hence why UN experts have called for arms exports to Israel to immediately stop.

…

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/17/keir-starmer-suspend-arms-sales-israel-kings-speech-amendment

Continue ReadingZarah Sultana: I call on Keir Starmer to suspend arms sales to Israel and end Britain’s complicity in the killing

Trump’s Shooting Should Not Silence Warnings About His Threat to Democracy

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Original article by JULIE HOLLAR republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Immediately after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, when little was known about the white male shooter (except that he was a registered Republican), right-wing politicians directly blamed Democratic rhetoric for the shooting.

“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Sen. J.D. Vance wrote on X (7/13/24), just days before Trump named him as his running mate:

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.

(That Trump might be considered a fascist did not always seem so far-fetched to Vance; in 2016, he privately worried that Trump might become “America’s Hitler”—Reuters, 7/15/24.)

“For years, Democrats and their allies in the media have recklessly stoked fears, calling President Trump and other conservatives threats to democracy,” Sen. Tim Scott posted on X (7/13/24). “Their inflammatory rhetoric puts lives at risk.”

Rather than denounce both the assassination attempt and these hypocritical and opportunistic attacks on critical speech, the country’s top editorial boards cravenly bothsidesed their condemnations of “political violence.”

‘Unthinkably uncivil’

The Washington Post (7/14/24) described Trump’s exhortation to “remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness” as a call for “national unity.”

In an editorial headlined, “Turn Down the Heat, Let in the Light,” the Washington Post (7/14/24) praised Donald Trump for appearing to call for national unity. The Post wrote that the assassination attempt offered Trump the chance to “cool the nation’s political fevers and set a new direction.”

The editorial board quickly admonished both sides equally for “unthinkably uncivil” actions and “physical violence.” They pointed to protesters who “harass lawmakers, justices, journalists and business leaders with bullhorns at their homes,” universities that have “become battlegrounds,” and the “bipartisan hazard” of political violence, citing Nancy Pelosi’s husband and GOP Rep. Steve Scalise.

(The link the Post inserted leads to an earlier editorial in which they condemned peaceful protests outside Supreme Court justices’ houses as “totalitarian,” and recommended that the protesters be imprisoned—FAIR.org, 5/17/22).

New York Times editors, meanwhile, called the shooting “Antithetical to America” (7/13/24), a formulation clearly more aspirational than actual. “Violence is antithetical to democracy,” the editorial board wrote, acknowledging moments later that “violence is infecting and inflecting American political life.” They explained:

Acts of violence have long shadowed American democracy, but they have loomed larger and darker of late. Cultural and political polarization, the ubiquity of guns and the radicalizing power of the internet have all been contributing factors, as this board laid out in its editorial series “The Danger Within” in 2022. This high-stakes presidential election is further straining the nation’s commitment to the peaceful resolution of political differences.

It’s a remarkable obfuscation, in which responsibility is ascribed to no one and—as at the Post—everyone.

‘Leaders of both parties’

Is the shooting of a political candidate really “antithetical” (New York Times, 7/13/24) to a country with more guns than people, and 50,000+ gun deaths every year?

Curiously, the 2022 editorial series the Times cites (11/3–12/24/22) did make clear where most of the responsibility lay, explaining that “the threat to the current order comes disproportionately from the right.” It pointed out that of the hundreds of extremism-related murders of the past decade, more than three-quarters were committed by “right-wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-government extremists.” While there have been occasional attacks on conservatives (like the attack on a congressional baseball game that wounded Scalise), the Times noted,

the number and nature of the episodes aren’t comparable, and no leading figures in the Democratic Party condone, mock or encourage their supporters to violence in ways that are common from politicians on the right and their supporters in the conservative media.

But two years later, the Times, like the Post, carefully avoids bringing that much-needed clarity to the current situation and apportions responsibility for avoiding political violence equally to both sides:

It is now incumbent on political leaders of both parties, and on Americans individually and collectively, to resist a slide into further violence and the type of extremist language that fuels it. Saturday’s attack should not be taken as a provocation or a justification.

Of course, there’s a crucial difference between criticizing Trump and his allies for their anti-democratic positions and actions—which is what the Democrats and the left have done—and actually threatening and calling for violence, as the right has been doing.

The list of examples is nearly endless, but would prominently include Trump’s incitement of violence at the Capitol on January 6; his personal attacks on prosecutors, judges and politicians who have subsequently required increased security protections; and his refusal to rule out violence if he loses the 2024 election: “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.” His supporters have repeatedly called for armed uprisings after perceived attacks on Trump, including immediately after the assassination attempt.

That’s why it’s critical that leading newspapers push back against right-wing attempts to equate criticisms of Trump with calls for violence.

‘Grossly irresponsible talk’

The Wall Street Journal (7/14/24), unsurprisingly, took this bothsidesism the farthest.

Leaders on both sides need to stop describing the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms. Democracy won’t end if one or the other candidate is elected. Fascism is not aborning if Mr. Trump wins, unless you have little faith in American institutions.

We agree with former Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement Saturday night: “The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy—he is not.”

Readers of those top US papers would have to look across the pond to the British Guardian (7/14/24) for the kind of clear-eyed take newspaper editors with concern for democracy ought to have: “There must also be care that extreme acts by a minority are not used to silence legitimate criticism.”

Research Assistance: Alefiya Presswala

Original article by JULIE HOLLAR republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Continue ReadingTrump’s Shooting Should Not Silence Warnings About His Threat to Democracy

US Republican Party puts full backing behind ultra-conservative program at National Convention

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Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

J.D. Vance was chosen as Trump’s Vice President, one of the most right-wing options for the ticket (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

At its National Convention, the leading conservative party in the US promotes its presidential ticket and ultra-conservative platform

The Republican National Convention, started on July 15, will continue until July 18 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The RNC officially confirmed former President Donald Trump as their nominee for the 2024 presidential elections, to take place in November.

Many in the US, of all political tendencies, were increasingly giving up on the prospect of a second Biden presidency even before Trump’s attempted assassination largely due to Biden’s disastrous debate performance and several political gaffes surrounding the NATO Summit. The Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago from August 19 to 22, where the Democrats will officially select their nominee for the presidency. Until the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, Biden’s incumbent status and victory in the primary elections made him essentially a shoe-in for the nomination. Since then, Biden’s nomination has been widely called into question.

Trump’s second presidency seems increasingly inevitable, with polls from recent days predicting a clear Trump victory. Much of the RNC has been dedicated to deifying Trump, who was notably ridiculed by the Republican Party establishment when he first ran for president in 2016. Trump’s own pick of Vice President, Ohio Senator and bestselling author J.D. Vance, once lamented privately to a friend that he was not sure if Trump was simply a “cynical asshole” or “America’s Hitler.” 

Vance and the “America First” comeback

Vance refused to vote for Trump in 2016. But like most of the Republican Party, even the most established and powerful figures within the party have fallen in line behind Trump. Even Marco Rubio, who ran a vicious primary campaign against Trump in 2016, hoped, in vain, to become Trump’s VP. 

However, Vance has since become one of the most conservative politicians in Congress, fully embracing what has become known as the “America First” political ideology. This conservative tendency is a break from the “neo-conservative” ideology that brought some of the most brutal foreign interventions in US history, such as the invasion of Iraq. In contrast, “America First” is characterized by isolationism, including a fierce opposition towards military aid to Ukraine. However, while “America First” politicians reference policies that could ostensibly benefit workers, such as lowering inflation and cutting on foreign military aid, these politicians have no issue promoting New Cold War policies against China, or chipping away at the little social spending that exists in the US.

“Our God still delivers, and he still sets free. Because the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but the American lion got back up on his feet,” said Senator Tim Scott, also a former Trump VP hopeful, on the first day of the convention, referring to the assassination attempt against the former president.

With its total capitulation to the ideology of Trump’s campaign and his base, the Republican Party seems to be attempting to mask a widely unpopular policy platform behind a pro-worker facade.

Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien addressed the convention on Monday, becoming the first Teamsters leader to speak at the Republican National Convention. O’Brien did not outright endorse him, and has reportedly also asked to speak at the DNC. According to a Teamsters spokesperson, the DNC has yet to accept that request.

The Republican Party is notoriously hostile to organized labor, responsible for some of the harshest anti-union legislation in the world, leaving workers in conservative states uniquely susceptible to exploitation. Workers in so-called “right to work” states, where unions are prohibited from ensuring every worker who enjoys union benefits pay union dues, weaken the power of trade unions in those states. Republican-controlled states often have less regulations on corporate greed across the board, with some of the lowest minimum wages in the country. 

RNC platform proudly embraces xenophobia and militarism

Despite the RNC’s appeals to workers, the RNC is promoting one of the most politically backwards platforms as it puts its full support behind some of the most ultra-conservative politicians in the country. The Republicans put their attack on migrants front and center in their policy platform, pledging to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” as well as completing Trump’s border wall (which Biden continued to build). 

Indeed, the platform, while emphasizing isolationism, also does not shy away from furthering US militarism. “Keeping the American People safe requires a strong America. The Biden administration’s weak Foreign Policy has made us less safe and a laughingstock all over the World,” the platform states. “The Republican Plan is to return Peace through Strength, rebuilding our Military and Alliances, countering China, defeating terrorism, building an Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield, promoting American Values, securing our Homeland and Borders, and reviving our Defense Industrial Base.”

Vance’s selection as VP, as one of the most conservative options that Trump could have possibly gone with, also signals the further entrenchment of the Republican Party with its ultra right-wing. “Vance’s nomination to be Trump’s running mate signals that the Republicans are doubling down on their false appeal as fighters for working people. In reality Vance is a Silicon Valley capitalist committed to militarism and boosting the profits of big business. His appointment, rather than a figure who would be considered more moderate like Doug Burgum, suggests that hardline repressive policies like a mass deportation campaign are likely under a potential second Trump administration,” Walter Smolarek, editor of Liberation News, told Peoples Dispatch. “Vance is also an anti-China fanatic, and would likely push for more and more escalation in the new Cold War.”

The 2024 US Presidential elections are now set to be a battle between the ultra-right represented by Trump, and the right-wing of the Democratic Party represented by Joe Biden. To find a true alternative to the right, people in the US may have to look outside of the two major parties.


Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingUS Republican Party puts full backing behind ultra-conservative program at National Convention