Greenpeace USA Welcomes Aviram Azari Sentencing, Calls for Investigation into Who Hired Him
WASHINGTON – In response to the sentencing of Aviram Azari, Ebony Twilley Martin, Greenpeace USA Executive Director, said: “We are pleased to see federal prosecutors taking legal action against those who use underhanded tactics like hacking to target public interest advocates. Our justice system is increasingly being used to hold fossil fuel companies and their backers accountable–including lawsuits brought by the states of California and Massachusetts against oil companies, including ExxonMobil, for deceptive and misleading practices.”
“That said, justice will not be completely served in this case until those who hired Azari are exposed and held to account. Whoever that is though, they ultimately failed. They failed to stop elected leaders across the country from pursuing some level of accountability for actions that – over time – amount to one of the greatest corporate crimes against humanity ever committed.”
“Overwhelmingly, the American people want climate action, and Big Oil will use every tool in their toolbox to stop it. Cyber attacks like this are one of the many tactics designed to silence and oppose climate activists. They have serious impacts on people’s lives–and thus their ability to do the important work of protecting our planet. But we aren’t backing down – in our work, our pursuit of justice. The stakes are too high.”
Greenpeace International Executive Director Mads Christensen said:
“Today’s sentencing of a hacker-for-hire, who facilitated an international spear-phishing campaign, serves as a stark warning to those who seek to intimidate and silence climate activists. But this case will not be closed until those who hired the hacker are held accountable.
“Greenpeace International is shocked to learn from the Government’s sentencing memorandum that ExxonMobil cited media articles based on hacked and stolen information in filings it made in US courts, while litigating against investigations into the company’s early knowledge and potential misrepresentation of climate risks. This revelation won’t stop the mounting global efforts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their role in contributing to deadly and devastating climate impacts. From the Philippines to the Netherlands, courageous communities impacted by the climate crisis are seeking justice to protect their human rights from being harmed by oil, gas, and coal companies, and they are winning.”
Related: Hacker-for-Hire Who Targeted Climate Activists: ‘You Don’t Know Everything’ Yet
Emissions of Richest 1% Will Cause 1.3 Million Heat Deaths: Oxfam
Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“The super-rich are plundering and polluting the planet to the point of destruction and it is those who can least afford it who are paying the highest price.”
The richest 1% of the global population produced 16% of the world’s carbon dioxide in 2019, generating as much planet-warming pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity, according to a report released Monday by Oxfam International.
Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99% describes the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency and runaway inequality as “twin crises” that are leaving those least responsible for planetary breakdown to bear the worst consequences, from catastrophic extreme weather to food and water shortages.
“If no action is taken, the richest will continue to burn through the carbon we have left to use while keeping the global temperature below the safe limit of 1.5°C, destroying any chance of ending poverty and ensuring equality,” the report warns. “The world needs an equal transformation. Only a radical reduction in inequality, transformative climate action and fundamentally shifting our economic goals as a society can save our planet while ensuring wellbeing for all.”
Using the latest available emissions data from the Stockholm Environment Institute, Oxfam calculated that it would take roughly 1,500 years for a person in the bottom 99% to produce as much CO2 pollution as the world’s top billionaires create in a year. The annual emissions of the global super-rich cancel out the emissions-reduction impact of nearly a million onshore wind turbines, according to the report.
The report also estimates that the emissions of the top 1% in 2019 will cause 1.3 million heat-related excess deaths in the coming decades, with most of the deaths occurring in the current decade.
Oxfam noted that transportation is far and away the largest source of pollution from the ultra-rich, whose private jets, yachts, and fleets of gas-guzzling cars are highly carbon-intensive. Experts at Indiana University estimated in 2021 that a “superyacht” emits more than 7,000 tons of CO2 per year.
Climate activists have also increasingly targeted private jet travel as a key source of luxury emissions. Oxfam observed in its new report that “a short trip on a private jet will produce more carbon than the average person emits all year.”
The report comes in the wake of news from the World Meteorological Organization that global greenhouse gas concentrations reached an all-time high once again last year, underscoring the need for dramatic action to curb fossil fuel use and transition to renewable energy.
Chiara Liguori, Oxfam’s senior climate justice policy adviser, said in a statement that “the super-rich are plundering and polluting the planet to the point of destruction and it is those who can least afford it who are paying the highest price.”
“The huge scale of climate inequality revealed in the report highlights how the two crises are inextricably linked—fueling one another—and the urgent need to ensure the rising costs of climate change fall on those most responsible and able to pay,” said Liguori.
“Governments globally, including the U.K., need to tackle the twin crises of inequality and climate change by targeting the excessive emissions of the super-rich by taxing them more,” Liguori added. “This would raise much-needed revenue that could be directed to a range of vital social spending needs, including a fair switch to clean, renewable energy as well as fulfilling our international commitments to support communities who are already bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.”
Oxfam’s report calls on governments to pursue a “radical increase in equality” by imposing wealth taxes on the richest 1% as well as steep inheritance, land, and property taxes. The report also recommends taxing or banning private jet travel, space tourism, and other polluting luxury activities and imposing “permanent, automatic” windfall profit levies on major corporations that often take advantage of crises such as wars and pandemics.
Additionally, Oxfam urged governments to invest heavily in establishing universal programs—from healthcare to education to childcare—and transitioning away from fossil fuels. The group said that rich countries must honor their commitments to provide climate financing to poor nations facing the brunt of the climate crisis and support debt cancellation and other relief measures.
“Unless we rapidly reduce carbon emissions,” the report states, “we will exhaust the amount of carbon we can emit without triggering climate breakdown within just five years.”
Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
dizzy: We’ve had a 5 years warning before and not from David Bowie.
‘We Are Too Humane. Burn Gaza Now,’ Says Senior Israeli Lawmaker
Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi is one of many Israeli leaders who have made genocidal statements against Palestinians.
Nissim Vaturi, the far-right deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, raised eyebrows and ire Friday after asserting on social media that Israel’s war on Gaza—which has killed and maimed over 40,000 people and displaced around 70% of the population—is “too humane.”
“All of this preoccupation with whether or not there is internet in Gaza shows that we have learned nothing,” Vaturi, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote Friday after the country’s war Cabinet approved extremely limited fuel deliveries into the besieged strip. “We are too humane. Burn Gaza now, no less!”
“Don’t allow fuel in, don’t allow water in until the hostages are returned back!” Vaturi added, a reference to the approximately 240 Israelis and others kidnapped by Hamas-led militants during the October 7 infiltration attack that killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel.
When Israeli journalist Ben Caspit responded to the post with a comment that he feared Vaturi’s words could fuel “anti-Israel propaganda,” the lawmaker shot back: “Your fear will kill us. Stop being humane.”
The social media platform X—whose multibillionaire owner Elon Musk is in hot water for promoting an anti-semitic post—deleted Vaturi’s tweet, and others including one in which he wrote that Israel should leave just “one old man” alive in Gaza so he could “tell everyone” what happened there.
Vaturi recently pushed for the suspension of colleague Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the leftist Hadash party, for comments critical of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza and for calling for the protection of civilians on both sides, including by saying that “a child is a child,” whether Israeli or Palestinian.
Over 5,000 Palestinian children are among the more than 12,300 people killed during Israel’s 43-day bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which has also maimed at least 30,000 others, according to Gazan health officials. Half the homes in the embattled strip have been damaged or destroyed, with around 1.7 million Palestinians forcibly displaced. Thousands of people are missing and feared buried beneath rubble. In the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers since October 7, while over 2,800 others have been arrested.
Vaturi is far from alone in making what legal experts call statements of genocidal intent.
Earlier this month, Israeli President Isaac Herzog asserted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “eliminate everything” there.
Galit Distel Atbaryan, a member of the Knesset from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said that “Gaza should be wiped off the map.”
Ariel Kallner, another Likud parliamentarian, urged a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48,” a reference to the forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1947-49.
Yet another Likud lawmaker, Tally Gotliv, demanded nothing less than a “doomsday kiss”—that is, use of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons. “Not flattening a neighborhood,” she clarified, but “crushing and flattening Gaza. Without mercy!”
Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, who said “we are now rolling out the Great Nakba,” was admonished by Netanyahu for saying the quiet part out loud.
Netanyahu said it out loud last month during a televised address when he called Israel’s imminent ground invasion of Gaza a “holy mission” and invoked Amalek, the ancient biblical enemy of the Israelites whom God commanded his “chosen people” to exterminate, in what critics called “an explicit call to genocide.”
Noting that statements of intent to commit genocide are a key element of the crime, Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal toldDemocracy Now! in an interview last month that “if this is not special intent to commit genocide, I really don’t know what is.”
“We’re seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent,” he added. “This is indeed a textbook case of genocide.”
Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
- Biden Accused of ‘Genocide Denial’ After Casting Doubt On Civilian Death Toll in Gaza ›
- Israeli MP Says It Clearly for World to Hear: ‘Erase All of Gaza From the Face of the Earth’ ›
- 1,500+ Israelis Urge ICC Action on ‘War Crimes and Genocide’ in Gaza ›
- Seeking Emergency Order, Palestinians Sue Biden for Failing to Prevent Genocide ›
- Genocide in Gaza Would Not Be Possible Without Western Complicity ›
- UN Experts Warn of ‘Grave Risk of Genocide’ in Gaza ›
- 800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May Be Perpetrating ‘Crime of Genocide’ in Gaza ›
Palestinians File ‘Urgent Motion’ to Stop Biden From Backing Genocide
Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“Our team has had to update more than once the numbers of our clients’ relatives who have been killed as we prepared this lawsuit and motion.”
A group of Palestinian Americans on Thursday urged a federal court to issue a preliminary injunction barring the Biden administration from providing any additional weaponry or diplomatic support to the Israeli military as it carries out mass atrocities in Gaza.
The “urgent motion” comes days after the group, represented by the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), sued President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a federal court in California, arguing that the top officials are “failing to prevent an unfolding genocide where they have influence over the state of Israel to do so, and directly abetting its development with weapons, funds, and diplomatic cover” in violation of international law.
The plaintiffs in the case are U.S. citizens with family in Gaza, which has been under relentless assault since a deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel last month. At least 116 of the plaintiffs’ family members have been killed in the Palestinian enclave since the latest Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza began.
“Our team has had to update more than once the numbers of our clients’ relatives who have been killed as we prepared this lawsuit and motion,” Astha Sharma Pokharel, an attorney at CCR, said Thursday. “There is no starker illustration of how urgently this injunction is needed.”
The Biden administration has opposed calls for a cease-fire and pledged unconditional support to the Israeli government as it wages war on the besieged Gaza Strip with the help of U.S. weaponry, including thousands of Hellfire missiles and army vehicles. That support has continued in the face of a horrific death toll and humanitarian crisis and amid global alarm over Israeli officials’ genocidal rhetoric.
In an emergency briefing paper released less than two weeks into Israel’s assault, CCR warned that the U.S. “is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure, and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza rise to the level of complicity in the crime under international law.”
The lawsuit filed earlier this week echoes that case, stating that the “unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has so far been made possible because of the unconditional support given by the named official-capacity defendants in this case”—Biden, Blinken, and Austin.
The lawsuit and push for a preliminary injunction are backed by leading scholars of genocide and the Holocaust, including William Schabas, a world-renowned expert on international human rights law.
In a declaration supporting the lawsuit, Schabas wrote, “There is a serious risk of genocide committed against the Palestinian population of Gaza and that the United States of America is in breach of its obligation, under both the 1948 Genocide Convention to which it is a party as well as customary international law, to use its position of influence with the Government of Israel and to take the best measures within its power to prevent the crime taking place.”
The new motion was submitted Thursday as Israel raided Gaza’s largest hospital and prepared for an assault on the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, prompting fears of a widening military campaign.
Meanwhile, little humanitarian aid has been allowed to enter the blockaded territory, leaving millions of lives at risk as most of the population lacks water, food, medicine, and other basic necessities.
The World Food Program warned Thursday that “nearly the entire population” of Gaza “is in desperate need of food assistance.”
“The small quantities of food that can be found are being sold at alarmingly inflated prices and are of little use without the ability to cook, forcing some to survive on one meal a day,” the U.N. organization said. “For the lucky, that includes more than solely canned food, though some people have resorted to consuming raw onions and uncooked eggplants.”
Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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