Human Rights

Vermont’s only prison for women is, by all accounts, a ghastly place. The facility was never intended to be a prison. The facility was never intended to house women. Built as a men’s detention center in the 1970s, the facility is inadequate to provide what any reasonable person would consider adequate health and safety conditions for as many as 160 incarcerated women.

The Vermont women’s prison, formally known as the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility (CRCF) in South Burlington, came into being in August 2011 as a political effort to reduce the state budget pushed by then Governor Peter Shumlin, a military-industrial Democrat who also supported basing the nuclear-capable F-35 in Winooski. Shumlin pushed both projects with grand promises of benefits that have yet to be fulfilled.

The notion that the COVID-19 pandemic was ‘the great equalizer’ should be dead and buried by now. If anything, the lethal disease is another terrible reminder of the deep divisions and inequalities in our societies. That said, the treatment of the disease should not be a repeat of the same shameful scenario.

For an entire year, wealthy celebrities and government officials have been reminding us that “we are in this together”, that “we are on the same boat”, with the likes of US singer, Madonna, speaking from her mansion while submerged in a “milky bath sprinkled with rose petals,” telling us that the pandemic has proved to be the “great equalizer”. 

With some help we did two days of work to harvest the five olive trees in
our home garden (total 240 kilos) followed by six days to harvest the many
trees in the museum garden (still two trees left). Jessie, Zohar, and I
were thus harvesting for eight days. I counted 44 people who helped at
different times over these days (including Israelis and internationals). I
especially want to thank Mohammad Najajreh who was there throughout the
days of harvest at the museum garden and is now helping his family harvest
their olives in Nahhalin. While muscles are aching and skin is darkened,
the psychological boost of harvesting olives and the physical gain of
exercising is hard to describe. I did write one article many years ago on
the deeper meaning of the olive tree which was reprinted last year here:

Noam Chomsky is right when he says that, in the US, sports creates the necessary “fantasy world” required to shield people from understanding, organizing, and attempting to “influence the real world”.  

Referring to sports commentary and phone-in shows, Chomsky, in an interview with AlterNet, marveled at the intellectual and analytical skills of people engaged in the sports culture. Ultimately, however, this culture “has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere,” he said. 

In a few words, a close associate of Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, summed up the logic behind the ongoing frenzy to expand illegal Jewish settlements in Israel.

“These days are an irreplaceable opportunity to establish our hold on the Land of Israel, and I’m sure that our friend, President (Donald) Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu will be able to take advantage,” Miki Zohar, a member of the Likud Party was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor. 

Belgium is furious. On November 6, the Belgian government condemned Israel’s destruction of Belgian-funded homes in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank. Understandably, Brussels wants the Israeli government to pay compensation for the unwarranted destruction. The Israeli response was swift: a resounding ‘no’.

The diplomatic row is likely to fizzle out soon; neither will Israel cease its illegal demolitions of Palestinian homes and structures in the West Bank nor will Belgium, or any other EU country, receive a dime from Tel Aviv.

Welcome to the bizarre world of European foreign policy in Palestine and Israel. 

Mohammad Ibrahim Ali al-Deirawi was born on January 30, 1978 in Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. His family is originally from Bir Al-Saba’, an ethnically cleansed Palestinian town located in the southern Naqab desert. Mohammad was arrested by the Israeli army at a military checkpoint in central Gaza on March 1, 2001. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his role in the armed Palestinian resistance, and was freed on October 18, 2011 in a prisoner exchange between the Palestinian resistance and Israel.

Mohammad's interrogation commenced as soon as he arrived at the Central Asqalan (Ashkelon) Prison in southern Israel, where he experienced physical and psychological torture for nearly two and a half months. He was handed his sentence by an Israeli military court on March 20, 2003.

As soon as he was released from the Nafha Prison, 100 kilometers north of Bir Al-Saba’, he married Ghadeer, the beautiful and only daughter of his prison-mate, Majdi Hammad. Ghadeer and Mohammad have two children.

With the railroaded Supreme Court appointment of Amy Barrett, Team Trump has lit the final fuse on his 2020 coup d’etat. With Barrett, Roberts and Kavanaugh, Trump’s Trifecta, because they all did it before in Bush vs Gore. Read on.

Barrett, Roberts and Kavanaugh, Trump’s Trifecta, did it all before in Bush vs Gore. Read on.

As of right now, with the all-but-certain compliance of Supremes Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, and with the agreement of enough Republican-held state legislatures, there is no legal barrier to Trump’s second term, no matter what the voters say.

In real terms, the only practical wall against such a coup might be a massive anti-Trump national vote—-but it would have to be overwhelming enough to make his would-be dictatorship politically unsustainable.  

As for the Constitutional path, the road has been cleared.  The calculation is simple.

A Brief History of Fascist Lies is the title of a new book by Federico Finchelstein, the author of a number of books on fascism and populism. Finchelstein both draws distinctions that slot politicians into categories (such as fascist or populist) and points out the overlaps and the shades of gray, the forerunners and the enablers.

Not only have there been politicians who resembled Trump in other countries in recent decades, but the appearance of Trump — I think — depended on the regimes of Bush the Lesser and Obama. And the Trumplike politicians sprouting up today come out of their own countries’ traditions as well as feeding off and feeding into fascist tendencies in the United States.

Trump is supposedly a populist rather than a fascist, because he is elected (even if he cheats?), and because he encourages bigoted violence but has no plan for genocide. Of course he drops tens of thousands of bombs a year on parts of the world not labeled “white,” advances climate collapse, and risks nuclear war, but that stuff can’t make him anything other than “American,” since every U.S. president does those things.

Remarks by phone on October 17, 2020, to Indigenous People’s Day event in Washington, D.C., delayed from October 12.

There may be no more important place to mark Indigenous People’s Day than Washington, D.C., the center of global weapons dealing, base building, and war making — the leading hub of nuclear weapons production and environmental destruction, the seat of a national and imperial government that overseas colonies of second-class citizens on Caribbean and Pacific islands as well as in Washington DC itself, while keeping nearly 1,000 major military bases in over 80 other countries, a government that continues to abuse the remaining native people of North America, exploit the land to destroy the sky and poison the water, in a city that after decades of protest is willing to rename its professional concussion-inducing team as long as it can name it for warmakers.