Human Rights
Editor note: I do not publish all of Mazin Qumisiyeh work. His posts are heartbreaking. Please consider subscribing to his newsletter.
Over 8,000 Americans die every day, many of them unnecessarily.
Why? Because the United States still doesn’t have a national health care system that guarantees everyone adequate medical attention.
One particular American’s death has driven that point home. On December 4, a gunman murdered Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s 50-year-old CEO. The bullet casings from the shooting read “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.”
Those three words neatly sum up the gameplan America’s giant insurers so relentlessly follow: deny the claim, defend the lawsuit, depose the patient.
A new kind of unity around Palestine is finally finding its way to the Palestine solidarity movement worldwide.
The reason behind this unity is obvious: Gaza.
The world’s first live-streamed genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the growing spontaneous compassion, thus solidarity, with the Palestinian victims, helped recenter priorities from the typical political and ideological conflicts back to where they should have always remained: the plight of the Palestinian people.
A photo popped up on the internet last week which was a bit surprising even for those of us who have been overly obsessed with the seemingly aimless and highly dangerous comedy routine that describes itself as the United States of America’s Foreign Policy. The US has confronted no real security threats since the Cold War ended but has done so many things that were against its own interests that it now finds itself seconds away from nuclear immolation as registered on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock.
As Christian nationalism, the political right and Trump-mania seem to tighten their grip on the country, maybe now is the time for me to take a deep dig into the complex preciousness of . . . life itself.
Hey, guess what? I’m “pro-life” — by which I mean, you know, pro-life in a deep, soul-gripping, planet-loving, war-hating way. By which I mean: Let us reclaim Roe v. Wade from the smug, bureaucratic moral certainty — “your body, my choice” — of the anti-choicers, who apparently could care less about the impact Roe’s overturning has had on medical care and the safety, both physical and spiritual, of women.
But I want to put my words into the paradoxical context of life itself. As a man, I am writing, of course, from the perimeter of the process. I am a dad. I’m also a journal-keeper. The other day I happened to dig back nearly 40 years into an old notebook and reread, for the first time in decades, the journal entry I wrote the day after my daughter was born. Mom and newborn were still in the hospital. That evening, when I came home, I had to let my words flow.
The paradoxical phrase, 'running away forward' is one of the most apt descriptions that illustrates the state of Israeli affairs now.
It seems that everything that Israel has done in the past year or so is a mere attempt to deny, distract from or escape imminent future scenarios - all of which are bleak.
Indeed, the last year has repeatedly proven that Israel's military supremacy is no longer able to win wars or decide political outcomes.
Israel denied two critically injured journalists to leave Gaza for life-saving treatments. Fadi Al-Wahidi and Ali Attar, two injured cameramen of Al-Jazeera TV, are fighting for their lives after they received serious injuries that required treatment outside Gaza. Israel refused repeated requests by Al-Jazeera and human rights groups to grant the journalists an urgent medical travel permit without offering a reason.
From 2020 to 2022, indigenous people infected with the COVID-19 virus died at a rate more than double that of Mexico’s general population, an epidemiological study revealed.
Epidemiologist Oswaldo Medina Gómez analyzed the statistics of the Epidemiological Surveillance System for Respiratory Diseases, finding that “clinical conditions and conditions of vulnerability due to social deficiencies” were the main causes for which 9.8% of indigenous people with positive cases died, “in contrast to 4.6% among the non-indigenous population.”
The impact among men was greater than among women, noted Dr. Medina Gómez and his co-author Jordi Josué Medina Vallegas in an article published on October 22 in Ciencia y Salud Colectiva titled Social Inequalities in COVID-19 Mortality among Indigenous Peoples of Mexico.