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Maldives government bans Israeli citizens over Gaza genocide. Maldives is an independent island country in the north-central Indian Ocean. It consists of a chain of about 1,200 small coral islands and it is considered the smallest country in Asia and the small Muslim majority country by land area.

The propaganda machine is hard at work in support of fueling the $$$ military industrial complex as Biden conflates Russia with Nazis. Russia lost 27 million people fighting against the Nazis!

Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day. While rightly praising the few surviving soldiers of that decisive day of battle, bravery and sacrifice in 1944, President Biden went on to conflate the hallowed D-Day counter-offensive against the Nazis, with the current U.S.-backed proxy war with Russia.

This is a total mischaracterization of the current conflict.

The Ukraine war is a wholly unnecessary conflict ignited by NATO expansionism and a $5.2 billion, US-led coup against a democratically elected government a decade ago. The conflict is now fueled by hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons and cash from NATO countries, spurred by the U.S.

The slaughter continues because the American people are being lied to, daily.

Leah is joined by ANDREA MILLER of the Center for Common Ground, RAY MCCLENDON of Communities United, MAYA VAN ROSSUM of the Green Amendments campaign, and HOLLY MOSHER of Why Do You Vote, who shows us a wonderful video of folks explain to us why, in fact, they vote.

KENNY BRUNO chimes in with cogent questions about the impacts of Gaza and other key issues in the upcoming election.

DENNIS BERNSTEIN, renowned host of KPFA/Pacifica’s Flashpoints, tells us about the great LARRY BENSKY. Emmy-winning DAVID SALTMAN adds to the eulogy, as does KPFK Chair Tatanka Bricca, who also underscores the need to become a voting member of the Pacifica Radio Network.

VINNIE DE STEFANO updates us on the Julian Assange case.

WENDI LEDERMAN urges us to think about Gaza and how it might affect the upcoming election.

RICK GOODWELL urges us to make sure we and our neighbors are, in fact, registered to vote.

RAY LUTZ updates us on the crisis in our voting machines.

PAUL NEWMAN, MIKE HERSCH and MYLA RESON get into the struggle of a southern high school and statue-defenders intent on being named for Confederate traitors.

If one were to argue that a top Spanish government official would someday declare that
“from the river to the sea, Palestine would be free”, the suggestion itself would have
seemed ludicrous.
 
But this is precisely how Yolanda Diaz, Spain's Deputy Prime Minister, concluded a
statement on May 23, a few days before Spain officially recognized Palestine as a state.
 
The Spanish recognition of Palestine, along with the Norwegian and Irish recognition, is
most important.
 
Western Europe is finally catching up with the rest of the world regarding the
significance of a strong international position in support of the Palestinian people and in
rejection of Israel’s genocidal practices in occupied Palestine.
 
But equally important is the changing political discourse regarding both Palestine and
Israel in Europe and all over the world.
 
Almost immediately after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, some European countries
imposed restrictions on pro-Palestinian protests, some even banning the Palestinian flag,
which was perceived, through some twisted logic, as an antisemitic symbol.

If we can end, let us say . . . slavery — the legal “ownership” of other human beings — can’t we also end other great social wrongs? Can’t we also end war?

As I ask this question, I am suddenly bludgeoned by an unexpected irony, since the United States ended slavery through a brutal war, with a death toll of perhaps three quarters of a million people.

But it was worth it, right?

Well, that’s what history tells us. It has essentially “made peace” with the war and now celebrates the moral objectives of the winning side, with all its carnage forever reduced to a statistical abstraction.

The topic of this column is the abolition of war — the urgent necessity of doing so — so, how odd it feels to begin by referencing a “good” war, which ended an enormous wrong . . . or at least forced the wrong to morph into a different, less legally blatant form of racism known as Jim Crow. (And when Jim Crow was defeated by the nonviolent civil rights movement a hundred years later, the nation’s racism morphed into such things as the “war on drugs” and an expanding prison-industrial complex.)

Scott Ritter was pulled off a NY-to-Istanbul flight yesterday by US officials and his passport confiscated in a startling new development in the government’s open drive to censor and silence critics of the Administration’s foreign policies at a time when the United States is supplying billions of dollars in arms to foment wider war in Russia, accelerate the attacks on Gazans and set the stage for war with China over Taiwan.

A Marine veteran and true American patriot, Mr. Ritter is also a noted former Chief UN weapons inspector, author and journalist.  He was enroute to Russia to attend an international conference in St. Petersburg.  

Mr. Ritter first came to my attention when he testified at a Capitol hearing I sponsored to inquire into the Bush Administration’s plans to attack Iraq. Ritter warned in August of 2002 that a case had not been made for attacking Iraq.