Archive for April, 2026
Israel’s New World Order: Nothing But the Threat of Endless Death
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For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has unilaterally — and with jaw-dropping illegality — reimagined warfare as a religiously-mandated existential struggle against alleged “forces of darkness” in which there are no rules, and no sense of proportionality or restraint.
Everyone in the Gaza Strip — 2.3 million people at the start of this “conflict” — has been regarded as, in one way or another, “associated” with Hamas, the administrative government of Gaza whose military wing, along with other armed factions, broke out of the “open-air prison” of Gaza on October 7, 2023, killing hundreds of Israeli security personnel, and hundreds of civilians.
Completely supported by almost all the nations of the west, who approved the shamefully ill-defined notion that Israel had “the right to defend itself”, Israel has reinterpreted “self-defense” to mean genocide, inflicting such disproportionate destruction on Gaza that almost its entire built environment has been destroyed, and over ten percent of its population — a quarter of a million people — have been killed or wounded.
Earth Day at 56: Extinction Beckons
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56 years ago, 20 million Americans took to the streets to mark the first Earth Day, to promote support for environmental protections, and, as it was described in a full-page promotional advert in the New York Times, to “start to reclaim the environment we have wrecked”, via “a commitment to make life better, not just bigger and faster”, and to “provide real rather than rhetorical solutions.”
In large letters, the ad proclaimed, boldly, “A disease has infected our country. It has brought smog to Yosemite, dumped garbage in the Hudson, sprayed DDT in our food, and left our cities in decay. Its carrier is man.”
The name, and the promotional messages, came via the legendary advertising copywriter Julian Koenig, whose campaign for Volkswagen, “Think Small,” was later cited by Advertising Age as the “greatest advertising campaign of the 20th century.”
The Guantánamo Document That Changed My Life 20 Years Ago Today
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20 years ago today, on April 20, 2006, a document was released by the Pentagon that changed my life, launching me on what has become the defining struggle (or jihad, in Arabic) of my time here on earth as an independent journalist and human rights activist: exposing the horrific injustice of the US’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, telling the stories of the 779 men — and boys — held there by the US military, and calling for the prison’s closure.
The document in question was a list of 558 prisoners held at Guantánamo at the time (see here or here), unwillingly released by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation.
It was the first ever list of prisoners released by the US government, which, for four years and three months, since Guantánamo first opened on January 11, 2002 — to hold prisoners seized in connection with the global “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — had sought to shroud the prison and those held there in a veil of the utmost secrecy, behind which it could completely disregard all international and domestic laws and treaties concerning the treatment of those deprived of their liberty.
Iran and Lebanon: The Fake Diplomacy of the US Losers and the Israeli Butchers
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Reality means nothing to either the US or Israel, who launched an illegal and unprovoked war on Iran on February 28, and were then humiliated when Iran delivered devastating blows to the US’s outposts throughout the Gulf, pierced Israel’s defense systems, causing extensive damage that the Israeli authorities have desperately tried to hide, and dealt a massive blow to the world’s energy supplies by cutting off the transit of tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.
For the US, which had fallen for Israeli lies that the war would be swift, and that decapitating Iran’s leadership would lead to a popular uprising and the collapse of the government, this was a rude awakening, and after Donald Trump had spent days on his social media account posting increasingly unhinged threats against Iran, he suddenly backed down last Tuesday and announced a two-week ceasefire.
This was a tacit acknowledgement of defeat, but when a US delegation, led by Vice President JD Vance, headed to Pakistan for peace talks with their Iranian counterparts, they refused to leave their baggage of belligerent arrogance at home, and turned up with a delusional swagger, reflecting the depths of their leader’s derangement, and the extent to which their alleged “America First” policies has been entirely usurped by the tired old ghosts of the discredited neocon movement.
Iran Ceasefire? From Trump’s Nuclear Threats to Israel’s Gaza-Style Extermination in Lebanon
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Yesterday, as perceptive observers marked two and a half years of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel cemented its reputation as an unprecedented pestilential sickness on the face of the earth, contaminating everyone who comes into contact with it through its relentless barbarism, by launching almost a hundred devastating aerial attacks on Lebanon in the space of just ten minutes, rising to 137 in total in the space of just half an hour, in what the genocidal entity proudly proclaimed as “Operation Eternal Darkness.” Could the exercise of evil have a more transparently accurate name?
The attacks, in Beirut and across southern Lebanon, which rivalled in intensity the most violent attacks on Gaza in the early months of the Gaza genocide, were clearly indiscriminate — acts of terrorism, completely destroying numerous apartment blocks in Beirut, for example, and meant to kill as many civilians as possible, following the template established in Gaza, for which Israel has never been held accountable. At least 303 people were killed, and 1,165 wounded, and social media reports provided grim accounts not of murdered militants, but of unjustifiably slaughtered women and children.
Also, as In Gaza, the Israeli authorities sought to defend their actions by plying the complicit western media with unverified and clearly risible justifications for their actions, just as they have done so cynically and successfully in Gaza for the whole of their uniquely depraved descent into monstrous and devious inhumanity over the last 30 months.
Photos and Report: Amidst Unprecedented Chaos, the Monthly Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure Continue
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Despite unprecedented global chaos caused by just two rogue nations — the US and Israel — who have wilfully eviscerated all the rules regarding the conduct of warfare over the last two and a half years, and massively increasing the geographical scope of their illegal actions over the last six weeks, campaigners across the US and around the world held their 39th monthly consecutive global vigils for the closure of the US’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay last week.
On Wednesday April 1, campaigners gathered outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in New York City and Detroit, while other campaigners were outside the Houses of Parliament in London, the European Parliament in Brussels, and in Mexico City. The Saturday before, on “No Kings Day”, campaigners in San Francisco highlighted the rank injustice of the prison’s continued existence, with other campaigners, in Cobleskill, NY, joining on Saturday April 4, as part of weekly protests reflecting the demands of the times that have been running every Saturday for the last 25 years. There were also solo participants in Oakland, CA and in Liège, Belgium.
Please see below for photos from all of the vigils, and read on for my assessment of the importance of the vigils as part of wider resistance to the collapse into depravity of all notions of any kind of moral order since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza 30 achingly long months ago.
Death by AI: My Interview About the Horrors of Automated Genocide with Chuck Mertz on “This Is Hell!”
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Many thanks to Chuck Mertz for having me as the featured guest on this week’s “This Is Hell!”, now in its 30th year, a Chicago-based “long-form political interview program”, broadcast live every Wednesday morning, and then made available as a podcast.
You can find my hour-long interview on the “This is Hell!” website here, the full show on the website here, and on Patreon, where you can also make a donation to support the show, if you’d like to contradict Chuck’s assertion that it is “broadcast without the virtue of money or the vice of political agenda.”
I’ve also embedded it via Soundcloud below, and I very much hope that you have time to listen to it.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
