TV News LIES

After the Taliban marched into Kabul in August, 2021, Zahir gathered 40 members of his extended family in the living room to discuss how the takeover would affect their lives. Twenty-five of them were girls and women. “I told them that I understand that they are suffering now, and that I and all the men this family are with you,” recalls Zahir, a 45-year-old public service professional. “We couldn’t stop crying.” (He asked that only his first name be used since the Taliban has a history of targeting people who criticize their policies.)

Despite stereotypes of Afghanistan as a deeply conservative and male-dominated society, Zahir is far from the only Afghan man to express support for Afghan women. While few Afghan men have voiced their protest of the Taliban’s regressive policies in public, a survey published in July revealed that a significant percent of them, including those that support the Taliban, are in favor of basic human rights for women.

More...

Back in May, when the image of a decapitated child in Rafah started circulating, my friend texted: This is the image. This is the one. Now the world’s going to roar. For many of us, this has been the reality of the last months: waiting for the image that will shake complacency and complicity; waiting for the image so staggering it’ll be non-negotiable. An amputated toddler. A blown-apart body. A girl hanging from the side of a building. We are still waiting.

Dehumanization is a prerequisite of most forms of violence. Well before a bomb drops on a school where children are sheltering – because you ordered them there to shelter – you have to make that act acceptable. The more dead, starving, weeping, and shredded Palestinian bodies the public sees, the more the brain becomes psychically numbed to them. Palestinians disappear into “hordes”, “masses”, numbers so high it becomes impossible to imagine their nicknames or favorite songs.

The body of a Palestinian is a negotiable thing – a child becomes a “minor”. The dead become “alleged”, numbers in unreliable mouths. This is an old trick on brown and Black bodies: write them out of the imagination, age them up, refer to them in the collective. So when they are shredded, burned, lynched, assaulted, when we see a Black man beg for air, when we see the heaps of limbs in Abu Ghraib, we are conditioned to accept their fate as inevitable.

More...

Mark Smith, a British Foreign office official who was based at the British embassy in Dublin, formally resigned on 16 August, citing London's continued arms sales to Israel.

In a letter titled “FCDO complicity in War Crimes,” Smith – an expert on the legality of UK arms sales – laments ending his long diplomatic career “in the knowledge that this Department may be complicit in War Crimes.”

“As [a] former penholder on the arms exports licensing assessment in [the Middle East and North Africa Department] MENAD, I am a subject matter expert in the domain of armed sales policy. Each day we witness clear and unquestionable examples of War Crimes and breaches of International Humanitarian Law in Gaza perpetrated by the State of Israel,” Smith writes.

More...

Rarely has a head of state received a more hostile welcome than that which met the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, when he arrived in Washington DC to speak before a joint session of Congress last month. While no senior US officials turned up to greet him on the tarmac, thousands of demonstrators marched in protest of his speech, including 200 from the group Jewish Voice for Peace who were arrested during an occupation on Capitol Hill, and others who burned him in effigy and replaced the American flag flying in front of Union Station with a Palestinian flag.

Perhaps more telling was the decision of roughly half of congressional Democrats to boycott the address altogether. “A dozen years ago, that would have been unthinkable,” noted Peter Frey, board chair of J Street, a Jewish lobbying group that supports Israeli security as well as a Palestinian state. One lawmaker who did attend, the representative Rashida Tlaib, wore a keffiyeh and held a sign calling Netanyahu a “war criminal” who was “guilty of genocide”. Meanwhile, a number of labor unions, including the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union and United Auto Workers sent a letter to Joe Biden calling for an end to US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.