Books On Fire

 

If you can spare 40 seconds, check out this video of a Palestinian child going through the rubble of destroyed buildings looking for books. Several other such vids are also easily available.

The book hunters are not looking for reading material, although Palestinian culture has always valued literature and poetry.

These kids need the books for fuel to cook the last scraps of food they have available. It’s been well over a month since Israel – with full U.S. support—cut off their cooking fuel supplies.

If you can spare a few more minutes, you could also read a rather poignant essay by a young Palestinian woman whose family is now burning the books from the shelves in their homes for the same reason.  She writes about her childhood in a family that placed enormous value on books and reading.  She writes:

I still remember the day our parents surprised us with a home library. It was a tall and wide piece of furniture with lots of shelves that they had placed in the living room. I was just five years old, but I recognised the sacredness of its corner from the very first moment.

 

Family outings were often to bookstores, and over time they built a library of which they were very proud. And when a ceasefire was declared this past January, the author thought the books had survived. But, as she continues:

… in early March, the genocide resumed. All humanitarian aid was blocked: no food, no medical supplies, and no fuel could enter. We ran out of gas in less than three weeks. The full blockade and the massive bombardment made it impossible to find any other source of fuel for cooking.

So the author did what she had to do, though she maintained a rich sense of irony:

I had no choice but to concede. Standing before our library, I reached for the international human rights law volumes. I decided they had to go first. We were taught these legal norms at school, we were made to believe that our rights as Palestinians were guaranteed by them and that one day, they would lead to our liberation.

 

 And so, it turns out that book burning can be a symbol of bad times in more ways than one. It’s bad enough when your government wants to burn your books to control your thinking. It’s even worse when you have to burn your own books to survive.

Palestinians are in that position as a direct result of U.S. government policies over the past several decades. That government – ours – has long since stopped pretending to respect human rights abroad. It has disdained human rights in countries too numerous to mention here.

 Perhaps, then, we should not be surprised that the same government is now showing such disdain for basic human rights here at home.

 

Is it Fascism Yet?

 

Above: Your tax dollars at work, protecting you from foreign college students

 

A video went around recently of FBI agents using a battering ram to smash down a door of some college students in Michigan. The agents presented no warrant prior to breaking in, even though they seem to have had one.

Similar raids were conducted in “multiple homes in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Canton Township, Michigan”.

 Several laptops were taken by the federals, and four students were hauled into custody, then later released.

 All of the students thus  harassed had one thing in common: they had been involved in protests against the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinain civilians by the U.S. and Israel.

The raids are reminiscent of actions once witnessed in some of modern history’s cruelest authoritarian regimes. Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Pinochet’s Chile come to mind, just to name a few.

You might have also seen the recent   video of six federal agents grabbing a college Tufts University student off the street, forcing her into a car, and whisking her away to nobody knew where. (It was eventually revealed that she had been packed away in an I.C.E. jail in Louisiana, some 1.700 miles away.  As of today, she is still there.)

As you can see in the video, several of the agents wore masks (masks!) and only one of them very briefly flashed some ID. They might just as well have been private thugs kidnapping her for ransom.  Instead, they were public thugs kidnapping her for the crime of having written a  piece of wrong-think for the Tufts University student newspaper.

Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk. She is from Turkey. She is a former Fulbright Scholar and currently a doctoral student in Child Study and Human Development.  And here’s a pic of her. Note the murderous look in her eyes.

 

 

Rumeysa Ozturk: Enemy of the (Fascist) State

You can read her op-ed piece here. You might bear in mind, as you peruse it, that you reading evidence that Oztirk is a “Hamas sympathizer.” You might also notice that the piece was co-authored by three other students.  Why only Ozturk was singled out for detention without due process is not for us to know.

The most radical sentence I could find in the article is shown below. Maybe it’s the one that convinced federal agents she needed locking up:

“what the collective voice of the student body is calling for are for the University to end its complicity with Israel insofar as it is oppressing the Palestinian people and denying their right to self-determination — a right that is guaranteed by international law.”

 

Well, these are only a few examples of our rapid descent into fascism.  If you are reading this, you probably have your own favorite examples. Maybe it’s the sending of citizens to jail in El Salvador for having tattoos. Maybe it’s the deliberate refusal to obey court orders. Maybe it’s the huge tax cuts for the already super-wealthy. Maybe it’s the blaming of the impoverished for being poor. Maybe it’s the bullying of schools into teaching a sanitized version of American history. Maybe it’s the shameless supplication of Republican officials toward their buffoon of a leader.

Welcome to America, kids. There’s enough fascism now for everybody.

 

Lock 'Em Up

Much has been written and said in the Western media about the fate of the innocent Israelis taken hostages by Hamas in October 2023.  They deserve all the empathy we can muster. 

So too, though, do the thousands of Palestinians essentially held hostage by the Israeli government.

Here are a few numbers pertaining mostly to the subject of cruel confinement::

                                        Number of Israeli hostages still held by Hamas: 59

Number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails for “security reasons”: 9,619

Number of Palestinians held in jail for “being in Israel illegally”: 1,705

Number of more Palestinians arrested for every one freed by Israel in the most recent ceasefire deal: 15

Number of Palestinians currently held indefinitely on "secret information without charging them or allowing them to stand trial "– known as “administrative Detention”: 3,327

Number of Gazans killed yesterday by U.S.-made bombs: 50

Number of those who were waiting for food assistance: 3

 

Mister, We Could Use a Guy Like Dennis Kuchinich Again

On Easter, former Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich posted an excellent article  titled The Cross and the Pieta: The Passion of Palestine. I highly recommend it. It is the source for several of the numbers reported below.

In the article, Kucinich notes the cruel damage to children and the role of the U.S. in the ongoing genocide in Gaza:

“All of Palestine is a children’s graveyard. Numerous doctors have testified to the unusually large numbers of children who have been killed by sniper shots to the head. Most deaths, however, are due to a stunning array of U.S. munitions being used on defenseless Gazans.”

Kucinich was once a fairly serious contender for President. He ran in 2004 and 2008. But the American press couldn’t take him seriously enough. He was too, as they say, “liberal.” Even worse, he was short – five feet seven -- and had a sort of elfin appearance. Not presidential material

Nevertheless, in the 2004 campaign for the Democratic nomination, Kucinich was John Kerry’s toughest opponent. In it, he emphasized his opposition to the (second) Iraq war, which is now generally conceded by sane people as among the most foolish, cruel, lie-based, and destructive military adventures in world history.

In Kucinich’s second run at the White House, his platform included two other pretty darn good ideas: single payer health care system and the impeachment of then Vice President Dick Cheney.

 

Today’s Scull-Numbing Numbers

Minimum number of U.S. Reaper Drones shot down in Yemen since  October 2023: 15

Number of Reaper drones in U.S. inventory: 280

Cost, in millions, of each Reaper drone: 28

Approximate size, in square miles, of Historic Palestine : 10,400

Percent of that taken by force by Israeli militias in 1948: 77

Minimum number of Palestinians driven from their homes that year: 700,000

Palestinian villages and cities destroyed that year: 600

Percent of historic Palestine now occupied by Israel: 85

Tons of U.S. bombs dropped on Gaza since October 2023: 100,000

Ratio of the explosive power of the above to that of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima in 1945: 6/1

Death ratio per capita (so far) in Gaza from U.S. bombs: .025

Number of Americans that would be killed at that ratio: 8,350,000

Minimum number of separate air strikes by the U.S. on a cancer hospital in Yemen since March: 14

Minimum number  of Yemenis killed in April 18 U.S. air strikes on  Ras Isa oil port; 80

Minimum number of countries in which U.S.-made bombs have purposely hit hospitals since 1950: 14*

 

*North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Gaza, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama

 

 

 

Trump and Congress are Working Together to Fix Our Forests -- And they Don't Need Your Help!

 

Above: A clearcut on private land in Oregon

The Trump crime syndicate recently declared an emergency situation on America’sNational Forest system lands.

They do love their emergencies, which they use as excuses to break any laws or conventions they choose. In this case, the faux emergency stems from “severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors.”

All of these are legitimate concerns. But the Trump gang’s edict addresses none of them. It simply prescribes a lot of deforestation. Specifically, it, opens for logging about 60 percent of the national forest lands. In at least two states – Washington and California- - it opens every single acre of forest service land to logging.

And this will not be a careful removal of a few trees. The most profitable way to “harvest” forests out west is to clearcut them. This means -- as the term implies -- simply identifying a large piece of forest, then mowing down every tree within it.

This, of course, is also the most destructive method of tree cutting. It makes forests more vulnerable to fire and makes them less useful for flood control. It fragments wildlife habitats. And it reduces the ability of forests to offset climate change. (Trees sequester carbon and the most mature trees sequester the most carbon.)

It’s true that clearcuts are often re-planted, and the timber companies love to praise themselves for this. But they prefer to plant only seeds of commercially useful species, thus creating forests that are more like monocultures than biodiverse systems.

In recent decades, size limits have been placed on clearcuts on federal lands. Forty-acre cuts with a little buffer between them is a fairly standard guideline. But, as Trump officials have shown in other matters, they disdain regulations that restrict profitability. Very little, if any, enforcement of clearcut size limits can now be expected.

And, when left to their own devices, large corporate timber companies are known to denude enormous sections of forest. Recently, three companies created a clearcut measuring 42 square miles on a privately owned plot in Oregon. That is 700 times (700 times!) the oft-recommended 40 acres.

Congress Gets on Board.

You might suppose some Democrats in congress would put up at least a show of  resistance to this destruction But instead, two Democratic Senators from Oregon have introduced a bill that would make it easier to give away the forests to large multinational paper companies.

The bill, as usual, sounds pleasantly benign. It’s titled the Fix Our Forests Act, and according to a statement released by Senator Alex Padilla of California:

It would create a wildfire intelligence center to centralize federal management, require assessments of fireshed areas and streamline how communities reduce their wildfire risk. It also would ramp up research into wildfire mitigation technologies and change some forestation treatments.

But this is, in fact, a kind of carefully crafted sheep dip. For the bill, in the words of a watchdog group called Oregon Wild:

would allow logging on federal lands without scientific review and community input. The bill truncates ESA consultation requirements to protect threatened and endangered species and limits the right of citizens to judicial review, effectively barring communities from bringing lawsuits to hold federal agencies accountable.  

 

 An official summary of the bill by the Congressional Research Service puts it this way (the emphases are mine):

.. the bill expedites the review of certain forest management projects under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 and exempts certain activities from NEPA review.. It also limits consultation requirements concerning threatened and endangered species under the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974 and the Federal Land Management and Policy Act of 1976. Finally, it limits litigation involving fireshed management projects and limits remedies that courts may provide.

 

In other words, it grants permission – as if they needed it -- to the Trump group to ignore virtually any environmental guidelines relating to chopping down trees.

Even the editors at The Hill – no radical webpage by any means -- saw through this sham. The headline for a recent article there sums it all up nicely:

The misleadingly named ‘Fix Our Forests Act’ would do anything but.