Portrait of Confucius by Qiu Ying (1494–1552), Ming dynasty. Public domain.
Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is alright because that’s what those people do … – Omar El Akkad, One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will always have been Read more
Israelis blocking food aid from entering Gaza. Wikimedia media commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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Sayfollah Musallet.
His family and friends called him Saif. He was affable and gregarious. He was kind and generous. He was handsome and athletic. He helped run the family’s ice cream parlor in Tampa. He liked cars, hip-hop, soccer and the beach. He was an American kid with Palestinian roots. A few weeks before his 21st birthday […]
Image by Planet Volumes.
Although any country that challenges domination by United States corporate or military power will inevitably be the target of a sustained demonization campaign, the lies consistently issued in a torrent against Venezuela are beyond the usual level of invective. Venezuela is the most lied-about country in the corporate press of the Global North, especially in U.S. corporate media outlets. That Venezuela has sought to align its economy to benefit its own people, instituting an impressive array of social services, health programs and political structures to facilitate grassroots participation, has drawn the consistent ire of U.S. authorities. An unrelenting cascade of lies is necessary to generate public support for the unrelenting campaign targeting the Bolivarian Revolution.
St. David’s Cathedral, Pembrokeshire, Wales.
The Pentecost Sunday service had just concluded. We were on the red stone porch outside the entrance to St. David’s Cathedral in the city of that name in South Wales. The clergy greeted us. The canon of the cathedral asked me if I had all my worldly belongings on my back. The sun was shining […]
As students worldwide head back to school this fall, in Gaza, there are no schools left. The U.N. considers the systemic obliteration of the education system by the Israeli military to be a “scholasticide” — all universities, over 80% of schools, the Central Archives of Gaza, and at least 13 libraries have been destroyed, as of April 2024, in Israel’s relentless bombing campaign. Almost 10,000 students are dead and 16,000 wounded, many killed in attacks on schools being used as sites of refuge.
Academics and university administrators in Gaza released an open letter asking for solidarity and resistance from the rest of the world: “We call upon our colleagues in the homeland and internationally to support our steadfast attempts to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza. We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.”
As a graduate student, an aspiring professor, and the child of a Jewish academic, I take this call for solidarity seriously. Where and how do we learn ideologies of resistance, radicalism, and revolution? Once we have inherited a radical idea, what do we do with it? And how do we choose what ideas not to inherit? More
Image by Alex Shuper
This quotation usually attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” is a watchword that investigative reporter Greg Palast lives by. Since the contested 2000 presidential election, Palast’s voting vigil has probed America’s electoral system and abuses of it. The journalistic detective chronicled purported purging of mostly Black citizens from Florida’s voter rolls in his landmark 2002 book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and a 2016 documentary version updated for the Trump era with the same title. Now this steadfast watchdog of voters’ rights is back with a new nonfiction cinematic inquiry wherein the reportorial gumshoe is vigilant about Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, and Georgia is on Palast’s mind.
Last week, the Department of Energy, which oversees the aging nuclear site in Hanford, Washington, reported that a tank containing high-level radioactive waste was leaking. This is currently the third tank we know of that’s releasing deadly nuclear waste into the soil above the groundwater that feeds the nearby Columbia River. This is not a new problem for Hanford, which has 177 of these huge underground tanks that contain 55 million gallons of radioactive leftovers from the US’s nuclear weapons operation. These waste tanks were only supposed to hold up twenty-thirty years, and we’re now going on six decades. Below is an excerpt from my book Atomic Days, which details the site’s sordid history and its extremely problematic future. Sadly, leaks at Hanford are nothing new, nor are the lies surrounding them. It’s a looming nuclear danger that’s bubbling in our own backyard, and I’m scared. You should be too. More
Image by Jan Canty.
Unlike its distant galactic cousin, this Death Star doesn’t orbit…it squats. Vast and immovable, it rises like a bricked-up Mongol yurt on steroids, shimmering out of the Khorasan grasslands with the sort of architectural menace even a crusading Luke Skywalker might hesitate to storm. This is the mausoleum of Öljaytu, a 25-meter-high dome of solid […]
The Israeli military intercepted and boarded the Madleen in international waters.
Berlin. Yasemin Acar is a Berlin-based activist who was aboard the Freedom Flotilla’s ship “Madleen”, a mission followed by millions on social media, as the ship tried to break Israel’s siege of Gaza. After attending Berlin’s largest Palestine protest ever last weekend, with over 60,000 protesters hitting the streets, she recounts her experience during the […]
Zohran Mamdani. (Photo: Bryan Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons)
Given that the 20th century showed that socialism in one country is essentially impossible, we surely will not have socialism in one city. There will be serious blocks on Zohran Mamdani’s ability to govern should he go on to win the general election for New York City mayor. Nonetheless, Assemblyman Mamdani’s nearly certain victory in […]
