Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen says island’s future must be decided by its people
Self-ruled Taiwan, which is claimed by Beijing, will go to the polls latest this month to choose a new president. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has stressed that the self-ruled island’s future and its relations with Beijing must be decided by its people after China’s leader Xi Jinping said “reunification” was inevitable. Beijing claims Taiwan as its own and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve its goal. It has been stepping up political and military pressure on the island since Tsai was first elected in 2016 and has ramped up its campaign in the weeks ahead of the next presidential and parliamentary elections on January 13. In a bullish New Year’s Eve address, Xi struck a stronger tone than usual over the island, promising the nation that China would “surely be reunified”. Asked about Xi’s speech at a New Year’s press conference at the presidential office in Taipei, Tsai stressed that the island was a democracy and it was its people who decided their future. “This is taking the joint will of Taiwan’s people to make a decision. After all, we are a democratic country,” she said, calling on Beijing to respect the outcome of the election and stressing it was the responsibility of both sides to maintain peace and stability in the strait that separates them. Earlier on Monday, Taiwan’s Ministry of Defence said it had detected four Chinese military aircraft and four Chinese navy vessels near the island. It said one of the aircraft had entered its air defence identification zone (ADIZ) in the southwest. Beijing sees Tsai as well as Vice President William Lai Ching-te, the frontrunner for the top, job as “separatists” and has refused offers of dialogue. Reelected in a landslide in 2020, Tsai has bolstered relations with the United States, Taiwan’s most significant ally, and stepped up efforts to modernise the island’s military. “Everyone’s home has locks on them, which is not to provoke the neighbours next door but to make yourself safer. This is the same for the doors to the country. Taiwan’s people want peace, but we want peace with respect,” she said. Tsai and Lai are from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has dominated the island’s politics in recent years leaving the China-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) in opposition. Analysts told Al Jazeera last month that Beijing was running a multi-pronged campaign to ensure the DPP is not re-elected and that the people of Taiwan make what it considers the “right choice”. In his New Year’s speech, Xi reiterated his goal of unifying China and Taiwan. “Compatriots on both sides of the [Taiwan] Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose to share in the glory of national rejuvenation,” he said. Tsai cannot run for another term in office because she has already served two terms. She will step down in May when the next president is sworn in. Adblock test (Why?)
Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II to abdicate after 52 years on the throne
The Danish queen announces January 14 abdication during New Year’s Eve address live on TV, making way for son, Crown Prince Frederik. Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II will abdicate on January 14 after 52 years on the throne and will be succeeded by her eldest son Crown Prince Frederik, she said in her annual New Year’s speech. The 83-year-old queen, who took over the throne in 1972, is the longest-serving monarch in Europe following the death of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. In February, she underwent a successful back surgery. “The surgery naturally gave rise to thinking about the future – whether the time had come to leave the responsibility to the next generation,” she said in the speech on Sunday. “I have decided that now is the right time. On 14 January 2024 – 52 years after I succeeded my beloved father – I will step down as queen of Denmark,” she said. “I leave the throne to my son, Crown Prince Frederik,” she added. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen confirmed the decision in a news release. He paid tribute to the monarch, offering a “heartfelt thank you to Her Majesty the Queen for her lifelong dedication and tireless efforts for the Kingdom”. In Denmark, formal power resides with the elected parliament and its government. The monarch is expected to stay above partisan politics, representing the nation with traditional duties ranging from state visits to national day celebrations. Born in 1940, Margrethe has been one of the most popular public figures in Denmark. The 1.82m (6-foot) tall, chain-smoking monarch often walked the streets of Copenhagen virtually unescorted and won the admiration of Danes for her warm manners and for her talents as a linguist and designer. A keen skier, she was a member of a Danish women’s air force unit as a princess, taking part in judo courses and endurance tests in the snow. Margrethe remained tough even as she grew older. In 2011, at age 70, she visited Danish troops in southern Afghanistan wearing a military jumpsuit. As monarch, she crisscrossed the country and regularly visited Greenland and the Faeroe Islands, the two semi-independent territories that are part of the Danish Realm. Adblock test (Why?)
The displaced Afghans making gruelling journeys to survive
The barren desert plain among the mountains of eastern Afghanistan is filled with hundreds of thousands of people. Some live in tents. Others live out in the open, among the piles of the few belongings they managed to take as they were forced from neighbouring Pakistan. The sprawling camp of people returning to Afghanistan through the Torkham border crossing is the latest facet of Afghans’ long, painful search for a stable home. More than 40 years of war, violence and poverty in Afghanistan have created one of the world’s most uprooted populations. Some 6 million Afghans are refugees outside the country. Another 3.5 million people are displaced within the country of 40 million, driven from their homes by war, earthquakes, drought or resources that are being depleted. Pakistan’s decision earlier this year to deport undocumented Afghans has struck them hard. Many Afghans have lived for decades in Pakistan, driven there by successive wars at home. When the order was announced, hundreds of thousands feared arrest and fled back to Afghanistan. Often, Pakistani authorities prevented them from taking anything with them, they say. Their first stop has been the camp in Torkham, where they might spend days or weeks before Taliban officials send them to a camp elsewhere. The expulsions from Pakistan have swelled the already large numbers of Afghans who are trying to migrate to Iran, hoping to find work. Adblock test (Why?)
‘Outraged’: Brazilian Muslims face growing Islamophobia over Gaza war
Sao Paulo, Brazil – It wasn’t unusual for patients to arrive in a foul temper at the hospital emergency room in São Paulo, Brazil, where physician Batull Sleiman worked. After all, every day brought new medical crises, new requests for urgent care. Sleiman had seen it all. But she was not expecting the level of anger she received several weeks ago. A patient had arrived in her examination room frustrated over the time he spent waiting for a doctor’s care. Sleiman recalled his issue was “not urgent”. Still, as she treated him, he accused her of being impolite. “You’re being rude with me because you’re not from Brazil,” Sleiman remembers him saying. “If you were in your country…” Batull Sleiman believes one of her patients lashed out after seeing her hijab [Courtesy of Batull Sleiman] Sleiman said she turned away rather than hear the rest. The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she believes the man reacted the way he did because of one thing: her hijab. “I was surprised and outraged,” Sleiman told Al Jazeera. But, she added, the atmosphere in Brazil had grown more tense since the war in Gaza had erupted. “I’ve been noticing that people have been staring more at me on the street since October.” But Sleiman is not alone in feeling singled out. As the war in Gaza grinds on, Brazil is one of many countries facing increased fears about religious discrimination, particularly towards its Muslim community. A survey released last month from the Anthropology Group on Islamic and Arab Contexts — an organisation based at the University of São Paulo — found that reports of harassment among Muslim Brazilians have been widespread since the war began. An estimated 70 percent of respondents said they knew someone who experienced religious intolerance since October 7, when the Palestinian group Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel, killing 1,140 people. Israel has since led a military offensive against Gaza, a Palestinian enclave, killing more than 21,000 people. That response has raised human rights concerns, with United Nations experts warning of a “grave risk of genocide”. While Palestinians are an ethnic group — and not a religious one — the University of São Paulo’s Professor Francirosy Barbosa found that the events of October 7 resulted in incidents of religious intolerance in Brazil, as Palestinian identity was conflated with Muslim identity. She led November’s survey of 310 Muslim Brazilians. Respondents, she explained, reported receiving insults that reflected tensions in the Gaza war. “Many Muslim women told us they are now called things like ‘Hamas daughter’ or ‘Hamas terrorist’,” she told Al Jazeera. The survey, conducted online, also found that many of the respondents also had firsthand experience with religious intolerance. “About 60 percent of the respondents affirmed that they suffered some kind of offence, either on social media or in their daily lives at work, at home or in public spaces,” Barbosa said. Women in particular, the study noted, reported slightly higher rates of religious intolerance. A Palestinian Brazilian woman holds up a sign at a protest in Brasilia on October 20 that reads, ‘Muslim women of Brazil: anti-Zionism, anti-militarism, anti-extremism’ [File: Eraldo Peres/AP Photo] The question of Islamophobia was catapulted into the national spotlight this month when a video spread on social media appearing to show a resident of Mogi das Cruzes, a suburb of São Paulo, rushing towards a Muslim woman and grabbing at her headscarf. The video was even broadcast on news outlets like CNN Brasil. One of the women involved, Karen Gimenez Oubidi, who goes by Khadija, had married a Moroccan man and converted to Islam eight years ago. She told Al Jazeera that the altercation involved one of her neighbours: She was upset after their children had argued. “She came down with her brother and was very aggressive. She called me a ‘cloth-wrapped bitch’. I soon realised it was not only about the kids’ fight,” Gimenez Oubidi said. Neighbours attempted to separate the two women. One man in the video, however, grabbed Gimenez Oubidi from behind, wrapping an arm around her throat to hold her down. Gimenez Oubidi identified him to Al Jazeera as her neighbour’s brother. Karen Gimenez Oubidi, known as Khadija, was the subject of a viral video that raised questions about Islamophobia [Courtesy of Karen Gimenez Oubidi] “He said a few times to me, ‘What are you doing now, terrorist?’ He didn’t say it loudly: It was just for me to hear. He knew what he was doing,” Gimenez Oubidi said. She added that the fight her son had had with the neighbour’s child was also over her hijab. The woman who attacked Oubidi, Fernanda — she said she did not want her full name revealed for fear of a public backlash — disputed this account. Fernanda said her son had been hit by Oubidi’s son in the playground, and while she had physically attacked Fernanda, she had not referenced her religion. “I never insulted her for her religion. That simply didn’t happen. I’d never do something like that,” she said. A government report from July noted that religious intolerance “occurs most intensely against those of African origin, but it also affects Indigenous, Roma, immigrant and converted individuals, including Muslims and Jews, as well as atheist, agnostic and non-religious people”. Brazil is predominantly Christian, home to an estimated 123 million Catholics — more than any other country in the world. But it has a long-standing, if smaller, Muslim population. Academics believe Islam arrived in the country with the transatlantic slave trade, as kidnapped African Muslims continued to practice their religion in their new surroundings. One group of enslaved Muslim Brazilians even launched a rebellion against the government in 1835, called the Malê uprising — a term derived from the Yoruba word for Muslim. Brazil’s Muslim population grew with waves of immigration in the late 19th and 20th centuries, particularly after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Arab immigrants, particularly from Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, came to know Brazil as their home.
Assad forces target crowded market, kill two: Syria’s White Helmets
Meanwhile, Israel bombed Aleppo and Neirab, leaving Syrians trapped between two forces raining fire from the sky. Idlib, Syria — Two civilians, including a child, were killed, and 16 others, including four children, were injured in an artillery attack by Syrian regime forces targeting a popular market in the centre of Idlib city on Saturday evening, according to the Syria Civil Defence. “We received two martyrs and 14 injuries, including two critical cases, at the hospital, and they are now in the operating room,” said Ismail al-Hassan, the head of the emergency department at Idlib University Hospital. Al-Hassan told Al Jazeera that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had recently intensified its targeting of the area, necessitating a constant state of preparedness to receive any injuries within the city or its vicinity in the event of any bombardment. “For nearly 13 years, we have been working to save civilian casualties targeted by the Assad regime and Russia,” al-Hassan said. The Syria Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, said that earlier on Saturday, a child was wounded as a result of artillery shelling targeting the city of Atarib in the western Aleppo countryside. “The timing and location of today’s attack in Idlib indicate that its goal is to kill the largest number of civilians,” said Ahmed Yazji, a board member of the Syria Civil Defence. Yazj told Al Jazeera that the attacks by the Syrian regime and Russia on the Idlib region consistently aim to target vital centres, schools, and hospitals with the intention of killing civilians. “Since the beginning of 2023 until today, we have documented more than 1,200 attacks by the Assad regime and Russia on the northwestern Syria region, including 27 attacks on schools and 16 attacks on displaced camps,” he said. “The attacks of the Assad regime and Russia on the region can only be described as terrorist attacks seeking to undermine stability in the area.” Idlib province, the last stronghold controlled by Syrian opposition fighters, is considered the most densely populated area in northwestern Syria, hosting 4.5 million people, including 1.9 million living in internally displaced camps, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Within moments, the market turned into a pool of blood and thick dust,” said Abdullah Aloush, a displaced person from Khan Shaykhun and the owner of a nearby shop in the targeted area in Idlib city. Aloush told Al Jazeera that the market was targeted at a time when it was crowded with civilians. “Initially, myself and those with me in the shop were helpless, not knowing what to do, before we went out to check on our neighbours and assist the injured.” Earlier on Saturday, Israeli warplanes conducted air strikes on Aleppo and Neirab airports, as well as several points belonging to the Syrian regime south of Aleppo. The Israeli air strikes targeted farms between the villages of Zahabiya and Sheikh Saeed in the Neirab military airport area, housing warehouses and headquarters for Iranian militias. A missile also fell in the area of Aleppo International Airport and Neirab military airport, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London. “As usual, the Assad regime, unable to respond to Israeli raids on its sites, targets civilians in northwestern Syria,” said Mohammed al-Saleh, 34, the owner of a cafe on the street in Idlib that was bombed. Al-Saleh, who was approximately 15m (50 feet) away from the bombing, warned everyone in the cafe not to leave the place for fear of a repeat of the bombing in the area and to avoid new casualties. “At these moments, our feeling can only be described as being in the embrace of death,” said Al-Saleh. “In these days, while people around the world are preparing to celebrate the start of a new year, we in Idlib are preparing to bury our friends and family who were killed today.” Adblock test (Why?)
A library of the ‘future’: Can it make the world a better place?
Oslo, Norway — Every May, literature lovers from all over the world walk 40 minutes through the hilly Nordmarka Forest outside of Norway’s capital Oslo and stop at a place where 1,000 Norwegian spruce, planted in 2014, are slowly growing. Here, the foresters make coffee on a fire and people gather around as a writer hands over a manuscript that will not be read until 2114. This is the site of the Future Library, a century-long project conceived by Scottish artist Katie Paterson. The vision is to get 100 carefully chosen authors to submit a manuscript each, one a year, and safeguard the works, unread, for a century, when they will be unsealed and published as a testament to the passage of time, mankind’s endurance and the hope that was imbued in the project by the generations that came before. The manuscripts are sealed inside the “Silent Room” at the city’s spectacular public library, the Deichman Bjorvika. Designed by artists and architects Atelier Oslo and Lund Hagem alongside Paterson, the Silent Room is hidden away on Deichman’s top floor, where Norway’s oldest book is being kept similarly safe from a possible flood. One hundred layers – one for each year and author – line the undulating walls of the Silent Room, folding on top of each other in soft, asymmetric curves from floor to ceiling. They resemble tree rings and are made from the wood of older trees that have been felled to make space for the Future Library forest – a process of continuous regeneration carried out as part of the maintenance of the managed forests around the city. The works can be any length, in any language and style, but all we will know of them, in our lifetime, is the title. There is little danger of a sneak-peak: Each manuscript is encased in a steel box embedded deep within a “tree ring” and hidden behind a glass panel emanating a soft but bright light. It reveals nothing but the author’s name, alongside their year, and is secured by an alarm. Together, these works will create a literary time capsule of each passing year, with future generations – so is the hope – taking over the project’s legacy. The Silent Room has a temple-like calm. No shoes are allowed inside and the room’s soft smell of wood serves as an umbilical cord to the forest outside that will help bring the books to life – today’s saplings that will provide the paper for about 3,000 copies of the anthology. Planted on a slope surrounded by the verdant forest, these young trees form a living amphitheatre around the wooden bench where the handover ceremonies take place. The trees, lit by a soft October sunshine on our visit, look like an audience. It is hard to shake the feeling that they are watching. “But they are!” Anne Beate Hovind, the chairwoman of the Future Library Trust, exclaims. A signpost in Norway’s Nordmarka Forest directs the way to the Future Library. The official agreement for the Future Library forest was signed in May 2022 [Anna Pivovarchuk/Al Jazeera] A 100-year plan The idea of the Future Library came to Paterson on a train journey while she was drawing tree rings on a napkin. Paterson, who has recently unveiled an interactive installation at Apple’s HQ, is known for artworks that challenge our perceptions and ideas of fundamental principles around us, like time, space and our place in them. She has mapped all of the dead stars, outfitted a grand piano to play a Morse-coded version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, bounced off the surface of the moon and set up a direct phone line to a melting iceberg. It was never going to stop at tree rings. Paterson became fascinated with the notion of deep time in the primordial landscapes of Iceland’s far north where she took on a job as a chambermaid after completing her art degree. She’s since dedicated her career to exploring the profound connection she senses between humans and the planet. It has fostered her love of forests and their sense of timelessness, with trees carrying the memory of an era long before ours. “Books are trees, libraries are forests,” Paterson explains. “Every book you pick up has its origin in a tree somewhere – it was alive.” “It’s actually the shortest time span of all my work. It’s only 100 years,” Paterson laughs, as she speaks of the project over a video call from her home in Fife, Scotland. As the Future Library is about to enter its 10th year, Paterson says the biggest change in the way the project is perceived has been the shift in perspective towards climate and ecology. At the start, she was mostly queried about the physicality of the book and whether books will still exist in 100 years. Now, she says, the questions are turning to the extinction crisis and whether there will be anyone left to read the books. “It’s just horrendous to watch and learn about new oil fields and … the profits going up, still, which is just unthinkable,” Paterson says, frustrated. It’s totally depressing, she admits. But, on the other hand, she sees that change is happening. “I guess artists have always, always responded to that particular moment in time, whatever it might be. And now, this is absolutely our moment,” she insists. Manuscripts are slotted into the walls of the Silent Room. There are one hundred layers – one for each year and author — resembling the rings of a tree [Anna Pivovarchuk/Al Jazeera] Leap of faith With the climate catastrophe and the trajectory of our species at the core of the Future Library project, words like “trust,” “hope” and “optimism” come up incessantly in discussions around the project. It was “such a leap of faith”, Paterson admits – one that found a soft landing in the capable hands of Hovind, who is also the project’s producer. Hovind initially met Paterson in 2011, in her role as
I don’t care who wins the US presidential election
It was a choreographed scene starring the US president and First Lady that was meant to convey the restorative spirit of the festive season. Last week, Joe and Jill Biden emerged from behind a black curtain like giddy celebrities and took their red seats before a large Christmas tree brimming with decorations and gifts at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. Their excited audience included a gaggle of young patients and their parents anxious to see the commander-in-chief and his wife who would read aloud the popular poem, The Night Before Christmas. “Thanks for letting us come to see you,” President Biden said. Indeed, every First Lady beginning with Bess Truman – 75 years ago – has made the annual pilgrimage to the children’s hospital “to spread holiday cheer”. In 2022, Biden became the first sitting president to tag along. A frail-looking but animated Biden winked, waved and smiled as the First Lady read from the picture book, holding it aloft. When the First Lady finished, Biden thanked the hospital staff. “It’s special, special what you do.” He had this parting advice: “Where there is life, there is hope.” With that, Biden urged the children to return after they had recovered to offer support to other kids spending the holidays in hospital rather than at home. A hospital official applauded the Bidens for “continuing this annual tradition…[that] brings so much joy to all the children, the families and our staff”. “God bless you all,” Biden said. Their performance lasted less than 10 minutes. However brief, it was designed in part, I suppose, to burnish “Uncle Joe’s” credentials as a caring president who is all too familiar with the worry, heartache and searing pain of caring for ill children or losing them to a sudden, violent act with awful consequences. But watching the Bidens stage this perfunctory ritual – with television cameras in tow of course – only deepened my contempt for a decrepit president who considers the welfare and lives of some children more valuable than others. Instead of using his powers and influence to try to stop the maiming and killing of thousands of Palestinian children, Biden has, in odious effect, encouraged the maiming and killing of thousands of Palestinian children. In occupied Palestine, Biden is not a harbinger of “joy”, but the co-architect of the dystopian carnage engulfing a shattered people and their shattered land. This complicit president, who is fulsome party to a systematic campaign to snuff out life and hope in Gaza and the West Bank, had the near-sickening audacity to share what amounts to a cheap bit of greeting-card-like philosophy that “where there is life, there is hope”. Astonishing. Biden compounded this obscenity by visiting a hospital to praise doctors and nurses tending to the sick while America’s proxy, Israel, has ruthlessly gone about occupying, ransacking and destroying hospitals throughout Gaza and forcibly disappearing and killing Palestinian doctors and nurses. What they did and how they did it – to borrow a phrase – was special, too. That Biden and his handlers were blind to this blatant and ugly juxtaposition is a measure of how disposable and forgettable the promising lives and horrific deaths of Palestinians are in their misanthropic geopolitical calculus. The litany of halting images of the dirt-caked faces of Palestinian children calling out for their lost mamas and babas or small, limp bodies wrapped in white shrouds apparently did not dissuade Biden from playing his part in an agreeable photo op that, given the lethal times and bleak context, stings of indecency. The Bidens’ token appearance and all that it revealed about the president’s signature nature has served as the exclamation point to a brewing realisation that, like a hurricane, has gathered strength and momentum in me since early October. I have been such a fool. I have written columns – that I wish I could erase – praising Biden as a literate, if not honourable, alternative to the mayhem and madness embodied by an illiterate, dishonourable charlatan named Donald Trump. I have written other columns – that I also wish I could erase – extolling the wisdom of enlightened Americans who, I was confident, would choose Biden over Trump again this coming November and spare a fretting world four more years of Trumpian madness and mayhem. Enlightened Americans exist. There just aren’t enough of them. I chided other, much wiser columnists, who wrote that beyond the rhetorical edges, both Biden and Trump were elected to protect the interests – at home and abroad – of the oligarchs they serve under the risible guise of a phantom “democracy” addicted to war and plunder for profit. On this defining score, Biden has proven to be every bit as useful and reliable a marionette as his predecessor. Trump’s offish manners and profanity offend the delicate sensibilities of the liberal and progressive cognoscenti, not his loyalty to the disfiguring status quo. I could not care less who prevails in the upcoming presidential campaign. I will not worry a whit about America’s “future” because if even the recent past is any litmus, history’s most efficient killing machine is bound to cause more death, pain and suffering across the globe – whoever is president. This coming year I will enjoy the entertaining spectacle of a country slipping deeper into fanaticism and dissonance while much of it, predictably, turns to muppets with megaphones, such as Joe Rogan and Bill Maher, for a way out of (or into) the impending abyss. Speaking of muppets, a note to the swarm of nitwits who will, no doubt, caution me to be “careful what I wish for”. How much worse can it get? A genocide is being perpetrated against millions of innocent Palestinians while dear, old Uncle Joe twiddles his knotty thumbs. Rather than get incensed about that, you’ll get miffed at me for writing this “outrageous” column. Priorities. Finally, I think it would be fitting if Trump returned to the White House. Then, all of the daffy guff about
Renowned Australian journalist John Pilger passes away at 84
From Palestine to Cambodia, Pilger worked extensively to expose human suffering caused by imperialist governments. John Pilger, the renowned Australia-born investigative journalist who was a trenchant critic of the West’s “imperialist” foreign policy, has died at age 84. His family released a short statement on his social media accounts on Sunday to confirm his passing in London, the British capital, a day earlier. “His journalism and documentaries were celebrated around the world, but to his family he was simply the most amazing and loved Dad, Grandad and partner. Rest in peace,” the statement read. He is survived by long-time partner, journalist Yvonne Roberts, and his two children, Sam and Zoe. Thousands of people took to social media to mourn his death and remember his work. “The world just lost one of its finest journalists and a man of utmost integrity,” one user wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “A great journalist, a fine man, and a tower of strength has fallen,” another wrote. ‘Imperialist and colonialist agenda’ Pilger was born in Sydney, Australia in 1939, but developed much of his career when staying in the United Kingdom, where he began working as a freelance journalist in the early 1960s. His main focus was uncovering and exposing abuses of power by governments and large corporations. He was an unwavering critic of the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom’s foreign policies, which he considered to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. He was a vocal critic of the US-led military interventions in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. In his book, The New Rulers of the World, Pilger exposed the role of the West in the 1960s coup in Indonesia and the US-led “war on terror” that ravaged Iraq. Pilger was internationally acclaimed for his documentaries, which chose diverse subject matters and uncovered atrocities from around the world. He made The Quiet Mutiny (1970) after a visit to Vietnam. In 1979, his Year Zero showed the heart-wrenching aftermath of the overthrow of dictator Pol Pot in Cambodia, propelling him to international fame and directing attention to the plight of civilians in the Southeast Asian nation. His latest in an illustrious list of dozens of documentaries, The Dirty War on the NHS, was released in 2019 and detailed an investigation into the woes of the British health system. Pilger was also a serious critic of the Australian government’s treatment of his country’s Aboriginal peoples and wrote The Secret Country – his best-selling history of Australia – and made several documentaries about the subject. He had a long history of writing books and articles and making documentaries about the Palestinian people and their brutal treatment by Israel and its Western allies. Several of his final posts on social media dealt with the carnage unfolding in the Gaza Strip, where nearly 22,000 Palestinians, including many journalists, have been killed so far by the Israeli military since October 7. “When I was last in Gaza, the Israeli air force terrorised the population by flying fast and loud and low at night,” reads a post from last month. “All children bed-wetted and had violent nightmares, said a psychologist, and were ‘damaged forever’. Such is Israel’s exercise of its ‘right to self defence’.” Pilger was a staunch ally of jailed Australian journalist Julian Assange and had spent much of the past decade campaigning for his freedom. Our dear dear John Pilger has left us. He was one of the greats. A consistent ally of the dispossessed, John dedicated his life to telling their stories and awoke the world to the greatest injustices. He showed great empathy for the weak and was unflinching with the powerful.… https://t.co/4ENQMwq5Os pic.twitter.com/L986CI3MlJ — Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) December 31, 2023 “Julian and David are Spartacus,” he wrote in his final published piece last month, in reference to Assange and Australian whistleblower David McBride. “The Palestinians are Spartacus. People who fill the streets with flags and principle and solidarity are Spartacus. We are all Spartacus if we want to be.” Pilger was a two-time recipient of Britain’s Journalist of the Year award and received numerous accolades around the world, including the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009. “It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it,” reads his quote that adorns his website and social media accounts. Adblock test (Why?)
Walkout weapon: British school students battle curbs on Gaza war protests
Luton, United Kingdom — At exactly 11am on a Saturday in mid-November, hundreds of students from Luton Sixth Form College streamed out of their school, gathering outside in a sea of black, white and red keffiyehs and Palestinian flags. They carried banners and placards saying “Bombing kids is not self-defence” and “This is no ‘conflict’ it’s genocide”, referring to Israel’s war on Gaza after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel. Student organisers of the rally read out speeches against the war, in which Israeli bombs and artillery fire have now killed more than 21,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 8,000 children. Yet Israel wasn’t the only target of criticism at the rally: The students were protesting against their college’s links to an arms company that had supplied weapons and advanced military platforms to Israel. The walkout was organised by the school’s student council after its chair, 18-year-old Hassan Sajjad, was approached by students critical of the senior leadership at the college, who some students felt had failed to address or acknowledge strong student sentiment towards the Israel-Gaza conflict. But a week later, Sajjad and the other council members were informed by the school leadership that their entire council had been disbanded, months before their term was supposed to end in April 2024. Their student council email communication was also suspended. “It shattered my understanding of democracy in college, and the idea of freedom of speech and ‘British values’,” Sajjad said. Since the start of the war, the United Kingdom has seen unrelenting demonstrations urging the government to call for a ceasefire. Yet as students in schools, colleges and universities across the UK also joined the chorus condemning the war, they have also been reprimanded, subtly or explicitly, for their pro-Palestine advocacy in several instances, igniting concerns around freedom of speech. Luton, a town less than 48km (30 miles) north of London with a majority ethnic minority population, has been at the centre of that debate after the backlash faced by students over their walkout. It all started when students discovered that their school had played host to a weapons giant with ties to Israel’s military. Students at the protest at Luton Sixth Form College on November 18, 2023 [Courtesy Miheer Shet] ‘Protest to have your voice heard’ Though Israel is today a major arms exporter, it continues to import weapons from the West. The United States is its biggest military partner and the source of 83 percent of Israel’s weapons imports between 1950 and 2020. But the UK has also been a steady military ally to Israel. It has licensed arms worth more than 442 million pounds ($563m) to Israel between May 2015 and August 2022 and is now facing a legal challenge in the High Court from Palestinian human rights groups. Demonstrations have been held outside other arms factories like those of defence giant BAE Systems and Leonardo — formerly known as Finmeccanica — which produce parts for Israeli fighter jets. In late October, dozens of trade unionists protested outside the Kent site of Instro Precision Ltd, a British subsidiary of Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems. Yet there are more subtle ways in which Israel’s war machine intersects with British educational institutions. Leonardo, one of the world’s largest arms companies, manufactures naval guns installed on Israeli warships used against Gaza in the current war. In a “multi-billion dollar” deal, Leonardo supplied seven training helicopters to Israel, according to The Times of Israel. It also provided the Israeli Ministry of Defense with “advanced mobile radars” in June. Thirty percent of the company is owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance according to Campaign Against Arms Trade, with substantial production in both the US and the UK. Leonardo has also participated in career fairs at British schools and colleges — including Luton Sixth Form College, students discovered, as scrutiny on Israel’s weapons suppliers grew with the spiralling death count of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Since the start of the October 7 war, Leonardo’s market valuation has grown by 20 percent. A walkout wasn’t the student council’s first planned course of action against the war. The council – who represent over 3,000 students – suggested organising a fundraiser for Gaza and the occupied West Bank. As the civilian death count mounted in Gaza, the council also flagged the college’s relationship with Leonardo. For about a month, their requests were met with silence. Then, the school’s leadership said the students could fundraise but only for an event that wasn’t specifically for Palestinians. “If students aren’t being catered for and the [school leaders] are not respecting the student council – the people who represent the thousands – then you only have one option left: that’s to protest to have your voice heard”, Sajjad said. On November 18, hundreds of students walked out of their lesson in what was a peaceful protest. “We wanted students to know this is your legal right to protest, and you shouldn’t feel pressured or afraid to protest”, said Arsalan Ilyas, 17, a student at the college. ‘Inherently Islamophobic’ The crackdown on the now-suspended council was swift, but its members soon discovered more. They found out, from social media platform X, that Shout Out UK, an organisation that aims to equip people with “critical thinking skills and emotional resilience needed to question divisive or extreme content” according to its CEO, Matteo Bergamini, was delivering workshops at the college in December. The news sparked further outrage among students, as Shout Out UK has worked on a number of Home Office Prevent programmes across the country, with a focus on countering extremist misogyny, online disinformation and the far right. Prevent, the UK government’s controversial counter-terrorism programme which aims to “stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism”, has been accused by critics of conflating extremism – and on occasion, pro-Palestine advocacy – disproportionately with Muslim students. According to Waqas Tufail, a reader in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University, pro-Palestinian activism has long been regarded “formally and informally” as
What’s the Philadelphi Corridor border zone that Israel wants to control?
Israel has said it wants to take control of the entirety of the border area between Gaza and Egypt as it signals that its brutal war on Gaza is nowhere near the end. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a weekly news conference on Saturday that the Philadelphi Corridor “must be in our hands” and shut down to ensure the security outcome Tel Aviv desires. Israel’s war on the besieged enclave has killed more than 21,000 Palestinians. With the fighting now in its 13th week, what is the significance of the corridor, why does Israel want control and what could be the implications? What’s the Philadelphi Corridor? The Philadelphi Corridor, also known as the Philadelphi Route, is the 14km (8.7-mile) long strip of land that represents the entirety of the border area between Gaza and Egypt. It was established as a buffer zone controlled and patrolled by Israeli armed forces as part of the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt that ended Israel’s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula and reopened the Suez Canal. Its stated purpose was to stop weapons and material from reaching the hands of Palestinians inside the Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied, and to prevent people from moving between the Palestinian lands and Egypt without tough checks. “It must be shut. It is clear that any other arrangement would not ensure the demilitarisation that we seek,” Netanyahu said on Saturday, also signalling the war may last many more months. [embedded content] Where does Egypt stand on this? In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip under international pressure and instead turned the densely populated Palestinian land into the world’s largest open-air prison. Egypt became the main player in control of the corridor, which signifies the only link with the outside world not controlled by Israel – as Tel Aviv maintains a land, sea and air blockade of the strip from all other sides. An agreement after the Israeli disengagement from the area in 2005 allowed Egypt to deploy 750 soldiers and heavy arms to patrol and safeguard the Egyptian side of the corridor, with the responsibility of the other side handed over to the Palestinian Authority. But Hamas was in full control of the Gaza Strip some two years after the Israeli withdrawal, and things changed. Over the years, Egypt said it kept destroying tunnels dug out by Palestinians to smuggle weapons and people, but Israel has questioned the effectiveness of Cairo’s moves. Now, Israel wants full control of the border area, which includes the crucial Rafah crossing, supposedly to ensure its security. But that would amount to a de facto full reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, something Israel and the US have publicly disagreed over. Both Egypt and Hamas have been against Israel regaining control of the corridor, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has repeatedly said Cairo won’t allow Palestinians to be displaced from their homeland into Egypt. What’s Israel after? Netanyahu wishes to reassure his domestic audience – which has grown angry and critical of his handling of the war and his failure to bring back dozens of captives still in Gaza — according to Rami Khouri, a journalist and distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut. At the same time, Khouri said, the Israeli PM wants to instil more fear among Palestinians and create fresh leverage for negotiations with the US and Egypt. “So, anything he says has multiple audiences, multiple purposes, and should not be taken at face value,” Khouri told Al Jazeera. “We have to take this as another element that he is throwing in the negotiating pot.” Khouri said Egypt would not agree to Israel retaking control of the corridor and establishing a military presence there decades after it left. He said Netanyahu’s comments can also be viewed within the context of Israel’s constant pursuit of territorial expansionism since its creation in 1948 — even though this has not brought the country security. “The more they expand, the more they control land, the more they try to be secure by taking over people’s lands and driving people out of their homes, the less secure they become because they just instigate greater and more intense forms of resistance by Palestinians and other people, including Hezbollah in Lebanon.” Didn’t Israel want another corridor in the north? Yes, Israel brought up the idea of another “buffer zone” along its border with the northern part of Gaza with Arab leaders and the US last month as part of its “day after Hamas” plans. Tel Aviv reportedly wants to raise this corridor inside Gaza in order to make sure it won’t suffer another attack like the one on October 7 by Hamas that killed about 1,140 people inside Israel. Earlier this month, White House National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby said Washington opposes “any reduction of the geographic limits of Gaza”. The US has also said it wants the Palestinian Authority to take over security of the Strip, contradicting Israel’s aspirations for establishing a direct presence there. [embedded content] Adblock test (Why?)