https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/10/09/two-years-of-savagery-how-israel-normalized-mass-slaughter/

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/10/09/two-years-of-savagery-how-israel-normalized-mass-slaughter/

On paper, the guardrails are clear. When the U.S. ships weapons overseas, partner governments promise three things: That they’ll use them only for authorized purposes, keep them secure, and not hand them off to third parties.

If those conditions are violated or serious suspicions arise that they are, the State Department is obligated to investigate and, in many cases, alert Congress.

In practice, however, a new Government Accountability Office report shows the system is ad hoc, with little guidance or follow through. The State Department largely relies on overseas Defense Department officials for tips about potential end-use violations.

Since 2019, the Pentagon has flagged more than 150 incidents that could be violations. But the State Department has reported just three end-use violations to Capitol Hill.

The State Department Isn’t Telling Congress When U.S. Weapons Fall Into the Wrong Hands

Congress is being left in the dark about the fate of U.S. weapons transfers, a new federal watchdog report found.

^{Alain Stephens (The Intercept)}

“This is a great day for the world,” the U.S. president said when the first phase of a ceasefire agreement was announced. “This is a wonderful day, a wonderful day for everybody.”

It has taken two years of unrelenting genocide for us to finally hear this. I keep wondering: Is it real? Might our suffering actually end soon?

This partial ceasefire deal comes amid the most horrific phase the Gaza Strip has witnessed since the war began. Gaza City has been under a rapidly advancing Israeli occupation, putting the roughly 200,000 people who remain there into unimaginable circumstances. According to the latest reports, Israel has displaced nearly 900,000 people from the city.

I became one of them just one month ago. It feels like a whole year. I left everything behind and fled to the south, where Israel has said it would be safer, but bombs still rain down around us. Now, the thought of returning home again brings life back into me. It brings peace even for a rare moment.

My heart pounded as I followed the news last night. It was “the final minutes,” all the channels reported. Everyone was ready to sign. I watched my people finally smile — finally feel a moment of comfort — after two long years of sadness and grief.

Why did it take two full years? Were they waiting for us to suffer even more? Children, women, and men have been killed in this genocide. Generations are growing up and being born amid these unfathomable horrors. This war has shaped new identities — minds and hearts forged in pain, loss, and resilience.

Now, Israel expects us to feel grateful for obtaining our basic rights to life and liberty — as if they were favors, not ordinary human rights.

In the tent camps where I am now displaced, the word “ceasefire” feels empty. The last round of ceasefire negotiations began with enthusiasm. It ended with my family displaced in a tent.

Ceasefire doesn’t mean the end of our suffering. It is simply a step toward justice after endless days and nights filled with fear and violence against us in Gaza. It doesn’t bring back the schools, universities, hospitals, streets, or homes that Israel bombed. It cannot heal the trauma we carry from those long nights of pain and terror. The sounds of drones and explosions will forever echo in our minds. A ceasefire cannot erase that.

I Have Hope for This Ceasefire, But It Can’t Undo Two Years of Genocide

U.S. President Donald Trump said the ceasefire deal marked “a wonderful day for everybody.” Why did it take two years to arrive?

^{Sara Awad (The Intercept)}

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/37163347

davel

2025-10-06 14:51:27

The Liberal Abandonment Of Greta Thunberg

The Liberal Abandonment Of Greta Thunberg

The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israel and reportedly maltreated by her Israeli captors after she was kidnapped, along with hundreds of other activists, from Gaza’s territorial waters on Friday.

^{Nate Bear (¡Do Not Panic!)}

Following Hamas’ Al Aqsa Flood operation into southern Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the subsequent bombardment of the Gaza Strip, I began making month-long reporting trips to Israel-Palestine to cover different aspects of the war.

In October and November 2023, I documented a wave of settler and military violence across rural villages in the southern West Bank, resulting in the complete ethnic cleansing of more than 20 communities in less than 40 days—a campaign of violence and displacement that continues to this day.

In March 2024, I embedded myself with Jewish Israeli nationalists who saw it as their civic and religious duty to travel south to the Nitzana and Karem Shalom border crossings, where they worked to block humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza’s starving population. I accompanied them, documenting their collaboration with the Israeli military, which—despite both Israeli and international law—allowed these civilians into closed military zones to obstruct aid shipments. I conducted interviews with civilians who openly expressed their genocidal ambitions, while military reservists spoke candidly about war crimes they had committed while deployed in Gaza.

These reporting trips ended in October 2024 when I was arrested by the Israeli military and incarcerated as an “enemy of the state” for factual reporting.

Previously, Israeli politicians and Knesset members weren’t able to openly advocate for turning the Gaza Strip into an exclusively Jewish Israeli enclave while still maintaining their international image as victims and framing their military actions as purely defensive. But that was changing.

My goal was to document how the resettlement movement had evolved. Tracking its shift from a fringe effort to a mainstream Israeli political cause. I planned to follow and embed with these groups, from their settlements to their demonstrations at various border checkpoints into Gaza.

Locked in the Levant

a firsthand account of my arrest by the IDF and my incarceration and interrogations by the Israeli security services.

^substack.com

Parola filtrata: nsfw Clicca per aprire/chiudere

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55248056

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55246505

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55246889

Clergy representing six different faiths — from the First United Methodist Church to Judaism — delivered a letter to the Florida Department of Emergency Management seeking permission from the state to provide one-on-one chaplaincy services to the detainees at the detention center, a practice that’s common in most other correctional facilities in Florida.

This time, the group received a hopeful response — though there was some confusion about the type of religious services that are already taking place at the facility.

Keith Pruett, the deputy executive director of FDEM, told clergy that he thought the facility already provided religious services, according to Rev. David Williamson, who attended the letter drop-off on Thursday. Williamson said that Pruett agreed to bring up the issue with Kevin Guthrie, the executive director of FDEM, when he returns to Tallahassee.

After years of working to dismantle diversity programs, ban books and rewrite classroom curriculum, conservatives are converging on a new battlefront in their push to overhaul public education: teachers’ unions.

This spring, a right-leaning think tank called the Freedom Foundation launched the Teacher Freedom Alliance as a free, national membership program meant to incentivize public educators to jump ship from traditional teachers unions.

The group, which is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, encourages teachers to instead take advantage of its $2 million liability insurance, professional development training and curriculum resources, including recommended learning from PragerU, a conservative group that produces free video content “upholding Judeo-Christian values.” The group is structured as a nonprofit, so it doesn't have to disclose its donors.

This Texas group aims to be a Republican option to teachers unions

The Teacher Freedom Alliance launched this spring as a free, national membership program meant to incentivize educators to jump ship from traditional unions. 

^{Taylor Goldenstein (Houston Chronicle)}

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-ukraines-european-allies-fuel-russias-war-economy-2025-10-10/

The venture capitalist has hosted and attended events and lectured on the topic for decades, going back to the 1990s, according to a report by Wired. In recent months, he has spoken to theologians and podcasters about the antichrist both publicly and in private. His beliefs are diffuse, meandering and often confusing, but one tenet he’s steadfastly maintained over the years is that the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the antichrist. In his talks, he uses the term “antichrist” almost interchangeably with “one-world state”.

He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI, and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

The political svengali and investor has been giving lectures on ‘an evil king or tyrant … who appears in the end times’

^{Johana Bhuiyan (The Guardian)}