08 June 21
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It's Live on the HomePage Now: Juan Cole | Capitol Insurrection in Jerusalem? Netanyahu Calls New Government a "Fraud," Calls for Massive Squatter Protests
In his continued attempt to claim the title of the Trump of the Middle East, Netanyahu instigated the Right wing and the hundreds of thousands of squatters on Palestinian land against the “Change” coalition of eight parties seeking to unseat him, which run the gamut from the extreme right to the left-liberal. He rejected the warning of Nadav Argaman, the head of the Shin Bet intelligence agency, that heated rhetoric could incite violence among Israelis during the transition and could even lead to an assassination. Argaman appears to have been criticizing Netanyahu. The Jerusalem Post reports that Avigdor Lieberman of the “Israel Our Home Party,” who is part of the “Change” coalition, asserted last week that he anticipates that what “everyone saw happen in the Capitol in Washington to happen” in Jerusalem. The same source says that Netanyahu is refusing to have his staff prepare a transition to Bennett should he win the Knesset vote of confidence this coming Wednesday. (This is another petty gesture he seems to have borrowed from Trump). Netanyahu riposted, “It is not possible to shut us up and to prevent criticisms from being launched,” adding, “the freedom of expression is not incitement, and they are attempting to portray the Right as violent and a danger to democracy.” Netanyahu had called on squatters on Palestinian land in the West Bank to surround and besiege the homes of some Change coalition members of parliament on the Right, to pressure them into defecting to Netanyahu. He is using the squatters, who are armed and often terrorize indigenous Palestinians and steal their property, as a sort of Mussolini-style Black Shirt paramilitary. Netanyahu’s Likud Party was influenced by the far right nationalist tendencies of European politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Netanyahu has criticized Change leaders Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid for accepting into their coalition Mansour Abbas of the United Arab List, an Israeli of Palestinian Muslim heritage who provided the essential 61st seat to Change in the 120-member parliament. He said he had never intended to ally with Abbas. Daher points out that this assertion is a lie, and that Netanyahu wooed Abbas but the possibility of having him join the Likud-led coalition was nixed by Shas, the Orthodox religious party, which said it would refuse to sit in Netanyahu’s government if it included a Palestinian-Israeli. Netanyahu warned that the small leftist parties, Meretz and Labor, and the centrist There is a Future Party (Yesh Atid) of Lapid would never take bold action against Israel’s enemies or inside Iran. Netanyahu boasted that his government had doubled the number of Israeli squatters on the Palestinian West Bank (he didn’t put it that way of course). Israel militarily occupies the Palestinian West Bank, and for the occupying power to flood its own citizens into occupied territory is a war crime in international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids it in hopes of forestalling the sort of thing Nazi Germany did in occupied Poland, where it expelled Poles and brought in ethnic Germans to replace them, in hopes of Germanizing Poland. Netanyahu charged that “their government will not stand steadfast before pressures to freeze the building of settlements or even to uproot the settlers, or against pressures [to allow] the opening of an American consulate for the Palestinians in Jerusalem and the reopening of the issue of dividing Jerusalem. This government will not stand against the return of the United States to the nuclear deal [with Iran] that threatens our existence.” Israel unilaterally annexed part of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which is illegal in international law, and which is not recognized by most of the world’s countries. Netanyahu is trying to stay in office in part by running against Joe Biden’s foreign policy, which seeks a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine and a return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which had limited Iranian enrichment of uranium to 3.6% for reactor fuel. Since Netanyahu conspired with Trump to cancel the deal, Iran has begun enriching as high as 60%. Enrichment to 95% is needed for an atomic bomb. Netanyahu called on two right wing members of incoming prime minister Naftali Bennett’s own Yamina Party to “do the right thing” and defect to him. For his part, Bennett, who is to Netanyahu’s Right on most issues, called on his rival to do the right thing and not engage in a “scorched earth” policy that would harm Israel. |
ilal Daher reports at the Israeli newspaper Arab 48
An unarmed Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile launches during an operational test from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. (photo: Senior Airman Ian Dudley/U.S. Air Force/AP)
Not Even COVID-19 Could Slow Down Nuclear Spending
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "A new report finds that nine countries collectively spent $72 billion in 2020 on nukes."
A new report finds that nine countries collectively spent $72 billion in 2020 on nukes.
t’s very profitable to prepare for omnicide,” Daniel Ellsberg, famed whistleblower and anti-nuclear weapons activist, said in a recent interview. “Northrop Grumman and Boeing and Lockheed and General Dynamics make a lot of money out of preparing for such a war. The congressmen get campaign contributions, they get votes in their district and almost every state for preparing for that.”
But don’t just take it from Ellsberg. At an investor conference in 2019, a managing director from the investment bank Cowen Inc. queried Raytheon’s CEO on this subject. “We’re about to exit the INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty] with Russia,” said the Cowen executive. Did this mean, he asked, whether “we will really get a defense budget that will really benefit Raytheon?” Raytheon’s CEO happily responded that he was “pretty optimistic” about where things were headed.
A new report from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons released Monday examines in detail just who’s getting all the radioactive cash and why. ICAN received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 in recognition for its work “to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.”
There are currently nine countries that possess nuclear weapons: the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. ICAN calculated that they collectively spent $72.6 billion in 2020 on nukes.
The U.S. was responsible for just over half of this doomsday payout, at $37.4 billion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, U.S. nuclear spending is anticipated to soon increase sharply due to plans for technological upgrades, rising to $41.2 billion next year and totaling $634 billion during the 10 years from 2021-2030.
hina came in second in 2020 at an estimated $10.1 billion. Russia was third at $8 billion. Notably, in a year when the world economy was flattened by the coronavirus pandemic, nuclear spending continued on an upward trajectory without a hiccup.
Despite these hefty numbers, they’re probably an underestimate. “There’s always more [nuclear spending] out there … even more still lurking in the shadows,” said Susi Snyder, co-author of the report and managing director of the project Don’t Bank on the Bomb. Snyder points out that “governments, especially U.S., U.K., [and] France are always demanding ‘transparency’ … yet they do not hold themselves to the standards they demand of others.”
A great deal of U.S. nuclear spending consists of profitable contracts with private corporations. The four companies Ellsberg said were raking in cash “preparing for war” indeed received the most money in 2020:
- Northrop Grumman — $13.7 billion
- General Dynamics — $10.8 billion
- Lockheed Martin — $2.1 billion
- Boeing — $105 million
These enormous contracts create obvious incentives for these companies to lobby for more government expenditures on Armageddon, and they assiduously do so. Indeed, lobbying unquestionably is the most profitable investment these companies make. According to ICAN’s report, for every $1 they spent on lobbying, they received $239 in nuclear weapon contracts.
The specifics are notable here. Northrop reported $13.3 million in lobbying expenses in 2020. Last year it was formally awarded the enormous initial contract to develop a new intercontinental ballistic missile system called the “Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.” It will inevitably receive the contract for the entire program, estimated to be worth $85 billion over its life. In discussion on the GBSD, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition stated that he didn’t see the pandemic affecting nuclear spending.
There is also much more to lobbying than that which goes by the name. In the 2006 documentary “Why We Fight,” journalist Gwynne Dyer explained that President Dwight Eisenhower considered the military-industrial complex actually to have three components: the military, defense corporations, and Congress. But now, Dyer said, there’s a fourth: think tanks, which generally push their funders’ policies under a thin veneer of scholarship.
According to the report, companies profiting from nuclear weapons contributed $5-10 million to think tanks in 2020. Northrop alone spent at least $2 million funding nine of them, including the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution, the Center for a New American Security, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
However, ICAN did not produce the report for passive consumption or as an inducement to despair. Instead, it is part of a sophisticated strategy to eventually make nuclear weapons as taboo worldwide as chemical and biological weapons are now.
ICAN was a key force behind the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted in 2017 at the United Nations. It makes illegal any activities related to nuclear weapons and has been signed by 86 countries and ratified by 54. It entered into force this past January.
None of the nuclear powers are signatories. Yet they need not be for the treaty to create a noose around those countries and their companies that should tighten over time. For instance, Airbus produces missiles for France’s nuclear weapons arsenal. But it is headquartered in the Netherlands, so if that country ratified the TPNW, it could no longer do so.
This financial threat has now attracted the attention of the stockholders of these nuclear corporations. Snyder notes that a 2020 Northrop shareholders resolution stated that the company “has at least $68.3 billion in outstanding nuclear weapons contracts, which are now illegal under international law,” and it received 22 percent support. A similar Lockheed resolution got over 30 percent support. The KBC Group, the 15th-largest bank in Europe, has announced that it will not fund any nuclear weapon-related activity because of the TPNW.
Success here will obviously require a long-term campaign and increased activism across the world. But the trajectory is headed in the right direction. “The days of spending with impunity on WMD,” believes Snyder, “are numbered.”
The Bridge of the Americas connects Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Supreme Court Rules Against Immigrants in Temporary Status Seeking Green Cards
Ariane de Vogue, CNN
Excerpt: "The Supreme Court held on Monday that the government can block non-citizens who are in the US under a program that temporarily protects them from deportation in certain situations from applying for a green card if they entered the country unlawfully."
Justice Elena Kagan wrote for a unanimous court.
"Today's decision is not just a setback for those immigrants currently in Temporary Protected Status who did not enter the United States lawfully; it also reinforces the barriers that Dreamers would face until and unless Congress provides a statutory path to some kind of permanent lawful status," said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
"The Executive Branch may have some authority to confer forms of temporary legal status on those who crossed the border without permission, but the Supreme Court today reinforced, however indirectly, that only Congress can provide a permanent answer," he added.
The case concerns Jose Sanchez and Sonia Gonzales, a New Jersey couple who came to the US illegally in 1997 and 1998 and now have four children. Their youngest was born in the US and is a citizen.
Following a series of earthquakes in El Salvador in 2001, they applied for and received Temporary Protected Status, which shields foreign nationals present in the US from removal if they have been subject to armed conflicts or environmental disasters in their homeland. In 2014, the couple sought to apply to "adjust" their status to become lawful permanent residents and apply for a green card.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services denied their application, noting that they were ineligible to apply because they had not entered the country legally and never been formally admitted to the US.
The case confronted two sections of immigration law: one that says that those in TPS should be considered as "maintaining lawful status," and another that says in order to adjust status, an individual in TPS must have been admitted lawfully.
Kagan said that the conferral of TPS status does not make an unlawful entrant like Sanchez eligible for a green card.
Kagan said that there was "no dispute" that Sanchez entered the US "unlawfully, without inspection." She said that a "straightforward" application of immigration law supports the government's decision to deny him status as a lawful permanent resident because he was not lawfully admitted.
"He therefore cannot become a permanent resident of this country," Kagan concluded.
Currently, there are about 400,000 people with TPS status in the country and 85,000 have managed to adjust status.
Although a district court ruled in favor of the couple, an appeals court reversed. It held that TPS does not "constitute an admission."
In court, Amy M. Saharia, a lawyer for Jose and Sonia Gonzales, argued that having been admitted is "inherent" in the TPS status. But Michael R. Huston, assistant to the US solicitor general, drew a line between status and admission, arguing against the couple.
The government said that while Congress had made some individuals eligible to adjust their status if they met certain criteria and had a sponsor, it was not available to those who had not made a lawful entry. Huston said the government had "reasonably determined" that Congress did not "establish TPS as a special pathway to permanent residents for non-citizens who are already barred from that privilege because of pre-TPS conduct."
He urged the court to defer to the position taken by the agency in the case and he noted that there are "tens of thousands" of TPS holders who have adjusted their status, but they had been lawfully admitted as a student or an au pair or a temporary worker. He said that TPS holders know that it is a temporary form of relief from removal and that it "will not last forever." At an early point in the case, the Trump administration had argued that those in the TPS program could never try to get green cards. The Biden administration's position leaves open the opportunity for the government to change its mind.
President Joe Biden signs the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act in the East Room of the White House on May 20. (photo: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
There Have Been Huge Gaps in FBI Hate Crime Data for Years. A New Law Aims to Fix That.
Ken Schwencke, ProPublica
Schwencke writes: "On May 20, President Joe Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act into law."
A lack of reliable hate crime data has left authorities with neither a complete understanding of such incidents nor the tools needed to address them, ProPublica reported. A bill Biden just signed will start to address that.
n May 20, President Joe Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act into law. Beyond including provisions intended to combat the recent increase in bias-motivated violence against Asian Americans, the law also provides money to help states and local law enforcement agencies collect better, more comprehensive data on hate crimes.
As ProPublica reported in its series Documenting Hate, the lack of reliable information for quantifying and tracking hate crimes has left authorities without a complete understanding of the scope of such incidents or the tools needed to address them.
The FBI compiles national data on hate crimes, but it relies on local law enforcement to supply the underlying information. Reports of hate crimes can slip through the cracks at multiple stages in the process: Victims may not report to the police, the police may not classify reports correctly, and, in some cases, the state may simply fail to transmit the data to the FBI. In many jurisdictions, police aren’t trained to understand what makes for a bias-motivated attack. There are wide disparities from agency to agency not only in what’s reported but in how.
Nadia Aziz, the deputy director of the Arab American Institute, pointed to the deaths of Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer, which were prosecuted as hate crimes but were not included in the country’s official count.
“They were both high-profile hate crimes. They were both charged as hate crimes,” Aziz said. Their killers “were convicted on hate crimes charges. But they weren’t reported” to the FBI as hate crimes.
The law Biden recently signed — which includes a section named after Jabara and Heyer — supplies grants to help state and local law enforcement agencies switch to a new reporting system that allows for the type of granular data collection needed to understand hate crimes. It also provides money to create state hotlines where people could report bias incidents if they preferred not to go to local police.
The act also provides additional grants for local law enforcement agencies to train officers about hate crimes or to establish new policies, units or reporting systems related to them.
Advocates acknowledge that the law stops short of requiring law enforcement agencies to report hate crimes to the FBI, but they say it’s a step forward, especially because it requires agencies that receive grants to report their progress in tracking such crimes to their states, and for states to send those reports to the U.S. attorney general.
“I think it’s just critical that this passed,” said Dennis Shepard, who along with his wife, Judy, have been advocating for better hate crime laws since their son Matthew was beaten to death and tortured in 1998 because he was gay. “Nobody realized how important data collection would be when they first started doing this.”
There are many failure points that can stop bias-motivated crimes from making their way to official reports, ProPublica found in its Documenting Hate reporting.
Law enforcement agencies covering populations of hundreds of thousands frequently say they have no hate crimes, or don’t bother to report anything at all to the FBI. Hate crimes can be mislabeled, such as anti-LGBTQ crimes being reported as “anti-heterosexual.” Police training on how to investigate and collect data on hate crimes is often inadequate and sometimes nonexistent.
The new law provides incentives for law enforcement to start addressing these flaws.
“It’s so critical that they get the funding, and that they apply for it and use it properly,” Shepard said.
'Everything I do is through a racial justice lens,' says first-term Congress member Cori Bush. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images)
'Cori Hasn't Hesitated.' From Police to Palestine, Missouri's Bush Has National Voice
Bryan Lowry and Kelsey Landis, McClatchy
Excerpt: "When House leaders learned that freshman Missouri Rep. Cori Bush was going to oppose a $1.9 billion bill to upgrade U.S. Capitol security, they enlisted the senior colleague from her home state in the hope that he could dissuade her."
“People came to me from leadership and said, ‘Hey we think your home girl is going to vote against the funding bill, which would include Capitol Hill police. Would you mind having a conversation with her?’” recalled Missouri Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.
Bush sat down with Cleaver and listened to his arguments, but didn’t defer to the older Democrat. It’s a sign of her willingness to buck pressure from party leadership — or, for that matter, anyone — when it comes to the issue of policing.
“I stand firmly,” Bush told The Star last month, speaking generally. “I won’t be pushed back by any Congress member.”
The two Democrats, who represent St. Louis and Kansas City respectively, both broke barriers in their paths from civil rights activism to elected office. Cleaver, 76, was Kansas City’s first Black mayor. Bush, 44, is the first Black woman to represent Missouri in Congress.
But last month’s vote highlighted their generational and ideological differences.
Bush was one of just three Democrats, along with Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, to oppose the security legislation, a response to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Cleaver said he appealed to Bush by pointing out that the bill would have an impact on all Capitol workers. “If you can’t vote on bonuses for Capitol Hill police, vote for the bonuses of people who clean the bathroom,” he said.
The congresswomen said the bill did not do enough to help heal traumatized Capitol workers, spending 50 times more on creation of a quick reaction force within the Capitol Police than on counseling. The increased security, they argued, will not expose the root causes of the attack or ensure greater safety.
Bush put it bluntly on Twitter the following day: “Investing more money in policing is always bad, actually.”
Just five months into her first term, Bush is one of the most visible faces of the Democratic Party’s left wing. Her fiery speeches and social media have made her a favorite of progressive activists and a target for national Republicans, who are eager to tie vulnerable suburban Democrats to her agenda ahead of the 2022 mid-term elections.
The online furor set off by the nine-word tweet on police funding has become routine for the Missouri freshman as her national profile has inspired a legion of antagonists.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and other conservative Republicans quickly condemned her comment. It also provoked criticism from centrists and commentators who accused Bush of oversimplifying the issue.
Bush brushed off the backlash.
“I don’t even believe it was misconstrued. I just think people don’t like to hear it,” she said, contending that for years St. Louis sank money into policing while under-investing “in the resources that will actually help to keep us safe.”
St. Louis has the highest murder rate in the U.S. among major cities at 64.54 per 100,000 residents (Kansas City is eighth with 29.88), according to FBI statistics, a fact often cited by Bush’s opponents but which she regards as proof the current approach is not working.
In June, she will unveil a major police reform bill, which will exemplify this philosophy. It’s the issue she campaigned on after years of organizing protests following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. His death galvanized activists both in Missouri and nationally.
Bush, a nurse and a pastor who was homeless for a period in the early 2000s, said her goal is to treat public safety as a health issue and to reduce the range of problems handled by law enforcement. The bill will provide grants intended to shift responsibility for various issues from police to other social services, a change she says will save lives.
“Having more police does not necessarily make us safer,” Bush said. “When we have police responding to calls for people who are in a mental health crisis, domestic violence situations, substance abuse situations… There are people who are specifically trained to be able to work with people in those situations to bring about the best outcomes.”
Jane Dueker, an attorney who represents the police unions for St. Louis, St. Louis County and the state of Missouri, said Bush’s strident stance is a drag on other Democrats.
“She has not backed off from this idea that defund means defund and abolish. And I think she becomes a gift for Republicans every time she goes there, so I do think it becomes a problem for Democrats because all Democrats are going to be painted as defunders,” said Dueker, who served as chief of staff to Missouri Democratic Gov. Bob Holden in the early 2000s.
“It’s just too radical of an idea. It just is.”
From the streets of Ferguson to Congress
Bush’s allies say she’s doing exactly what voters in her district expected and wanted.
“Cori’s going to take a lot of heat, period. Just coming from the idea that she was involved in Ferguson,” said St. Louis Democratic state Rep. Rasheen Aldridge, a fellow activist turned lawmaker who described Bush as his “big sister” in the Ferguson movement.
“She has a platform as a congresswoman, and we all know these things come and go, so this can be that one moment where a protester from a place that changed the world, Ferguson, has a seat in the halls of power.”
Kristian Blackmon, a St. Louis housing activist who met Bush during the Ferguson protests, applauded her for staying true to the movement since her election.
“Sometimes people kind of tiptoe and slowly become more and more vocal when they’re a freshman and they’re new and they don’t know whether to say this or that, but Cori hasn’t hesitated at all. She just came right in speaking truth to power.”
Bush has also offered a new approach to public utilities, introducing a resolution in June to “establish electricity as a basic human right and public good.” She argues that the current system of for-profit power companies has disadvantaged communities of color.
Bush’s social media microphone is massive: more than 820,000 Twitter followers on her main account. That is better than 16 times the audience of any other House member from Missouri, and nearly 200,000 more than Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, an active social media user and likely presidential aspirant.
But this spotlight also makes her a target.
Missouri Republicans tethered Democratic gubernatorial nominee Nicole Galloway to Bush during the 2020 election. It’s a strategy that will soon go national.
“Whether it’s defunding the police, abolishing ICE, or attacks on our allies in Israel, vulnerable Democrats will be answering for Bush’s radical positions for years to come,” said National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Mike Berg. The former aide to Hawley oversaw communications in 2020 for Uniting Missouri, the GOP PAC behind the attacks linking Bush to Galloway, who announced June 4 that she would not run again for state auditor, or any office, next year.
Bush’s 1st Congressional District, which covers St. Louis and adjacent communities, is the only one in Missouri with a Black plurality and no rural areas.
For twenty years the House seat was held by Democrat William Lacy Clay, a close ally of Cleaver’s and whose father served before him. He had arguably the most liberal voting record in the state delegation. Bush ran to Lacy Clay’s left, with a strong focus on police reform and outspoken support for Medicare-for-All and other progressive policy goals.
After her surprise primary win, she won the general election by nearly 60 points.
Cleaver noted that he and Bush vote the same way nearly 99% of the time. Her differences with the older generation of Missouri Democrats have less to do with the votes she’s cast and more with what she’ll say and which issues she’ll elevate.
“I think she has a different congressional district than anybody else and it is dramatically different from anybody else’s, including mine,” said Cleaver, whose district includes both Kansas City’s urban core and rural communities east of the city.
“I think she has presented a kind of philosophy that will very likely play better in her district than any of the others.”
“When she first got elected, she had to go to the thrift store to find clothes,” Aldridge said. “Because she’s still a mother, a single mother… and she’s still her district.”
“She knows that her district’s got her back. We come in 10 toes behind her because we know she’s representing the people who elected her.”
‘Not willing to compromise on what we need to do’
Bush’s Missouri colleagues didn’t have to wait long before learning that it would not be business as usual. Her first piece of legislation called for the expulsion of every lawmaker who supported the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. It would have required the ouster of six members of the state’s federal delegation, including Hawley and Missouri Republican Reps. Vicky Hartzler, Sam Graves, Billy Long, Jason Smith and Blaine Luetkemeyer
“The white supremacist insurrection on January 6th was not a sign that this country needs more unity, it was a sign that our country has yet to dismantle white supremacy. Don’t get it twisted,” Bush said on Twitter in May.
“As I’m sitting in these committees with other members who allowed for this and won’t speak up and speak out against what happened on Jan. 6… It’s very hard because we show up to do the exact same job,” she said in an interview.
“We have the same jurisdiction, the same authority. We have voting power and we have the power of the pen and the power of the purse. It’s disturbing, but what I won’t do is allow that to distract me from what St. Louis needs.”
Asked whether this stance has made it difficult to build relationships with other members of the Missouri delegation, Bush said her door is open to other members of the delegation who are willing to listen to the needs of St. Louis.
“But I am not willing to compromise on what we need to do,” she said.
Missouri Republican Rep. Ann Wagner, the only House Republican from Missouri to vote against overturning the election, said she does not have the same bipartisan connection with Bush that she had with Lacy Clay.
“I have not yet been able to work with her much on local issues, but it’s unfortunate that she continues to espouse dangerous anti-police rhetoric that is so harmful to our communities,” said Wagner, who represents the adjacent suburban district.
Wagner also criticized Bush’s stance on Israel. Bush condemned it an “apartheid state” after it launched airstrikes on Gaza that killed Palestinian civilians. The strikes were in response to Hamas rocket attacks.
“What we are seeing and have been seeing is… one of the most advanced militaries in the world attacking a largely defenseless, captive civilian population. That’s what it is,” Bush said, pointing to the United Nations’ tracking of civilian casualties.
“We cannot support this. We cannot fund this. And we cannot keep sending the weapons.”
Neveen Ayesh, government relations coordinator for the Missouri chapter of American Muslims for Palestine, said she had little success in getting Lacy Clay to speak out on the plight of Palestinians and that Bush’s full-throated advocacy has been a significant change.
“I know what that costs her. I know what she’s risking. I don’t know what more I could ask for in a congressperson,” said Ayesh, a 28-year-old St. Louis resident who spent part of her childhood in the West Bank village of Betein.
Bush’s support for the cause has resonated with others in the Black Lives Matter movement, who see parallels between Palestine and Ferguson.
But the violence abroad has also coincided with a string of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. The St. Louis Jewish Light, a Jewish newspaper in her district, accused Bush of refusing to conduct an interview, which would have included questions about Israel.
“There are plenty of local Jews who may see one side as more deserving of the blame for the latest round of fighting than the other — and are also aghast at all the lives lost. But they see their congressional representative only expressing concern for Palestinians, not Israelis,” a recent editorial from Jewish Light said.
Bush declined to comment specifically on the editorial, but she rebutted the notion that she’s not listening to Jewish constituents.
“Let’s be clear. I’m in deep conversation with Jewish constituents and I’m continuing to work very hard across our district to make sure their voices are heard as well. … It has been said I’m anti-Semitic. I’m not anti-Semitic. I don’t want to see anyone being discriminated against. I don’t want to see anyone losing their lives,” she said.
The Squad
Bush was less clear in responding to another recent controversy.
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative newspaper, reported that Bush worked as a faith healer after training with Charles Ndifon, head of the Rhode Island-based Christ Love Ministries International. The paper also said she had called Ndifon to heal her when she contracted COVID-19 last year.
Bush called the article a misrepresentation, but confirmed that she spoke with Ndifon while she was suffering from COVID. “I did have a conversation with Charles Ndifon. And he prayed with me and I believe in the power of prayer. I’m a pastor. But in that moment, I was not healed,” Bush said.
However, she did not clarify whether she had ever performed faith healing during her tenure as pastor for Kingdom Embassy International Church in St. Louis, as alleged in the article. Her spokeswoman would also not comment on the matter, calling it “misinformation spread by right-wing media.”
Bush has forged close ties with other members of “The Squad,” an informal name for some of the most progressive members of Congress, including New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Omar, one of the first two Muslim in Congress, invoked Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman in Congress, to describe Bush.
“As another woman of color in federal office, I know how difficult it can be to do this in the face of constant distortions, harassment, and hate speech,” Omar said in a statement.
“But much like Shirley Chisholm, Cori Bush is unbought, unbossed and unbothered.”
Boko Haram militants. (photo: Guardian)
Leader of Boko Haram Killed on Direct Orders of Islamic State
Jason Burke, Guardian UK
Burke writes: "The death of the leader of the Nigerian militant Islamist group Boko Haram has been confirmed by a rival extremist faction that said it carried out the killing on the direct orders of Islamic State's leadership thousands of miles away in the Middle East."
Isis ordered death of Abubakar Shekau over concerns about indiscriminate targeting of ‘believers’
he death of the leader of the Nigerian militant Islamist group Boko Haram has been confirmed by a rival extremist faction that said it carried out the killing on the direct orders of Islamic State’s leadership thousands of miles away in the Middle East.
Abubakar Shekau, one of the most infamous leaders of Islamic militant groups anywhere in the world, died last month after detonating an explosive device while being pursued by fighters from the Islamic State West African Province (Iswap). The Iswap fighters had stormed the Sambisa forest, a swath of strategically important dense forest in Nigeria’s north-east, which was Shekau’s base.
His death both delighted and embarrassed Nigerian and international security services, who spent a decade devoting huge resources on hunting down Shekau.
That the operation against Shekau was launched on the direct orders of the leadership of Isis in the Middle East, which is concerned by Boko Haram’s indiscriminate targeting of “believers”, underlines the continuing global reach of the group through its affiliates and the possibility of further expansion in Africa.
Islamic extremist factions across the Sahel have intensified attacks in recent months, bringing fresh levels of violence in some regions. More than 120 villagers died in an attack in Burkina Faso last week in one of the bloodiest such massacres yet recorded. No group has claimed responsibility.
On an audio tape obtained by Humangle, a respected local news website with strong contacts among insurgents and counter-terrorist agencies, the Iswap leader, Abu Musab al-Barnawi, can be heard telling followers that the death of Shekau came in response to orders from the new leader of Islamic State, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi.
“[Shekau] was someone who committed unimaginable terrorism. How many has he wasted? How many has he killed? How many has he terrorised? But Allah left him alone and prolonged his life. When it was time, Allah set out brave soldiers after receiving orders from the leader of the believers,” he said, according to a report on the Humangle website.
Barnawi’s faction broke away from Boko Haram in 2016 following personal, religious and strategic disputes. The faction was adopted later by Islamic State’s leadership in Iraq and Syria as its affiliate in the area after Shekau proved impossible to control.
Barnawi, who is seen as a relative moderate among extremist leaders in the region, had been given the leadership role by an “auditing mission” sent from the Middle East by Isis earlier this year, said Vincent Foucher, an expert in Islamist extremism in Nigeria with the International Crisis Group.
Shekau initially escaped the attack on the Sambisa forest, hiding from Iswap fighters for five days, Barnawi said in his statement.
When found, Shekau escaped again, was caught once more and then refused an offer to surrender. Though most of his followers are thought to have either disbanded or switched allegiance, at least one of the various factions that made up Boko Haram is resisting Barnawi’s authority.
Shekau was responsible for using young women and girls as suicide bombers as well as the abduction of 300 female students from a college in 2014, in an incident that made global headlines. His unpredictability and tendency towards the most extreme and violent strategies explain the orders given for his elimination.
The death of the former street boy leaves Iswap as the unrivalled Islamic extremist group in the Lake Chad basin region.
Environmental activists protest in front of the construction site for the Line 3 oil pipeline. (photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images)
Activists and Tribal Groups Prepare Minnesota Pipeline Protests
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Environmental and tribal groups opposed to Enbridge Energy's ongoing effort to replace its aging Line 3 crude oil pipeline in the United States are planning large protests in northern Minnesota on Monday as the Canadian-based company gears up for a final construction push."
rganisers say they expect hundreds of people to participate in the “Treaty People Gathering”, which they are billing as the largest show of resistance yet to the project. They plan to march to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, one of the water crossings for the pipeline, where they will deliver speeches and participate in organised civil disobedience.
Opponents of the project have said they will do whatever it takes to block completion of it, even if it risks arrest. Among those they say will be on hand on Monday will be actors Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, Rosanna Arquette and Taylor Schilling, as well as environmentalist and author Bill McKibben.
Line 3 carries Canadian crude from Alberta. It clips a corner of North Dakota on its way across northern Minnesota to Enbridge’s terminal in Superior, Wisconsin. The Canadian and Wisconsin replacement segments are already carrying oil. The Minnesota segment is about 60 percent complete.
Project opponents say the replacement pipeline, which would carry Canadian tar sands oil and regular crude, would worsen climate change and risk spills in sensitive areas where Native Americans hunt, fish, harvest wild rice, gather medicinal plants – and claim treaty rights.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz told Minnesota Public Radio News that he doesn’t plan to deploy the US National Guard during the event, saying he doesn’t expect protesters to “interfere with lawful construction or lawful practices”.
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