26 February 23
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
As policymakers debate the future of the Black Sea peninsula, more are coming around to the view that ending the Russian occupation is possible.
That view is now changing. A year after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his disastrous war — which not only saw Russia annex further chunks of Ukraine, but which has already cost Russia more casualties than the U.S. saw in Vietnam — the geopolitical tides have shifted measurably. And in the past few months, with Ukrainian forces continuing to reclaim regions from Russian forces, western voices have begun revisiting a topic they’d long brushed off: Crimea.
Rather than viewing the peninsula as a Russian appendage, an increasing number of experts and policymakers have begun arguing that restoring Ukrainian control of Crimea may be the key ingredient for any lasting peace — and that, increasingly, only Ukrainian sovereignty over the region will guarantee stability not only in Ukraine, but in Europe overall.
Such a view isn’t yet a consensus; western policymakers haven’t uniformly come out in full-throated support of Ukraine’s moves to reclaim the peninsula. Last week, Rep. Adam Smith, one of the top Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee, said there was a “consensus” that “Ukraine is not going to militarily retake Crimea.” And Secretary of State Antony Blinken added that a Ukrainian effort to retake Crimea would be a red line for Putin.
But in conversations and commentary, views have clearly begun to shift, especially among the expert community, which increasingly views Ukrainian efforts to retake Crimea as both feasible and necessary. And while western officials aren’t yet outwardly backing such views — and still aren’t providing all of the arms the Ukrainians have asked for — they’re increasingly leaving the door open to a Ukrainian push toward the peninsula.
Thanks to Putin’s full-scale invasion, the myth that Russia has some kind of right to Crimea has effectively collapsed across the West. And the reality has begun seeping in from Washington to London to Brussels that, in terms of military success, Russian suzerainty over Crimea must end before any lasting, stable peace can be found.
Part of that shift in perspective comes from a purely tactical analysis. As Ukraine continues to claw back Russian holdings — including in areas that Moscow nominally claims as its own, such as Kherson — a push toward Crimea suddenly becomes much more plausible, and much more militarily viable.
To be sure, any thrust toward the peninsula remains a way off. “We won’t seriously be talking about Crimea until the rest of Ukraine is free,” former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk told me in an interview. Purely from a geostrategic perspective, Ukraine will need to reclaim significant holdings in places like Zaporizhzhia and even Donetsk before considering an assault on Crimea.
But such a push seems far more feasible now than it did just a few months ago — and western analysts have begun gaming out what such a push might entail. In a recent Twitter thread, retired Australian general Mick Ryan, one of the most popular commentators regarding the war’s progress, detailed Ukraine’s potential routes toward the peninsula. One option backed up Zagorodnyuk’s view that Kyiv will have to recapture significant territory elsewhere prior to any push, in order to form “a land blockade and fire support base” that would allow Ukrainian forces to pour into the peninsula. Another option could see Ukraine launch “a large-scale air, sea and land operation to advance on several axes against key land objectives in Crimea,” forming a “robust air and sea campaign” to “accompany the hundred thousand or so Ukrainian troops required to capture Crimea.”
Either option contains significant hurdles, not least the significant military assets Russia still maintains in Crimea. And it is clear that Ukraine will likely be unable to accomplish any push into Crimea without expanded western weaponry such as long-range precision missiles and increased air power.
But it’s also obvious that Russia’s ability to resupply Crimea is becoming tenuous, with both the Russian land corridor and Crimean Bridge, the latter of which was recently bombed, increasingly threatened. And a year into the war, it’s now apparent that Russian military assets in Crimea will continue to present an unacceptable threat to Ukraine, regardless of the outcome of the war.
“Occupation of Crimea enables the Russian military to threaten Ukrainian positions from the south and gives Russia’s Black Sea Fleet a forward base for carrying out long-range attacks,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, one of the U.S.’s premiere Ukrainian experts, recently wrote for Foreign Affairs. Even if Ukraine is victorious elsewhere, Crimea would effectively remain a forward operating base for the Kremlin’s military, a sanctuary for Russian forces to rest and regroup. This reality manifested most clearly last year, when Russian troops used Crimea as a staging ground for Moscow’s most successful push of their 2022 invasion, allowing the Kremlin to gain significant ground in southern Ukraine.
Nor are those ongoing military threats limited to land alone. Because of Crimea’s geographic positioning, the peninsula allows Moscow to threaten both Ukrainian and broader Black Sea maritime security. And this includes things like blockading Ukrainian exports, such as grain, which has already upended global markets. “Crimea is decisive for this war,” retired U.S. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, told me. “Ukraine will never be safe or secure, or be able to rebuild their economy, as long as Russia retains Crimea…. And I think increasing numbers of people are recognizing not only the necessity of [retaking Crimea], but also the feasibility.”
All of these tactical, military reasons are sufficient to explain the ongoing shift in western perceptions of Crimea. But elsewhere, and far more broadly, western observers are coming around to what Ukrainians have long been arguing: that Russian claims to the peninsula are saturated in myopic, misleading myths, none of which stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, one of the most pernicious pieces of Russian propaganda is that there’s some kind of Russian entitlement to Crimea — an argument that is only just now starting to recede.
Take Putin’s claims that Crimea somehow maintains a “vital, historic significance” to Moscow, or that it’s a kind of “holy land” to all Russians. To be sure, Crimea, which was initially annexed by Russian colonizing forces in 1783, retains a unique history, suffering through things like the 1850s Crimean War and World War II nearly a century a later. But myriad regions and countries, from Belarus to the Baltics, can claim similarly unique histories, without giving Russia any rightful claim to them. “If it’s a ‘holy land’ [for Russians], you wouldn’t have seen [hundreds of thousands of] Russians leave the country last year,” Hodges said, pointing to the significant numbers of Russians fleeing the Kremlin’s conscription orders. Even after Ukrainians directly hit Crimea’s Saki airbase, Hodges added, “you had a 30,000-car traffic stall trying to leave, instead of Russians heading to the military recruitment office.”
Likewise, the notion that Crimea has long been some Russian enclave isn’t accurate, either. The region wasn’t majority Russian until the Second World War, and only then as a result of the Kremlin’s gargantuan ethnic cleansing campaigns, which forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of indigenous Crimean Tatars. And, of course, Crimea doesn’t share a land connection to Russia — part of the reason the region has prospered under Ukraine and wilted under Moscow.
Crimeans themselves have hardly evinced any overwhelming desire to rejoin Russia, despite Putin’s insistence that they are part of Russia proper. In 1991, Crimeans joined every other region of Ukraine in voting for Ukrainian independence. And in the decades following, they never once voted to rejoin Moscow. In the months leading up to Russia’s initial invasion in 2014, fewer than a quarter of Crimeans wanted to rejoin Russia. Such realities go a long way to explaining why Moscow forced a sham, ballot-by-bayonet “referendum” on Crimeans in 2014, rather than offering a free and fair vote.
Perhaps most pertinently, Putin effectively abnegated the idea that Crimea is somehow unique in Russian eyes last September, when he announced the annexation of four further Ukrainian provinces (none of which Moscow controls). Suddenly, Crimea’s nominally distinct status — as the only region the Kremlin would go so far as to annex outright — crumbled. With Putin’s newest annexation announcements, the region that Putin claimed presented the “spiritual unity” of Russians was now no different than places like Luhansk or Zaporizhzhia, which Ukrainian forces continue to liberate.
Those annexations further undercut Russia’s most pertinent and most impactful threats: that Crimea presents some kind of “red line” for Russian authorities, after which the potential for nuclear war rises considerably. But given how Ukraine has continued to bludgeon territories Russia has claimed elsewhere — and how explosions continue rocking Crimea itself, without any resultant nuclear war — Moscow’s supposed red lines have become increasingly blurred, even to the point of disappearing entirely. As Russia expert Nigel Gould-Davies recently wrote in the New York Times, Putin “has no red lines.”
Indeed, the notion that Crimea presents any kind of final, formal “red line” is slowly fading. Even Blinken, who recently mentioned that Crimea might be such a “red line,” indicated that such a framing isn’t nearly as important as it once was. According to those familiar with Blinken’s views, the secretary of state believes “it is solely the Ukrainians’ decision as to what they try to take by force, not America’s” — with the secretary of state “more open to a potential Ukrainian play for Crimea.” As Blinken added this month, there will be no “just” or “durable” peace unless Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored. “If we ratify the seizure of land by another country and say ‘that’s okay, you can go in and take it by force and keep it,’ that will open a Pandora’s box around the world for would be aggressors that will say, ‘Well, we’ll do the same thing and get away with it,’” Blinken said.
All of these ingredients — the increasing military import of retaking Crimea; the shattering of Russian myths regarding the peninsula; upholding the principle that nuclear powers must never be allowed to carve up non-nuclear neighbors — have all begun combining, churning out a new perspective across western countries. A decade ago, when Putin initially launched his invasion of Crimea, the peninsula stood apart, a supposed crown jewel of Putin’s reign. Now, though, it’s increasingly viewed as what it’s long been: a peninsula full of Ukrainians who never opted for Russian rule, watching Kyiv’s forces steadily gear up toward a southern push, looking to finally dislodge the Kremlin’s forces from all Ukrainian territory.
And this time, more western policy-makers — providing the arms, the financing and the diplomatic support necessary for Ukraine to finally achieve its goal of retaking “every inch” of Russian-occupied Ukraine — are increasingly along for the ride. “No matter what the Ukrainians decide about Crimea in terms of where they choose to fight… Ukraine is not going to be safe unless Crimea is at a minimum, at a minimum, demilitarized,” undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland recently said. Or as Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh announced last month, the U.S. will back Ukraine’s efforts to reclaim the peninsula it first lost nearly a decade ago.
“That includes an operation in Crimea,” Singh said. “That is a sovereign part of their country, and they have every right to take that back.”
READ MORE 
US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (left) stands next to Chief Justice John Roberts outside the court in 2017. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
In the summer of 2021, Gorsuch — the first Supreme Court appointee by former President Donald Trump — tacked a single-paragraph concurring opinion onto a major court ruling to "flag one thing."
The ruling was for a lawsuit about Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
And the "thing" Gorsuch wanted to flag was a question he said no one in the case had raised before the court: Who has the right to sue to try to enforce that key section of the landmark law?
For decades, private individuals and groups, who did not represent the federal government, have filed the majority of Section 2 lawsuits that have stopped state and local governments from minimizing the political power of people of color through the redrawing of voting maps and other steps in the elections process.
But that longstanding practice may be coming to an end.
Gorsuch's paragraph of a concurring opinion, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, planted the seeds for an unusual argument that has emerged in an Arkansas redistricting case — that private individuals are not allowed to bring Section 2 lawsuits. And the case may soon find its way before the country's highest court.
"It keeps me up at night," says Doug Spencer, an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado, who tracks voting rights lawsuits and is concerned about the argument not to allow private individuals to sue under Section 2.
"If that process is taken off the table, then the protection of minority voting rights will be much weaker after that case than it was before," Spencer adds. "This is one important thread that could unravel what remains of the Voting Rights Act."
This unusual argument got a "strong" voting rights case thrown out of court
The Arkansas redistricting case before U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky was a "strong" one, the Trump appointee noted in the 2022 ruling released more than a half-year after Gorsuch's concurring opinion.
In the lawsuit, groups representing Black voters in Arkansas claim that Republican politicians on Arkansas' apportionment board had drawn a map of state House districts that dilutes the voting power of Black people, denying Black communities meaningful opportunities to elect representatives of their choice.
"From what the Court has seen thus far, there is a strong merits case that at least some of the challenged districts in the Board Plan are unlawful" under Section 2, Rudofsky's ruling said.
But Rudofsky decided the lawsuit had to be thrown out because of who brought the case.
The words of the Voting Rights Act do not include any explicit mention of private individuals when describing who enforces Section 2. Instead, Rudofsky's ruling said, "the text and structure strongly suggest that exclusive enforcement authority resides in the Attorney General of the United States."
Citing Gorsuch's paragraph that flagged whether private individuals can sue as an "open question" among lower federal courts, Rudofsky concluded that there was a "narrow question" to decide in this Arkansas case — "whether, under current Supreme Court precedent, a court should imply a private right of action to enforce [Section 2] of the Voting Rights Act where Congress has not expressly provided one."
"The answer to this narrow question is no. Only the Attorney General of the United States can bring a case like this one," said Rudofsky's ruling, which has been appealed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A ruling by a three-judge panel is expected soon.
But "everyone" has understood Congress intended for private individuals to sue
Rudofsky's interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, however, goes against decades of practice and common understanding within legal circles.
"I think it's an open question only in the sense that no court has ever felt compelled to expressly say that people whose voting rights have been violated can sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because everyone — and I do mean everyone — understood that that's what Congress meant," says Dan Tokaji, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School, who has written about private individuals suing for violations of federal election laws.
Before Congress amended the Voting Rights Act with bipartisan support and then-President Ronald Reagan's sign-off in 1982, committees on Capitol Hill issued reports that spelled out lawmakers' intentions.
"It is intended that citizens have a private cause of action to enforce their rights under Section 2," the House Judiciary Committee's report said. Months later, the point was echoed when another report said that the Senate Judiciary Committee "reiterates the existence of the private right of action under Section 2, as has been clearly intended by Congress since 1965."
Still, Rudofsky's ruling dismissed the lawmakers' statements, writing in a footnote that congressional committee "reports—which are neither passed by Congress nor signed by the President—are not law."
"This is a way of interpreting laws that sometimes goes by the name of textualism. But a more accurate appellation would be literalism — if it doesn't literally say in the law that private individuals can sue when their voting rights have been violated, then they can't," Tokaji says. "The problem with that argument is that it conflicts with reality."
The reality is the Justice Department can't handle all Section 2 cases, the DOJ says
After ruling that only the U.S. attorney general, who heads the Justice Department, could bring the Arkansas case, Rudofsky gave the federal government five days to pick up the lawsuit before the judge formally threw out the case.
The Justice Department did not step up.
But in a court filing, it did tell the judge that the U.S. government believes private individuals do have the right to sue under Section 2. It also referred to an earlier statement the department filed to lay out its reasoning a few weeks before Rudofsky ruled.
"The limited federal resources available for Voting Rights Act enforcement reinforce the need for a private cause of action," the DOJ's statement said.
Pam Karlan — a professor at Stanford University Law School who, before stepping down last year, helped lead the department's Civil Rights Division as the principal deputy assistant attorney general appointed by President Biden — says beyond limited resources, there's also the challenge of the "sheer volume of jurisdictions in the United States that might face a Section 2 case."
"There are states, counties, school boards, water districts, city councils. I mean, there are just so many different governmental bodies that are subject to Section 2 that the idea that you'd have one body in the Justice Department as the sole enforcement mechanism makes no sense at all," says Karlan, who declined to comment on why the DOJ decided not to take on the Arkansas case.
A change in presidential administrations can also change the priority level of Section 2 cases at the Justice Department, warns Spencer, the associate law professor at the University of Colorado.
"If you're relying on that political institution to protect your right to vote, you may have years that go by when that right is not enforced in the courts, even though Congress created that right," Spencer says.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is in danger at the Supreme Court in other ways
If the Arkansas lawsuit ultimately reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, it may join a list of cases that have resulted in a steady chipping away of Voting Rights Act protections by the conservative-majority court under Chief Justice John Roberts.
"The conservative majority of the current court knows that there's a different world of possibilities in terms of the direction of law, and they're reshaping actively, especially in the election law area," says Michael Kang, a professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, who wrote an online essay last year for the Stanford Law Review titled "The Post-Trump Rightward Lurch in Election Law."
After the court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted another key section of the act, Section 2 remains as one of the last legs of the civil rights-era law. Many court watchers are holding their breath to see what's left of Section 2 after the court is expected to rule on another redistricting case — Merrill v. Milligan — by the end of its current term in June.
Kang sees the argument that private individuals do not have the right to sue under Section 2 as an example of Gorsuch "imagining a different possibility where we could close off opportunities for voting rights challenges under the current court."
Until Gorsuch's concurring opinion questioned that right, Kang adds, "even the most conservative legal thinkers weren't contemplating that federal courts would buy that argument."
Depending on how the courts rule in the Arkansas case, it could also mean different possibilities for state and local governments that are "hostile to racial minorities," Kang says. "To the degree that voting is racially polarized, Republican governments that want to cut back minority voting opportunities — there'll be a new world of possibilities for them to take advantage of. It'd be really hard to challenge a lot of what they might do."
READ MORE 
Palestinian relatives mourn during the funeral of Omar Assad, 78, who was found dead after being brutally detained by the Netzah Yehuda unit of the IDF in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on Jan. 13, 2022. (photo: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images)
Israeli Army Battalion Puts U.S. Ban on Funding Abusive Units to the Test
Omar Assad had already stopped breathing when the soldiers left him, a man detained alongside him told reporters. When a doctor finally arrived, he found that Assad had been dead “for 15 or 20 minutes.” An autopsy found that he had suffered a fatal, stress-induced heart attack.
The brutal death of Assad, a U.S. citizen who had retired to his home village near the Palestinian city of Ramallah after four decades in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sparked widespread outrage. B’tselem, an Israeli human rights group, denounced the soldiers’ “utter indifference” in failing to provide first aid or call an ambulance; the U.S. State Department called Assad’s death “troubling.” Following an internal review, the IDF itself acknowledged that “the incident showed a clear lapse of moral judgment.”
Israel recently moved the unit involved in Assad’s death out of the occupied West Bank. But the soldiers’ treatment of Assad was not unusual. While hardly the only ones accused of human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories, members of the Netzah Yehuda unit often committed gratuitous acts of violence, a former member of the unit told The Intercept in his first interview with an international news organization.
The Netzah Yehuda battalion was originally set up to allow ultra-Orthodox Israelis to serve in the military. But over the years, the unit has attracted not only some of the most religious soldiers, but also a growing number of far-right extremists, including many settlers. Unlike other units, enlistment in Netzah Yehuda is voluntary; until recently, it was deployed exclusively in the West Bank, where its members were in daily contact with Palestinians living under occupation. As such, the unit — whose name is an acronym for “Haredi Military Youth” — was known for getting “a lot of action,” the former member said.
The ex-Netzah Yehuda soldier asked not to be identified because of the enormous social cost associated with publicly criticizing Israel’s military. Since leaving the unit, he has come to reject the occupation and his own role in it. Netzah Yehuda has long been criticized in Israel — some senior political and military figures have even called for the unit to be disbanded — but testimonies from former members are rare. While The Intercept could not independently verify some of the incidents the former soldier described, he also spoke to Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli veterans who gather testimony from soldiers in the occupied territories.
The IDF did not answer a detailed list of questions for this story nor address the former soldier’s allegations on the record. But in a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson wrote that the Netzah Yehuda unit was moved from the West Bank to the Golan Heights “to diversify the IDF’s area of operation and accumulate operational experience.”
The spokesperson also referred The Intercept to an earlier statement in which the IDF wrote that it is “considering filing indictments” against the soldiers involved in Assad’s death. “As part of the investigation, anomalies were found in the conduct of the commander of the checkup force and the commander of the soldiers that guarded the detainees,” that statement read. “It was also found that it is not possible to establish a correlation between these abnormalities and the death.”
U.S. Pressure
Even before Assad’s death last January, Netzah Yehuda members had been accused of extrajudicial killings, torture, and beatings, among other abuses. In August, the unit made headlines after a video of some members beating two young Palestinians went viral on TikTok. The IDF suspended the soldiers involved in that beating and opened a criminal investigation. It wasn’t the first time: According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been convicted of offenses against Palestinians at a rate higher than those in any other IDF unit.
But it was the death of Assad — which came only weeks before the killing by a different IDF unit of another Palestinian American, journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — that put the unit on the radar of U.S. officials. The incident prompted calls for the U.S. government to impose consequences on a foreign military it supports to the tune of $3.3 billion a year. In particular, a growing number of critics have urged the Biden administration to apply U.S. legislation known as the “Leahy Law,” after recently retired Sen. Patrick Leahy, which limits the ability of the State and Defense departments to provide military assistance to foreign units that have a record of human rights violations. The law has never been applied to any units of the Israeli military, despite a number of cases — including the killings of several U.S. citizens by Israeli forces — likely meeting its criteria.
“The very least the US can do is to impose Leahy Law sanctions for the murder of an American against a repeat offender Israeli unit that has been killing and abusing Palestinians with impunity for years,” said Adam Shapiro, advocacy director for Israel-Palestine at Democracy for the Arab World Now, a U.S.-based human rights group focused on the Middle East and North Africa. DAWN also submitted a complaint detailing a series of incidents involving the unit to the International Criminal Court, accusing its members and two of its commanders of war crimes. “While Netzah Yehuda might not be the worst abuser in the Israeli Army, its actions have been well-documented by Israeli and international media, offering a unique insight into the absolute unwillingness by Israeli governments to hold its soldiers accountable for violating international law and the Israeli army’s own rules of engagement,” the group noted last fall.
The State Department began looking into the unit’s record following Assad’s death, although officials would not confirm reports that they had asked the U.S. Embassy in Israel to draft an internal report on the unit’s conduct and begun interviewing witnesses. The IDF characterized the unit’s recent move out of the West Bank and its redeployment to the Golan Heights as an operational decision. But many have pointed out that the move followed increased U.S. scrutiny of the unit’s record. Israeli authorities have also opened a criminal investigation into Assad’s death and made a rare offer of compensation to his family — a signal, to some, that U.S. pressure was having an impact.
The State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Israel did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story. At a press briefing in December, State Department spokesperson Ned Price did not directly answer a reporter’s question regarding calls to apply the Leahy Law to Netzah Yehuda but said, “We manage our security relationships around the world in the context of human rights and the rule of law and in accordance with U.S. legislation, including in this case with the Leahy vetting laws.”
Stanley Cohen, an attorney representing the Assad family in the U.S., told The Intercept that the family has repeatedly asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into Assad’s death but has received no response. “The U.S. government has an obligation at this point to initiate a grand jury investigation or certainly a preliminary FBI investigation of what happened and why and how,” Cohen said. “This is an elderly man, simply driving home, in a community filled largely with elderly Palestinians, many of whom are American Palestinians.” (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.)
Cohen noted that the Assad family declined the Israeli government’s offer of compensation and rejected “Israel’s interpretation that the family only cared about money and not justice.”
For Shapiro, of DAWN, there is no question that U.S. pressure played a role in the redeployment and the compensation offer, even if those measures fall far short of Leahy Law requirements. “It wasn’t just a random decision to move this unit,” he told The Intercept. “For me, the biggest lesson of all of this is that when the U.S. does something even as minor as asking questions, there can actually be very positive results, though this is not a full, positive outcome yet.”
“Of course, we would like to see a cutting of aid,” Shapiro added. “But we didn’t have to press the so-called nuclear button in order to get accountability. There are things that can be done, and this is a perfect example of that.”
With Netzah Yehuda soldiers now out of the West Bank, however, it’s unclear whether the State Department will continue to investigate their record or demand accountability for their crimes. It also seems unlikely that U.S. officials will heed calls to finally apply the Leahy Law against a unit of the IDF.
“The fact that they moved the unit out of there was a positive step,” Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide to Leahy, told The Intercept. “But they should have disbanded it altogether and punished the soldiers who were responsible.”
Troubled Youth
The Netzah Yehuda unit, originally known as Nahal Haredi, was established in 1999 to offer ultra-Orthodox Israeli men, who are usually exempt from mandatory military service, an opportunity to serve in the IDF while keeping to strict religious codes. No women are allowed in the unit or on its bases, which also adhere to strict kosher standards. A rabbi works with the unit, and soldiers’ terms of service are shorter than in other branches of the military so that members can focus on religious studies. But the 500-man battalion, which started with only a few dozen recruits, was also intended to provide discipline to young men with troubled backgrounds, including some who had been shunned by their families or who had violent and sometimes criminal pasts, the former soldier said.
He had been drawn to Netzah Yehuda because of its religious accommodations, he noted, but had also been impressed to learn that the unit had received a series of awards, including for thwarting several attacks and “neutralizing” alleged terrorists.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be boring,” he told The Intercept. “As a 19-year-old, that gets the testosterone going. It was ‘Black Hawk Down,’ that type of thing.”
He soon realized, however, that putting troubled young men, many with ultra-nationalist views, in a position of power and with constant access to Palestinians was a recipe for abuse. “I think that the intentions of the rabbis that came up with this were in the right place. I get where they came from, but I don’t think that it panned out very well because it put a lot of very problematic people in the same place,” the former soldier said. “Some were very politically motivated, I would say the settlers were the most politically motivated. And then there were a bunch of teenagers who drew a short straw in life and tried to take it out on other people.”
“There’s definitely a problem with discipline,” he added. “Some officers would not take some people with them on missions because they knew that they might lose a couple of soldiers on the way, because they might just wander off in the middle of a Palestinian village and do whatever they want.”
While it wasn’t until years later that the former Netzah Yehuda soldier began to reevaluate and ultimately disavowed his time in the military, the racist beliefs and often unruly behavior of his peers were readily apparent. One of the soldiers, he recalled, said that the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1994, by an Israeli extremist was “justified.” The soldier was disciplined over the remark, “but most people in the unit didn’t understand why — because in the eyes of a lot of people there, it was obvious that the murder of Rabin was justified.”
There were other incidents that revealed the unit’s extremist tendencies. On one occasion, while he was stationed in the northern West Bank, a group of unit members slashed the tires of an Arab driver — a fellow member of the Israeli military — in a nod to the “price tag” attacks frequently carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. The incident infuriated some officers, “but a lot of people thought it was completely fine,” the former soldier recalled. “They said that we shouldn’t have Arabs in the military.”
Members of the unit made no secret of their extremism. On Friday nights, after sharing their Shabbat meal, they would sing racist anthems about Jewish power, including songs glorifying Meir Kahane, the U.S.-born founder of the Kach party, an ultranationalist political group that until recently was listed as a terrorist organization in both the U.S. and Israel. Kahane’s grandson himself served in the unit. “I had no idea how he got into the military to begin with,” the soldier said. “Usually, they wouldn’t let someone like that in.”
The IDF does not “intentionally” recruit soldiers with a criminal background and launches investigations “in cases where criminal offenses are suspected,” the spokesperson wrote in the statement to The Intercept, which also noted that “the IDF is a stately body and prohibits any form of political expression.”
Collective Punishment and “Hannukah Parties”
The Palestinians who members of Netzah Yehuda met daily had been completely dehumanized, the former soldier added. While The Intercept could not independently corroborate details about the specific incidents he described, the episodes are well in line with the violence, harassment, and restriction of movement that Palestinians living under occupation are routinely exposed to and that human rights groups have documented for decades.
The former soldier said that he once witnessed a commander punch a Palestinian man in the stomach and shove him into a military car, apparently because the man was moving too slowly. Some of the soldiers were not allowed to guard Palestinian detainees, he added, because their superiors “didn’t trust everyone to do that without harming them.”
Some of the most violent incidents happened when the ex-soldier was stationed near a large settlement in the West Bank. Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are illegal under international law and, in some cases, even under Israeli law. Nevertheless, the military is routinely deployed to protect settlers there, even as settler violence against Palestinians has been on the rise.
One Friday, after a funeral for a man killed by the IDF in a Palestinian village near the settlement, a crowd of residents turned up to protest, the former soldier recalled. “Usually, it would just be a couple kids throwing rocks. We would shoot a couple of gas grenades back. There would be back and forth for half an hour, and then we would each go home,” he said. “But after this funeral a huge crowd came together, and when we got there, we had almost no crowd control equipment because all that ammunition, like the rubber bullets and the gas canisters, had run out. So all we had was live ammunition, and it’s very difficult to do crowd control with live ammunition. That day, they actually told us that we are not allowed to shoot at anyone, because they had just killed someone. And in a situation like that, when you start opening fire on a crowd, you can kill a lot of people, and that was going to be an even bigger problem.”
Instead, the soldiers were instructed to pour mounds of dirt over the main road to the village, essentially trapping its residents. “It was collective punishment,” said the soldier.
Another time, the former soldier recalled, a commander took a group of soldiers into a Palestinian village, where they went door to door, knocking and then throwing flash-bang and gas grenades into each home — retribution after some children from the village had thrown rocks on a nearby road earlier that day.
The former soldier, who said he was not directly involved in the grenade-throwing or some of the other, more egregious incidents he described, remembers being disturbed by the episode. “The company commander said, ‘Let’s throw them a Hanukkah party, because it was during Hanukkah,’” he told The Intercept. His fellow soldiers, he said, “were very excited about that whole thing. They would say, ‘You should have seen the face of the family when we opened the door. Everyone was sitting and watching TV, and all of a sudden, they got tear-gassed.’”
“A lot of soldiers were excited about being able to just walk into a stranger’s house with little to no consequences,” he said. “You couldn’t do that in Tel Aviv.”
No Accountability
The harassment and dehumanization of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation are a daily affair, and Netzah Yehuda soldiers are hardly the only culprits. But on some occasions, the unit’s actions in the West Bank escalated into gross human rights violations and potential war crimes. Since 2015, members of the unit have killed several Palestinians and beaten and tortured others with electric shocks, according to documentation submitted by DAWN to the ICC, which in 2021 opened an investigation into alleged crimes committed in the occupied territories.
In that time frame, Netzah Yehuda soldiers killed three Palestinians, including a 16-year-old boy, “in incidents in which soldiers used lethal force against unarmed civilians without justification,” DAWN charged. “In almost every case […] soldiers were found to be lying or covering up the incidents to suggest that they were acting in self-defense.” In October 2021, unit members were also accused of beating and sexually assaulting a Palestinian man they had detained in the back of a military vehicle and later at a military base. Four soldiers were arrested following that incident; one of them was demoted and sentenced to four and a half months in prison. In 2016, another Netzah Yehuda soldier received a nine-month sentence and demotion for torturing Palestinian detainees on two separate occasions. In one instance, the soldier had attached electrodes to the neck of a man who was blindfolded and handcuffed, increasing the voltage when the man pleaded with him to stop. He did the same to a second detainee a few days later, while fellow soldiers filmed the torture on a cellphone.
It’s unclear whether Netzah Yehuda’s abuses were on the State Department’s radar before last year, but after Omar Assad’s death, U.S. officials began making inquiries about the unit. In September, the State Department’s Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, Hady Amr, met with Assad’s family and publicly called for accountability for his death. Israel’s offer of a reported $141,000 settlement to the family and later the decision to move Netzah Yehuda out of the West Bank also coincided with a growing chorus of voices, including in Congress, calling for a U.S. investigation into the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist who was shot in the head in May while reporting from the West Bank city of Jenin. Furor over the killing of Abu Akleh, who was wearing a clearly visible press vest at the time, eventually forced the U.S. Justice Department to launch an investigation — the first time the U.S. government has heeded demands for an independent, American investigation of an incident involving Israeli forces.
Whether growing demands for accountability for Abu Akleh’s killing or calls for Leahy sanctions against Netzah Yehuda — or both — factored into Israeli officials’ decision to move the unit is hard to establish. “I don’t know how much of this has to do with Israel being afraid of the Leahy Law versus Israel trying to manage a relationship with the U.S. after they have killed two U.S. citizens,” Brad Parker, a legislative consultant at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented the Abu Akleh family in the U.S., told The Intercept. The Leahy Law hardly seems to work as a deterrent when it comes to Israel, he added. “Even if it means absolutely nothing, a statement saying ‘This unit is problematic’ or something like that would be significant, given the fact that the U.S. really doesn’t do anything.”
Other critics argue that anything short of blocking U.S. financial support for Netzah Yehuda is not enough.
“That’s not accountability,” Matt Duss, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Intercept, referring to the unit’s redeployment and the compensation offer. “Some people might claim, ‘Hey, look, high five, we got the Israelis to do something,’ but that doesn’t begin to solve the systemic problem. What we need is the political will to apply the law, and thus far this administration has lacked that will.”
U.S. officials’ failure to apply their own laws against Israel has increasingly become a liability, Duss said, noting that while the U.S. “tends to be very serious about human rights in countries that don’t buy our weapons,” intervening in Israel and with some other allies is viewed as “too politically controversial … despite systemic abuses.”
For Rieser, Leahy’s longtime foreign policy adviser, that’s long been a cause of frustration. “The law has not been applied as consistently as Senator Leahy believes it should be with respect to Israel and some other key U.S. allies,” he told The Intercept. “I think that’s partly due to political calculations by the administration, whose job it is to apply the law.”
Leahy’s Legacy
There is no public record listing when and where the Leahy Law has been invoked, though public reports indicate that it has been applied to Colombian, Mexican, Turkish, Indonesian, and Pakistani forces, among others. The law is also used as basis for the State Department to vet thousands of foreign military personnel every year — a requirement for the provision of U.S. weapons and training.
More than two decades after it was first introduced, Leahy’s signature legislation “has been institutionalized to the point that it’s not going away,” said Rieser. “It has been built into the training and guidance of the State and Defense departments. It is permanent law. But Congress and human rights defenders still need to ensure that the law is applied as intended.”
Defense officials have at times resisted the law’s implementation. The Intercept reported last year on one of several programs set up to circumvent it. Before he retired, Leahy also worked to close a major loophole in the law that made it difficult to apply against countries that receive U.S. assistance in bulk installments, like Israel, whose security agreements with the U.S. are outlined on a 10-year basis. Previous arrangements made it hard for U.S. officials to know which units of the IDF received what — something Leahy addressed through a recent amendment to the defense budget. “We don’t know with certainty which IDF units receive U.S. equipment,” Rieser said. “We realized that was a loophole for countries that receive bulk shipments of equipment, and Congress modified the law to address that issue.”
The ultimate obstacle to the law’s implementation, however, remains a political one. “Many members of Congress or administration officials are reluctant to suggest that Israeli soldiers may have committed a gross violation of human rights,” said Rieser, noting that Leahy repeatedly called on multiple administrations to apply the law with respect to Israel. He noted that during the Trump administration, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, suggested that the law should not apply there.
The argument, Rieser noted, was that “Israel is a democracy, it has a credible justice system, and therefore the Leahy Law doesn’t apply.” But Israel’s investigations of alleged military misconduct are carried out by the IDF itself, he noted; they have often been cursory and rarely resulted in appropriate punishment. “The Israeli justice system, particularly the military justice system, is not perceived as being impartial in cases involving Palestinians.”
An Extreme Symptom
Shawan Jabarin, the general director of Al-Haq, a prominent Palestinian human rights organization based in the West Bank, told The Intercept that he first heard about the Leahy Law during a trip to the U.S. in 2001, a few years after the legislation was introduced. “We first called for Leahy sanctions to be applied against the IDF two decades ago,” he said.
Over the years, the State Department has flagged several incidents of human rights abuses committed by Israeli forces as potential Leahy cases, including the 2003 killing by an Israeli military bulldozer of American peace activist Rachel Corrie. (Last year, The Intercept published exclusive documents revealing internal deliberations about the law’s application to that case).
Yet none of those incidents resulted in sanctions against any unit of the IDF. “Nothing happened,” said Jabarin. “Nothing happened because this is Israel.”
Multiple U.S. administrations have in the past responded to Israeli abuses with measured words of condemnation, but the U.S. government has never publicly imposed consequences on Israel for its military’s misconduct — neither by applying the Leahy Law nor by threatening to withhold military assistance or limit arms exports under other U.S. statutes. A formal sanctioning of Netzah Yehuda would have only minor practical impact but would convey that the U.S. government is ready to draw a line.
“Israelis got very upset when Ben and Jerry’s said it didn’t want to have ice cream sold in settlements,” said the former soldier. A U.S. rebuke of Netzah Yehuda would likely renew calls to address its history of abuses, he noted, but warned that singling out one unit for censure risks giving a pass to the rest of Israel’s military apparatus.
“For the Israeli public, Netzah Yehuda is very convenient because it’s a group of people that are not very popular in Israeli society to begin with, the Haredim. So it’s very easy to scapegoat and say these Haredim and these settlers, they are the ones who are a problem, it’s not our kids from Tel Aviv and these other nice cities, who also go and kill Palestinians.”
Ori Givati, advocacy director at Breaking the Silence — the group of former Israeli soldiers who have denounced the abuses of Israel’s occupation — told The Intercept that “anything that pushes the U.S. to do anything is a step in the right direction.”
“Every unit that serves in the territories is violent toward Palestinians — every unit,” he said. “Some are documented less, some are documented more. Netzah Yehuda has maybe a tendency to be more violent than others toward Palestinians, but they are not worse than any other unit which invades people’s homes in the middle of the night. They’re not the problem; they’re maybe an extreme symptom.”
Jabarin, the Palestinian human rights activist, agreed that sanctioning Netzah Yehuda would have only symbolic impact — but would be important nonetheless.
“It’s not just the unit, it’s the system behind it,” he said. “Still, this is a test. Can [the U.S.] act according to its principles, its laws, the values they speak about?”
READ MORE 
EPA emergency response member agitates water to check for chemicals settled at the bottom after a train derailment in Ohio. (photo: Michael Swensen/Getty Images)
Guardian analysis of data in light of Ohio train derailment shows accidental releases are happening consistently
But such accidents are happening with striking regularity. A Guardian analysis of data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and by non-profit groups that track chemical accidents in the US shows that accidental releases – be they through train derailments, truck crashes, pipeline ruptures or industrial plant leaks and spills – are happening consistently across the country.
By one estimate these incidents are occurring, on average, every two days.
“These kinds of hidden disasters happen far too frequently,” Mathy Stanislaus, who served as assistant administrator of the EPA’s office of land and emergency management during the Obama administration, told the Guardian. Stanislaus led programs focused on the cleanup of contaminated hazardous waste sites, chemical plant safety, oil spill prevention and emergency response.
In the first seven weeks of 2023 alone, there were more than 30 incidents recorded by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, roughly one every day and a half. Last year the coalition recorded 188, up from 177 in 2021. The group has tallied more than 470 incidents since it started counting in April 2020.
The incidents logged by the coalition range widely in severity but each involves the accidental release of chemicals deemed to pose potential threats to human and environmental health.
In September, for instance, nine people were hospitalized and 300 evacuated in California after a spill of caustic materials at a recycling facility. In October, officials ordered residents to shelter in place after an explosion and fire at a petrochemical plant in Louisiana. In November, more than 100 residents of Atchinson, Kansas, were treated for respiratory problems and schools were evacuated after an accident at a beverage manufacturing facility created a chemical cloud over the town.
Among multiple incidents in December, a large pipeline ruptured in rural northern Kansas, smothering the surrounding land and waterways in 588,000 gallons of diluted bitumen crude oil. Hundreds of workers are still trying to clean up the pipeline mess, at a cost pegged at around $488m.
The precise number of hazardous chemical incidents is hard to determine because the US has multiple agencies involved in response, but the EPA told the Guardian that over the past 10 years, the agency has “performed an average of 235 emergency response actions per year, including responses to discharges of hazardous chemicals or oil”. The agency said it employs roughly 250 people devoted to the EPA’s emergency response and removal program.
‘Live in daily fear of an accident’
The coalition has counted 10 rail-related chemical contamination events over the last two and a half years, including the derailment in East Palestine, where dozens of cars on a Norfolk Southern train derailed on 3 February, contaminating the community of 4,700 people with toxic vinyl chloride.
The vast majority of incidents, however, occur at the thousands of facilities around the country where dangerous chemicals are used and stored.
“What happened in East Palestine, this is a regular occurrence for communities living adjacent to chemical plants,” said Stanislaus. “They live in daily fear of an accident.”
In all, roughly 200 million people are at regular risk, with many of them people of color, or otherwise disadvantaged communities, he said.
There are close to 12,000 facilities across the nation that have on site “extremely hazardous chemicals in amounts that could harm people, the environment, or property if accidentally released”, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued last year. These facilities include petroleum refineries, chemical manufacturers, cold storage facilities, fertilizer plants and water and wastewater treatment plants, among others.
EPA data shows more than 1,650 accidents at these facilities in a 10-year span between 2004 and 2013, roughly 160 a year. More than 775 were reported from 2014 through 2020. Additionally, after analyzing accidents in a recent five-year period, the EPA said it found accident-response evacuations impacted more than 56,000 people and 47,000 people were ordered to “shelter-in-place.”
Accident rates are particularly high for petroleum and coal manufacturing and chemical manufacturing facilities, according to the EPA. The most accidents logged were in Texas, followed by Louisiana and California.
Though industry representatives say the rate of accidents is trending down, worker and community advocates disagree. They say incomplete data and delays in reporting incidents give a false sense of improvement.
The EPA itself says that by several measurements, accidents at facilities are becoming worse: evacuations, sheltering and the average annual rate of people seeking medical treatment stemming from chemical accidents are on the rise. Total annual costs are approximately $477m, including costs related to injuries and deaths.
“Accidental releases remain a significant concern,” the EPA said.
In August, the EPA proposed several changes to the Risk Management Program (RMP) regulations that apply to plants dealing with hazardous chemicals. The rule changes reflect the recognition by EPA that many chemical facilities are located in areas that are vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis, including power outages, flooding, hurricanes and other weather events.
The proposed changes include enhanced emergency preparedness, increased public access to information about hazardous chemicals risks communities face and new accident prevention requirements.
The US Chamber of Commerce has pushed back on stronger regulations, arguing that most facilities operate safely, accidents are declining and that the facilities impacted by any rule changes are supplying “essential products and services that help drive our economy and provide jobs in our communities”. Other opponents to strengthening safety rules include the American Chemistry Council, American Forest & Paper Association, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute.
The changes are “unnecessary” and will not improve safety, according to the American Chemistry Council.
Many worker and community advocates, such as the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace & Agricultural Implement Workers of America, (UAW), which represents roughly a million laborers, say the proposed rule changes don’t go far enough..
And Senator Cory Booker and US Representative Nanette Barragan – along with 47 other members of Congress - also have called on the EPA to strengthen regulations to protect communities from hazardous chemical accidents.
“The East Palestine train derailment is an environmental disaster that requires full accountability and urgency from the federal government. We need that same urgency to focus on the prevention of these chemical disasters from occurring in the first place,” Barragan said in a statement issued to the Guardian.
‘We’re going to be ready’
For Eboni Cochran, a mother and volunteer community activist, the East Palestine disaster has hardly added to her faith in the federal government. Cochran lives with her husband and 16-year-old son roughly 400 miles south of the derailment, near a Louisville, Kentucky, industrial zone along the Ohio River that locals call “Rubbertown.” The area is home to a cluster of chemical manufacturing facilities, and curious odors and concerns about toxic exposures permeate the neighborhoods near the plants.
Cochran and her family keep what she calls “get-out-of-dodge” backpacks at the ready in case of a chemical accident. They stock the packs with two changes of clothes, protective eyewear, first aid kits and other items they think they may need if forced to flee their home.
The organization she works with, Rubbertown Emergency Action (React), wants to see continuous air monitoring near the plants, regular evacuation drills and other measures to better prepare people in the event of an accidental chemical release. But it’s been difficult to get the voices of locals heard, she says.
“Decision-makers are not bringing impacted communities to the table,” she said.
In the meantime React is trying to empower locals to be prepared to protect themselves if the worst happens. Providing emergency evacuation backpacks to people near plants is one small step.
“Even in small doses certain toxic chemicals can be dangerous. They can lead to long term chronic illness, they can lead to acute illness,” Cochran said. “If there is a big explosion, we’re going to be ready.”
READ MORE 
'Today's the day I'm supposed to get canceled by the newspapers,' 'Dilbert' creator Scott Adams, pictured in 2014, said Saturday on his YouTube live stream. (photo: Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images)
The Washington Post, the USA Today network of hundreds of newspapers, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times and other publications announced they would stop publishing “Dilbert” after Adams’s racist rant on YouTube on Wednesday. Asked on Saturday how many newspapers still carried the strip — a workplace satire he created in 1989 — Adams told The Post: “By Monday, around zero.”
The once widely celebrated cartoonist, who has been entertaining extreme-right ideologies and conspiracy theories for several years, was upset Wednesday by a Rasmussen poll that found a thin majority of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s okay to be White.”
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people … that’s a hate group,” Adams said on his live-streaming YouTube show. “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people … because there is no fixing this.”
Adams, 65, also blamed Black people for not “focusing on education” during the show and said, “I’m also really sick of seeing video after video of Black Americans beating up non-Black citizens.”
Outrage followed.
By Thursday, The Post began hearing from readers calling for the strip’s cancellation. On Friday, the USA Today Network said that it “will no longer publish the Dilbert comic due to recent discriminatory comments by its creator.” The Gannett-owned chain oversees more than 300 newspapers, including the Arizona Republic, Cincinnati Enquirer, Detroit Free Press, Indianapolis Star, Austin American-Statesman and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“In light of Scott Adams’s recent statements promoting segregation, The Washington Post has ceased publication of the Dilbert comic strip,” a spokesperson for the newspaper said Saturday, noting that it was too late to stop the strip from running in some upcoming print editions, including Sunday’s.
Chris Quinn, the vice president of content for Plain Dealer publisher Advance Ohio, wrote in a letter from the editor Friday that pulling “Dilbert” was “not a difficult decision.” “We are not a home for those who espouse racism,” Quinn wrote.
“MLive has zero tolerance for racism,” wrote John Hiner, the vice president of content for MLive Media Group, which oversees eight Michigan-based publications. The San Antonio Express-News wrote: “These statements are offensive to our core values.” The Los Angeles Times noted that it had printed reruns of the comic "when the new daily strip did not meet our standards” four times in the past nine months, and would now cease publication entirely.
“Scott Adams is a disgrace,” Darrin Bell, creator of “Candorville” and the first Black artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, told The Post on Saturday. “His racism is not even unique among cartoonists.” Bell compared Adams’s views to the Jim Crow era and more recent examples of White supremacy, including “millions of angry people trying to redefine the word ‘racism’ itself.”
In fact, Adams did exactly that on his YouTube show Saturday. He offered a long, quasi-Socratic defense of his comments, which he said were taken out of context, and seemed to define racism as essentially any political activity. “Any tax code change is racist,” he said at one point in the show. He denounced racism against “individuals” and racist laws, but said, “You should absolutely be racist whenever it’s to your advantage. Every one of you should be open to making a racist personal career decision.”
In the same show, Adams suggested that he had done irreparable harm to a once-sterling career.
“Most of my income will be gone by next week,” he told about 3,000 live-stream viewers. “My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can’t come back from this, am I right? There’s no way you can come back from this.”
Set in a dystopian office where the titular character is tormented by a stupid boss and a talking dog, “Dilbert” appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers at its peak, winning Adams the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award in 1998 and spawning a television show that aired on UPN from 1999 to 2000.
The National Cartoonists Society declined to comment. Andrews McMeel Syndication, the company that syndicates “Dilbert,” did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The shift in Adams’s public image was initially intertwined with his praise for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, he has identified himself with increasingly extremist viewpoints.
In 2019, he apologized to the victims of a mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California for a tweet in which he used the tragedy to advertise an app he created. Adams also claimed in June 2020 that the “Dilbert” television show was canceled because he’s White, adding that it “was the third job I lost for being White.” He tweeted in January 2022 that he planned to “self-identify as a Black woman.” He has suggested Americans were brainwashed into supporting Ukraine, and praised anti-vaccine advocates last month.
Last May, Adams used “Dilbert” to mock workplace diversity and transgender politics through a new character called Dave the Black Engineer.
“Dilbert” was dropped last year by Lee Enterprises, a media company that runs 77 newspapers in the United States, though that decision appeared to be part of a larger overhaul. The Times Union reported that it and the San Francisco Chronicle stopped publishing “Dilbert” in recent months, after strips that joked about reparations for slavery and inclusive workplaces.
“His strip went from being hilarious to being hurtful and mean,” Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor in chief of the Chronicle and a former managing editor at The Post, told the Times Union. “Very few readers noticed when we killed it, and we only had a handful of complaints."
“Dilbert” nevertheless continued to run in many major publications — at least until this week.
Asked to comment in more detail about his remarks and the mass cancellations, Adams initially declined. He later told The Post in a text message: “Lots of people are angry, but I haven’t seen any disagreement yet, at least not from anyone who saw the context. Some questioned the poll data. That’s fair.”
READ MORE 
Carabinieri officers and Red Cross personnel at a beach near Cutro, southern Italy, on Sunday. (photo: Giuseppe Pipita/EPA)
Boat believed to be bringing refugees from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan struck rocks off coast of Calabria
Italy’s fire service wrote on Twitter that 28 bodies had been recovered early on Sunday morning, with many reported to have washed up on a tourist beach near Steccato di Cutro, while others were found at sea.
An estimated 120 people were reported to be onboard the boat before it crashed into the rocks. Eighty-one people survived, with 22 of them taken to hospital, Manuela Curra, a provincial government official, told Reuters.
Antonio Ceraso, the mayor of Cutro, told reporters: “It is something one would never want to see. The sea continues to return bodies. Among the victims are women and children.”
The wreck of the boat was reportedly seen by a fishers early on Sunday. “You can see the remains of the boat along 200-300 metres of coast,” Ceraso added. “In the past there have been landings but never such a tragedy.”
Rai News reported that the boat “snapped in two”, citing sources as saying that those onboard “didn’t have time to ask for help”. The vessel is believed to have departed from Turkey with people from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan onboard.
The Italian coastguard, firefighters, police and Red Cross rescue workers attended the scene.
Italy is one of the main landing points for people trying to enter Europe by sea. The so-called central Mediterranean route is known as one of the world’s most dangerous.
More than 100,000 refugees arrived in Italy by boat in 2022. The prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government, which came to power in October, imposed tough measures against sea rescue charities, including fining them up to €50,000 if they flout a requirement to request a port and sail to it immediately after undertaking one rescue instead of remaining at sea to rescue people from other boats in difficulty.
Rescues in recent months have resulted in ships being granted ports in central and northern Italy, forcing them to make longer journeys and therefore reducing their time at sea saving lives. Charities had warned that the measure would lead to thousands of deaths.
In a statement, Meloni expressed her “deep sorrow” for the lives cut short by “human traffickers” while repeating her government’s commitment to “preventing departures and along with them the tragedies that unfold”.
“It is criminal to launch a boat of just 20-metres long with as many as 200 people onboard in adverse weather forecasts,” she added. “It is inhumane to exchange the lives of men, women and children for the price of a ‘ticket’ paid by them on the false perspective of a safe journey.”
Meloni said her government would demand “maximum collaboration” with the countries of departure and origin.
Matteo Piantedosi, Italy’s interior minister, said the shipwreck in Calabria was a “huge tragedy” that “grieves me deeply”, while adding that it was “essential to continue with every possible initiative to prevent departures [of migrants]”.
Piantedosi told Il Giornale on Thursday that the government measures, including agreements with Libya and Tunisia, had “averted the arrival” of almost 21,000 people.
According to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants project, 20,333 people have died or gone missing in the central Mediterranean since 2014.
READ MORE 
A gray wolf at the Wildlife Science Center in Forest Lake, Minn. Author Erica Berry explores how many of our stories about wolves involve fear and warning. (photo: Dawn Villella/AP)
In ‘Wolfish,’ Erica Berry delves into the stories we tell about wolves to better understand the animals that have shadowed us throughout history
I’m pretty brave and not so squeamish, so meeting a wolf appealed to me — or at least didn’t immediately horrify. I was prepared to sit, wait for a wolf and gape. But face to face with her, I clenched my jaw and balked. The wolf wandered off, back to a volunteer she knew. I yearned for a second shot, but I’d missed my chance. I should forgive myself now: We can’t always control our fear. But it wasn’t exactly fear that had made me recoil, at least not insofar as “fear” describes specific concerns about some specific phenomenon — the awareness that this toothy predator might bite off my human face, for example. The wolf’s pursuit felt instead like ancient information, a message that overwhelmed my brain and inserted a terrified panic into my body.
Terror propels Erica Berry’s exhilarating book, “Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear.” The book sets about on two simultaneous projects: understanding the wolf as a symbol in human stories and as a real animal that humans live alongside. This double pursuit can’t be split. It’s the thing and its shadow. “There is always the creature in front of you and the creature in your mind,” Berry writes. “That wolf is a piece of cultural taxidermy, fabricated by humans with parts gathered across time and space.” In her pursuit of understanding, Berry treks through many nonfiction genres, from coming-of-age memoir to ecological history, from thriller-paced personal stories to feminist critique, poetic nature writing and sociological theory. But the intuitive, winding nature of Berry’s approach shouldn’t suggest that this work is unfocused. The wolf wanders a meandering and highly focused path to find food, a mate, a home. No matter where Berry weaves, she sniffs out fascinating insights. And she writes about it in clear, beautiful language.
One of the most propulsive themes in “Wolfish” concerns the practice of stalking another creature. Berry writes, “There was something about going to look for an animal, to focus on being smart enough to try and find it, that sharpened the experience of being in the woods, but also just being alive on earth.” Her hunt for the wolf heightens her ability to understand the world. She isn’t sentimental or romantic about wolves, but she is passionate. Her search sends her far and wide, but the book never suffers from lack of direction. The best reference point for “Wolfish” might be Helen Macdonald’s perfect “H Is for Hawk.” But where that book felt captivating (and concerned captivation), “Wolfish” reads expansively. And where Macdonald creates a character portrait of a rare and relatively unfamiliar creature (the goshawk), Berry has the difficult project of detangling myths about a rare creature we think we know.
“The symbolic wolf is enormous,” Berry writes. Her chapter “Town v. Wolf” uses the children’s fable about “crying wolf” to investigate questions about lying, borders, belief and violence. “The work of statehood is at first the work of boundary creation,” Berry writes. She recounts how wolves are described as vengeful murderers when they kill livestock inside a farmer’s fences; and she writes about how people who cross borders are described in animalistic terms as a feared other. “Often, it is only by anthropomorphizing animals and animalizing humans that the fictions that necessitate human borders can be propped up at all.” Berry is interested not only in fear but also in how fear changes the way we live. Here, she quotes the essayist Eula Biss: “Fear is a cruelty to those who are feared.” Our myths about wolves — Little Red Riding Hood, the boy who cried wolf — are stories of fear and warning. And these stories affect how we treat actual wolves, from romanticization on one end to extermination on the other.
In the process of making sense of those tales, “Wolfish” collects wolf-related idioms from across languages. Berry considers the wolf as a sign of insatiable or incorrect hunger: “Stop wolfing down your food.” Then there’s “going berserk,” which refers to ancient Norwegian warriors who donned wolf skin before they killed. When Berry lived in Italy, she recalls, her boss would say, each time she walked out the door: “In bocca al lupo!” Into the wolf’s mouth! “It was a colloquial expression, an idiom with roots in opera,” she writes. “Like ‘break a leg,’ it was a paradoxical wish of good luck. ‘Crepi!’ I learned to respond. Let it die!” In French, she notes that “le loup” can refer to a hoarse voice, as if someone has been “silenced by the fear of a wolf.”
The hardest-working of the idioms in “Wolfish” is another French one (they have several): “entre chien et loup.” This phrase recalls “that dawn-or-dusk hour when it becomes hard to tell the difference between a dog and a wolf. That time when you cannot tell if the shadow on the road before you is familiar or strange, if it poses a threat.”
This phrase captures Berry’s most compelling argument about wolves — that they are defined in part by a kind of wavering indefinability. The wolf ignites a crepuscular uncertainty about what’s fact and what’s fable, about how to differentiate between bared teeth and lolling tongue. There’s a broader truth to this: Our relationship to reality cannot be understood if we ignore our relationship to our myths. Berry never forgets when we talk about wolves, even symbolically, we’re talking about real animals. Even more important, she never forgets that we are also real animals. To train a bifocal vision on both the thing and its shadow is an act of respect that begins to undo fear of the unknown.
When I recoiled from the wolf in Colorado, I interpreted my failure to relax as a yearning for a wildness I couldn’t handle. But Berry encourages us to walk into a scary world and declare: In bocca al lupo! Into the wolf’s mouth! Maybe only then can we let the wolf into our own.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.