“Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century (and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel). After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances. Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of gays are guaranteed in marked contrast to all its neighbors.” [editor’s note: Israel holds regular elections from which unwelcome parties and voters are banned, has government censorship of all media bearing on “national security,” and doesn’t allow, among other things, interfaith marriage. The difference between it and the more “moderate” Arab states is that it supposedly caters to a different ethnic group – TLK] (05/12/26)
“There is ‘no sign’ of a larger hantavirus outbreak after the evacuation of the last passengers from a disease-stricken cruise ship, the head of the UN health agency has said. But the World Health Organization’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned ‘the situation could change’ and there could still be more confirmed virus cases. The MV Hondius left Spain’s Tenerife island on Monday and is sailing to the Dutch port of Rotterdam. Two flights with the final group of 28 passengers landed in nearby Eindhoven on Tuesday. Three people have died after travelling on the ship. An American and a French national who previously returned home have tested positive. Overall, seven cases have been confirmed.” (05/12/26)
“The leader of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group called on the government Tuesday to withdraw from direct talks with Israel, calling them a concession and urging ‘indirect negotiation.’ Lebanon and Israel are scheduled to hold two days of talks in Washington starting Thursday in an attempt to end the latest fighting that broke out two months ago, following the Iran war, and discuss the future of relations between the two sides that have been at war since Israel was created in 1948. Naim Kassem said in a letter directed to the group’s officials that direct negotiations benefit Israel and that they are ‘concessions by Lebanese authorities.’ He said Lebanon’s government should instead resort to indirect negotiations with Israel, as in previous years, such as when a ceasefire was reached in November 2024.” (05/12/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by Dylan Gyauch-Lewis
“With right-wing courts tearing up American democracy, the Strait of Hormuz blocked for two months and counting, and the price of oil heading toward $150 per barrel, the centrist political think tank Third Way is laser-focused on the most important political issue in the country: the leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. Specifically, they are incensed that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been campaigning with Piker. The attacks center on Piker’s anti-Israel positions and what Third Way characterizes as antisemitism. Third Way’s president Jonathan Cowan began the campaign with an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, and the group sent a questionnaire to El-Sayed asking for specific, enumerated instances of agreement and disagreement with Piker. One could imagine a good-faith debate about whether Piker has crossed the line on occasion. He spends hours a day streaming, and that profession tends to select for people with inflammatory positions.” (05/12/26)
“The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizens the right to petition their government. Petitioning government is part of our DNA. We benefited from British institutions of direct democracy that can be traced back to the Magna Carta. In the New England colonies direct democracy was the foundation for government, citizens could petition their government in town meetings and annual election ballots. At the national level, petitioning Congress peaked in the 19th century but has declined since then. In the 19th century disenfranchised citizens, including women before suffrage, free blacks, and indigenous peoples were able to petition the federal government to address issues and enact reforms that Congress was unwilling to initiate. The decline in direct democracy over the past century is due to several factors.” (05/11/26)
“It’s been a tough couple of months for women officials in Washington — or, more accurately, in Trumpland. In early March (Women’s History Month, by the way), in a Truth Social post, the president fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the second woman ever to hold that title. Weeks later, also in a social media post, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, the third woman ever to serve as head of the Department of Justice. While in the first year of his first presidency, Trump 1.0 had fired numerous officials, this time around, Bondi and Noem, who ran the two largest law enforcement agencies in the country, were the first cabinet officials to be dismissed. Both — no surprise — were replaced by men. And just as I was writing this piece, Trump removed another female cabinet official, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer.” (05/10/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“In a fawning softball 60 Minutes interview released Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu stressed the importance of winning ‘the propaganda war’ on social media. This comes as Israel moves to quadruple its propaganda budget to $730 million a year. Major Garrett (which apparently is a real name belonging to a real guy who works for 60 Minutes) told the CBS audience that ‘Netanyahu attributes the reputational harm to Israel almost entirely to social media, which he calls the eighth front of the war.’ ‘This is yours, right?’ asked Netanyahu, picking up Garrett’s phone. ‘You’re not immune either. Because you can penetrate this machine, you can penetrate this little instrument, and you can say about Major Garrett anything you want. And I can paint you as a monster. And if I say it often enough, enough people will believe it.'” (05/11/26)
“After the Virginia Supreme Court rejected the results of the recent Democratic effort to effectively wipe out Republican representation in the state, Democratic pundits and activists have latched onto a proposal by Michigan State law professor Quinn Yeargain to gut the court by forcing the retirement of the current justices, appointing liberal activists, and then reversing the opinion. It is extremely telling that some are pushing the raw muscle play to retake power in Washington, particularly in light of the calls to pack the United States Supreme Court once the party is back in control. … Under this plan, Virginia Democrats would adopt an absurdly low age for retirement in a gut-and-pack scheme: Yeargain suggested that they could set ‘the mandatory retirement of justices and judges after they reach a prescribed age, beyond which they shall not serve, regardless of the term to which elected or appointed.'” (05/10/26)
“A painting stolen from a Jewish art collector by the Nazis during World War Two has been found in the home of descendants of a notorious Dutch SS collaborator, an art detective has said. Portrait of a Young Girl, by Dutch artist Toon Kelder, is believed to have hung for decades in the home of Hendrik Seyffardt’s family, Arthur Brand said. It had belonged to Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who died while fleeing the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, leaving behind a collection of more than 1,000 paintings. The case was brought to Brand’s attention by a man who told him he was a descendant of Seyffardt and that he was ‘disgusted’ to learn his family had kept the artwork for years. Seyffardt was a Dutch general who commanded a Waffen-SS unit of volunteers on the eastern front before he was assassinated by resistance fighters in 1943.” (05/11/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Medea Benjamin & Nicolas JS Davies
“Empires rise and fall. They do not last forever. Imperial declines follow a gradual shifting of the economic tides, but are also punctuated and defined by critical tipping points. There are many differences between the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war on Iran today, but similarities in the larger context suggest that the United States is facing the same kind of ‘end of empire’ moment that the British Empire faced in that historic crisis. In 1956, the British Empire was still resisting independence movements in many of its colonies. The horrors of British Mau Mau concentration camps in Kenya and Britain’s brutal guerrilla war in Malaya continued throughout the 1950s, and, like the United States today, Britain still had military bases all over the world.” (05/11/26)
