On October 1, Iran fired about 180 missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), Hezbollah and Hamas. There are conflicting reports about how many of the missiles struck their targets and if there were any deaths. But Israel is now considering a counterattack that could propel it into an all-out war with Iran, with the U.S. in tow.

For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union. Former U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and despite President Joe Biden’s much-touted differences with Trump, he failed to restore U.S. compliance. Instead, he tried to use Trump’s violation of the treaty as leverage to demand further concessions from Iran. This only served to further aggravate the schism between the United States and Iran, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980.

Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the United States into war with Iran. By killing Iranian military leaders and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as well as attacking Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, Netanyahu provoked a military response from Iran that has given him an excuse to widen the conflict even further. Tragically, there are warmongering U.S. officials who would welcome a war on Iran, and many more who would blindly go along with it.

Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.

Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, campaigned on a platform of reconciling with the West. When he came to New York to speak at the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, he was accompanied by three members of Iran’s JCPOA negotiating team: former foreign minister Javad Zarif; current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi; and deputy foreign minister Majid Ravanchi.

President Pezeshkian’s message in New York was conciliatory. With Zarif and Araghchi at his side at a press conference on September 23, he talked of peace, and of reviving the dormant nuclear agreement. “Vis-a-vis the JCPOA, we said 100 times we are willing to live up to our agreements,” he said. “We do hope we can sit at the table and hold discussions.”

On the crisis in the Middle East, Pezeshkian said that Iran wanted peace and had exercised restraint in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its assassinations of resistance leaders and Iranian officials, and its war on its neighbors.

“Let’s create a situation where we can coexist,” said Pezeshkian. “Let’s try to resolve tensions through dialogue… We are willing to put all of our weapons aside so long as Israel will do the same.” He added that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not, and that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to Iran.

Pezeshkian reiterated Iran’s desire for peace in his speech at the U.N. General Assembly.

“I am the president of a country that has endured threats, war, occupation, and sanctions throughout its modern history,” he said. “Others have neither come to our assistance nor respected our declared neutrality. Global powers have even sided with aggressors. We have learned that we can only rely on our own people and our own indigenous capabilities. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others. We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”

The U.S. response to Iran’s restraint throughout this crisis has been to keep sending destructive weapons to Israel, with which it has devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of women and children, bombed neighboring capitals, and beefed up the forces it would need to attack Iran.

That includes a new order for 50 F-15EX long-range bombers, with 750 gallon fuel tanks for the long journey to Iran. That arms deal still has to pass the Senate, where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is leading the opposition.

On the diplomatic front, the U.S. vetoed successive cease-fire resolutions in the U.N. Security Council and hijacked Qatar and Egypt’s cease-fire negotiations to provide diplomatic cover for unrestricted genocide.

Military leaders in the United States and Israel appear to be arguing against war on Iran, as they have in the past. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney balked at launching another catastrophic war based on lies against Iran, after the CIA publicly admitted in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.

When Trump threatened to attack Iran, Tulsi Gabbard warned him that a U.S. war on Iran would be so catastrophic that it would finally, retroactively, make the war on Iraq look like the “cakewalk” the neocons had promised it would be.But neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant can control their countries’ war policies, which are in the hands of political leaders with political agendas. Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.

Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coattails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.

Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.

So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote in Responsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here—avoiding war.”

Gerrymandering is as old as the republic. In the very first congressional election, Patrick Henry drew a map to try to keep James Madison from being elected to Congress. (That was before the word “gerrymandering” was even coined.) Today, both parties do it with gusto when they can.

And now gerrymandering may decide control of the House of Representatives.

Once, gerrymandering was an art. Phillip Burton, the legendary Democratic House member from San Francisco who served from the 1960s to the 1980s, used to draw the state’s maps on a tablecloth at a Sacramento restaurant. He proudly called one misshapen district “my contribution to modern art.” Now, however, it’s a science. Digital technology has reshaped the drawing of maps. Partisans can craft districts to quash competition in a way that lasts throughout a decade.

Gerrymandering may be as old as the republic, but so is the fight for fair maps.

Once, there was hope the courts would step in. In 2019, however, the Supreme Court ruled that federal judges were barred from policing partisan gerrymandering. And while it is still illegal to draw district lines to discriminate based on race, judges have often winked and allowed politicians to racially gerrymander so long as they shrug and say, “It’s not about race, it’s just politics.”

Rampant district rigging has blocked fair representation in many states, especially in the South. Nearly all the population growth in the United States over the past decade took place in the South and Southwest, and most of that came from communities of color—the very voters who should be represented and who are being shut out of power.

Now, we know that there are direct partisan consequences too. All the map drawing, all the lawsuits, are done for 2024. The dust has settled. And the Brennan Center’s experts have analyzed the effects of gerrymandering. Attorney Michael Li and political scientist Peter Miller have checked and rechecked the data.

Here’s what they found: Gerrymandering in 2024 will give Republicans approximately 16 additional seats in the House of Representatives compared to fairly drawn maps. That is well more than the margin of control in this Congress or in the one before it. There can be no question that this was done deliberately and with scientific precision—and comes especially at the expense of communities of color. In most of the gerrymandered states, there were hundreds or thousands of fair maps that could have been drawn.

What can be done about it?

One answer comes from Ohio. Seven times, the state supreme court there struck down unfair maps drawn by the Republicans. (The Brennan Center represented a broad coalition of Ohio voters.) Each time, partisan map drawers simply ignored the court. Then the state’s esteemed Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a prominent Republican, retired due to term limits. Now she leads a statewide drive for a ballot measure to create a strong, independent, citizen-led redistricting commission. This conservative stalwart teamed up with the progressive grassroots Ohio Organizing Collaborative. It’s a buddy movie for the ages.

Republicans tried to change the number of votes needed to pass a measure like this, but citizens rejected that sneaky move. Then state officials rewrote the language to say that the initiative was designed to support gerrymandering. No matter. Polls look strong, and there is a good chance that in Ohio, voters will untilt the legislature and congressional maps. Ohio would join Arizona, California, Colorado, and Michigan with their independent commissions. It is a prime exhibit of why voters should be able to overrule politicians.

There’s a national solution too. The Freedom to Vote Act would ban partisan gerrymandering in congressional redistricting. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would strengthen that vital law against racially discriminatory rules. Both bills came achingly close to passing in the last Congress.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), at a Brennan Center event with Democracy SENTRY in Chicago this summer, announced that Democrats would make these voting rights bills the first order of business—and that they would change the filibuster rules so they could pass. The next night, Vice President Kamala Harris pledged to sign them (the only bills mentioned by name in her convention speech).

Gerrymandering may be as old as the republic, but so is the fight for fair maps. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, James Madison insisted on the provision used to give Congress the power to override local politicians. It used “words of great latitude,” he explained, because “it was impossible to foresee all the abuses” that might come. “Whenever the State Legislatures had a favorite measure to carry, they would take care so to mould their regulations as to favor the candidates they wished to succeed.”

Meanwhile, voters will go to the polls to choose their representatives—but too often, the representatives will choose the voters. And the Congress that would consider reform will be one disfigured by biased rules and manipulative maps.

September marked the 23rd anniversary of al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. For the two decades since then, I’ve been writing, often for TomDispatch, about the ways the American response to 9/11, which quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, changed this country. As I’ve explored in several books, in the name of that war, we transformed our institutions, privileged secrecy over transparency and accountability, side-stepped and even violated longstanding laws and constitutional principles, and basically tossed aside many of the norms that had guided us as a nation for two centuries-plus, opening the way for a country now in Trumpian-style difficulty at home.

Even today, more than two decades later, the question remains: Will the war on terror ever end?

Certainly, one might be inclined to answer in the affirmative following the recent unexpected endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris by two leading members of the George W. Bush administration which, in response to those attacks, launched the GWOT. First, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who, after September 11, sought to take the country down the path to what he called “the dark side” and was a chief instigator of the misguided and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq in 2003, endorsed Vice President Harris. Then, so did Alberto Gonzales who, while serving as White House counsel to George W. Bush and then as his attorney general, was intricately involved in crafting that administration’s grim torture policy. (You remember, of course, those “enhanced interrogation techniques.”) He was similarly involved in creating the overreaching surveillance policy designed and implemented during the first years of the war on terror.

Consider those surprising endorsements by former Bush war hawks a possible coda for the war on terror as a major factor in American politics. In fact, for almost a decade and a half now, there have been signs suggesting that the denouement of that war might be at hand (though it never quite was). Those markers included the May 2011 lethal raid on the hideout of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; President Barack Obama’s December 2011 authorization for the “final” withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (though a cadre of 2,500 military personnel are stationed there presently and another 900 are in neighboring Syria). In August 2021, 10 years after the killing of bin Laden, the U.S. did finally exit, however disastrously, from its lost war in Afghanistan. And in 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The counterterrorism measures have had an impact on the American threat environment. As reported in the Department of Homeland Security’s 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, in 2022, “Only one attack in the United States was conducted by an individual inspired by a foreign terrorist organization” such as al Qaeda or ISIS.

Terrorism Prosecutions

Notably, prosecutions of alleged international terrorists have declined precipitously since the Bush administration years (and some of the convictions then have been reversed or altered). In a 2009 report, the Justice Department stated that, “since September 11, 2001, the Department has charged 512 individuals with terrorism or terrorism-related crimes and convicted or obtained guilty pleas in 319 terrorism-related and anti-terrorism cases.” Soon after that, however, the decline began. TRAC, a database that monitors such cases, reported that, in October 2014, “[t]here were no prosecutions recorded that involved international terrorism.” By 2022, TRAC was reporting that the number of domestic terrorism prosecutions far outnumbered international terrorism cases, due in large part to the charges leveled against those involved in the January 6th insurrection. And that trend has only continued. This year, as TRAC indicated, “Overall, the data show that convictions of this type are down 28.6 percent from levels reported in 2019.”

And when it comes to terrorism prosecutions, something unthinkable not so long ago has now happened. Several judges have recently given early release or simply overturned cases involving individuals convicted and sentenced in jihadi-inspired terrorism cases during the first decade of the war on terror. In July 2024, Eastern District of Virginia Judge Leonie Brinkema threw out 3 of 10 charges against and overturned a conviction carrying a life sentence for Ali Al-Timimi, a U.S.-born computational biology scholar sentenced in 2004 for soliciting treason by inspiring his followers to commit acts of violence abroad to defend Islam. Judge Brinkema reversed her decision following a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found the term “crime of violence” to be “unconstitutionally vague.” Al-Timimi’s fate on the other counts is now on appeal. Having been released to home confinement after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, he now no longer faces a life sentence, though, as The Associated Press reports, he could potentially see “decades of prison time beyond the 15 years he already served.”

Nor was this Brinkema’s first reversal in a terrorism case. In 2018, she ordered the release of two prisoners convicted in what was known as the Virginia “Paintball Jihad” case following two Supreme Court rulings that held the charges in those cases to be similarly unconstitutionally vague.

If only in acting to restore a balance between punishment and the law, even when it comes to post-9/11 terrorism cases, Judges MacMahon and Brinkema had set an example for others.

And Judge Brinkema was not alone in reviewing and reversing post-9/11 terrorism convictions. This year, in two controversial cases, judges reassessed rulings they had once made, releasing from prison those they had sentenced in the war on terror years. Judge Colleen MacMahon granted “compassionate release” to James Cromitie, after six months earlier ordering the release of his three codefendants, commonly referred to collectively as the “Newburgh Four.” At sentencing, MacMahon had indicated her disagreement with the initial outcome of the case which led to 25-year sentences for the defendants convicted on charges that involved plotting to bomb synagogues and shoot down American planes with stinger missiles, describing their crime as that of “allegedly planting ‘bombs’ that were packed with inert explosives supplied by the FBI.” She further chastised the FBI in her compassionate release ruling, claiming, “Nothing about the crimes of conviction was of defendants’ own making. The FBI invented the conspiracy, identified the targets, manufactured the ordnance, federalized what would otherwise have been a state crime…, and picked the day for the ‘mission.’”

Four years earlier, in late 2019, a federal judge in Lodi, California overturned the conviction of Hamid Hayat, convicted in 2006 for attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and plotting an attack on this country, on the grounds that his counsel had ineffectively assisted him. Following that vacated conviction, the National Security Division at the Department of Justice reviewed the case and decided against filing new charges concluding “that the passage of time and the interests of justice counsel against resurrecting this 15-year-old case.” Having served 14 years of a 24-year sentence, Hayat was released.

The “passage of time” in these cases had led to a rethinking of the uses of justice and law after 9/11. Sadly enough, it has not resulted in sunsetting two of the major initiatives of the war on terror—the authorization for the initial military response to the 9/11 attacks that led to this country’s disastrous military engagements in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the creation of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility.

The 2001 AUMF

One glaring element of the war on terror that has defied any sense of ending is the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, passed by Congress in the days just after 9/11, which initially green-lit the invasion of Afghanistan. It’s still on the books.

Unlike prior authorizations for war, the 2001 authorization included no temporal limits, no geographical boundaries, and no named enemy. It was a classic blank check for launching attacks anywhere in the name of the war on terror and has indeed been used to justify attacks in dozens of countries throughout the Middle East and Africa, including against “unspecified organizations and individuals connected to international terrorism,” as a Council on Foreign Relations overview reports. As Georgetown professor Rosa Brooks has pointed out, the temporal open-endedness of that AUMF defied international law and norms in which “a state’s right to respond to an armed attack is clearly subject to some temporal limitations; it does not last indefinitely.” Or at least it shouldn’t.

Year after year, Congress has indeed considered sunsetting that 2001 AUMF, as well as the 2002 authorization for war in Iraq. After all, the landscape of international terrorism has changed vastly since the post-9/11 years. While the threat hasn’t disappeared, it has been transfigured. As the 2024 Annual Threat Assessment issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence points out, “While al Qaeda has reached an operational nadir in Afghanistan and Pakistan and ISIS has suffered cascading leadership losses in Iraq and Syria, regional affiliates will continue to expand.”

The war in Gaza has, of course, further changed the terrorism landscape. According to FBI Director Chris Wray, Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel took the threat of foreign terrorism to “a whole ‘nother level.”

However, the 2001 authorization for the war on terror that remains in place is not an apt authorization for the new brand of terrorism or for the war in Gaza. It has so far made no difference that a 2022 National Security Strategy issued by the Biden White House pledged “to work with the Congress to replace outdated authorizations for the use of military force with a narrow and specific framework appropriate to ensure that we can continue to protect Americans from terrorist threats.” To date, no such narrowed framework has come into existence. And while Congress has repeatedly tried to sunset that piece of legislation, largely under the leadership of California Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee (the sole member of Congress who insightfully opposed it in 2001 on the grounds of its expansive overreach), such efforts have failed year after year after year. With Lee’s departure from office this coming January, the possibility of such a sunset will lose its most ardent proponent.

The Forever Prison

By far the most egregious relic of the war on terror is undoubtedly that forever war’s forever prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. True, the number of detainees still held there—30—is down dramatically from the “roughly 780 detainees” in 2002. And 16 of those detainees have now been cleared for release (a review board having determined that they no longer pose a threat to the United States), while three remain in indefinite detention, and 11 others are in the military commissions system either facing charges or convicted. And true, President Joe Biden’s administration has made some progress in those commissions, arranging plea deals to resolve the cases of those who have been charged, as in that of two detainees who had been tortured and who pleaded guilty to charges related to terrorist bombings in Bali, Indonesia.

But whatever progress has been made during this administration, there have been two major setbacks.

First, early in the fall of 2023, the Biden administration reportedly arranged for the transfer of 11 Yemeni detainees to Oman. As The New York Times‘s Carol Rosenberg reported, thanks to Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel, “A military cargo plane was already on the runway at Guantánamo Bay ready to airlift the group of Yemeni prisoners to Oman when the trip was called off.” Had that transfer occurred, the prison population would have dwindled to 19. But worries about a newly unstable Middle East left members of Congress uneasy and, according to Rosenberg, they expressed their concerns to the State Department and so succeeded in halting the transfer.

Twenty-three years later, there is arguably no greater reminder of both the need to put the war on terror behind us and an all-American inability to do so than the continued existence of Guantánamo.

In July, however, a momentous forward step did take place. Brigadier General Susan Escallier, the Pentagon’s Convening Authority for Guantánamo, the person in charge of the military commissions there, finally authorized a plea deal that had been in the works for years. It involved three of five defendants in that prison’s signature case, the prosecution of those accused of conspiring in and abetting the 9/11 attacks, including their alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The grim years of torture of those five codefendants at CIA “black sites” around the globe had long made it impossible to bring the case to court.

However, a deal was finally reached. As Chief Prosecutor Rear Admiral Aaron Rugh explained, “In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet.” Other parts of the agreement remain secret, but it still seemed like a huge step forward had been taken in bringing justice to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. After endless pretrial hearings, filings, and motions—and no trial—there seemed at least to be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. In the words of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the plea deal “was the best path forward to finality and justice.”

Unfortunately, only two days after the announced deal, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin mysteriously revoked it, issuing a two-page memorandum that managed to provide no explanation whatsoever for his decision.

Twenty-three years later, there is arguably no greater reminder of both the need to put the war on terror behind us and an all-American inability to do so than the continued existence of Guantánamo. There, at an estimated expense of more than $13 million per prisoner per year, judges and lawyers, many of whom favor plea deals, continue to play their roles as if a trial in the 9/11 case will ever be possible; as if the passage of time without resolution is an acceptable solution; and as if the example of indefinite detention, the use of torture, and a system that can’t adjudicate justice doesn’t continue to undermine the American promise of justice for all.

Moving Forward?

If only, in acting to restore a balance between punishment and the law, even when it comes to post-9/11 terrorism cases, Judges MacMahon and Brinkema had set an example for others. Certainly, at this truly late date, President Biden and Secretary of Defense Austin should have accepted—and should now reconsider and accept—the plea deal for those 9/11 co-defendants as a way of helping this country finally move past the 9/11 era and those endless, disastrous wars on terror. Isn’t it time to free the country up to focus on truly pressing national concerns instead of letting the aberrations of the past continue to haunt the present moment? Along these lines, perhaps it’s also the moment for Congress to sunset the 9/11 authorization for open-ended all-American global warfare.

Isn’t it truly time to move on from the war on terror’s lingering and painful legacy?

By now you’ve probably heard of Project 2025 — the not-so-secret plan the Heritage Foundation cooked up for the next Republican administration, complete with a 900-page authoritarian playbook for overturning civil-rights laws, gutting environmental and labor protections, criminalizing abortion, and purging the federal government of any career workers who aren’t partisan loyalists.<

Project 2025’s contents are so noxious, unpopular and anti-democratic that even Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from them — though at least 140 former Trump officials contributed to the plan.

What you might not know is that just one of Project 2025’s authors currently works for the federal government: Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission.

Carr has sided with big companies and against the public interest on nearly every important issue to come before the FCC. He’s also learned what it takes to get ahead in Trumpworld: telling lies, cozying up to the far right, insisting Trump can do no wrong, sucking up to billionaires and telling more lies.

Angling to be FCC chairman in a possible Trump administration, this once mild-mannered government lawyer has gone full-on Fox News fire-breather in a despicable-if-calculated attempt to get a promotion.

Carr’s vision for the next FCC

There are serious ethical concerns about a sitting commissioner participating in Project 2025, with no clear lines as to where Carr’s government role ends and his role as a private citizen working in his “personal capacity” begins. That’s why in July a group of 16 House members called for the FCC’s inspector general to investigate whether Carr “may be misusing his official position as an executive-level employee of the FCC to craft and advance a political playbook to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.”

Commissioner Carr’s contribution to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” is wrongheaded if relatively milquetoast compared to other chapters. He rants TikTok (which is not under the FCC’s jurisdiction) and China, unwisely calls for the elimination of Section 230 of the Communications Act, and endorses ways to enrich Elon Musk’s Starlink and right-wing broadcasters like Sinclair.

He makes it clear that under a future Chairman Carr, the FCC would do the bidding of big business unencumbered by notions of serving the public interest, helping those experiencing poverty or addressing racial disparities.

In a vacuum, this wouldn’t look too different from the reliably terrible ideas and complete corporate capture of previous Republican FCC chairs.

But Project 2025 isn’t a vacuum. It’s a cesspool.

The company Carr keeps

The priorities of the Heritage Foundation, which organized Project 2025, include banning the teaching of “critical race theory” (i.e., “accurate descriptions of U.S. history”) in public schools and universities, defaming the Black Lives Matter movement, denying climate change, amplifying false claims of voter fraud and attacking transgender kids.

Project 2025’s advisory board, organizational supporters and their known associates include an array of anti-abortion zealots, anti-vaxxers, Big Liars, book banners, climate deniers, conspiracy theorists, immigrant bashers and other assorted haters.

To achieve their Christian-nationalist goals, Heritage and its allies seek to undermine democratic checks and balances in favor of a system where near-absolute power is vested in the office of a strongman president. To quote the watchdogs at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, Project 2025 is “an authoritarian roadmap to dismantling a thriving, inclusive democracy for all.”

This is the company Carr keeps, and that alone should be reason enough to disqualify him from leading a future FCC.

But if you’re looking for more reasons, he’s providing plenty.

Fox News’ favorite commissioner

While the FCC is technically an independent agency, Carr’s binary worldview is simple: Democrats can do no right, and Trump can do no wrong.

Witness his recent appearance at a House hearing where he refused to speak out against Trump’s preposterous and dangerous suggestion that ABC should lose its broadcast licenses because its journalists tried to fact check the former president during a debate.

To be fair, fact-checking isn’t Carr’s forte. In an appearance on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria show, the commissioner happily agreed with the host while she made numerous misleading claims — several of which originated from Carr’s Twitter feed — about the efforts of the FCC and the Biden administration to expand affordable broadband access.

While Carr wrongly claims the Biden administration has “connected no one,” the reality is that the administration’s Affordable Connectivity Program helped 1-in-6 U.S. households connect to the internet before congressional intransigence interrupted its funding.

Congress and the Biden Treasury Department also have awarded $10 billion for broadband deployment, but that’s not even half of it. A bipartisan majority in Congress committed another $42 billion to expand high-speed Internet access in every state to support infrastructure and adoption programs. Under the infrastructure law that Congress passed, each state and U.S. territory had to design a plan to receive its slice of the funds. The job of Biden’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is to collect data, ensure state plans are in line with the law and allocate the funds to viable projects serving the communities that need it most.

Infrastructure projects like these take time, as they should given their historic nature — think rural electrification or the building of the U.S. highway system — but the benefits last far beyond a single presidential term.

For Carr and his partisan allies, the historic and popular effort underway to close the digital divide looks too much like a win for the other side, so they’ll say anything to undermine its progress. Fox — whose corporate bosses want a Republican-controlled FCC to do them special favors — is always ready to provide a platform.

Sucking up to Musk

Carr knows who’s calling the shots in the modern GOP, so when he’s not fawning over Trump — a prerequisite for any potential appointee — he’s busy buttering up the world’s richest internet troll: Elon Musk.

Carr is constantly caping for the would-be efficiency czar. At every opportunity, Carr bemoans “a campaign of regulatory harassment” the FCC is allegedly waging against Musk. The truth is that the FCC stepped in to prevent billions in taxpayer dollars from being wasted fattening Elon’s wallet while failing to get anyone better service — unless they were on a golf course or living on a highway median.

The background: During the waning days of the Trump administration, Musk’s Starlink satellite company snagged nearly $900 million in government subsidies with a promise to provide internet service to rural communities as part of a program known as the Rural Digital Opportunities Fund (RDOF).

Free Press was the first group to sound the alarm that a huge amount of taxpayer money was being wasted under RDOF to allegedly deploy internet service to uninhabited areas, big-box retail stores, airport runways and luxury resorts. Because the Trump FCC did such a shoddy job of designing the initial program, many of the beneficiaries — including Musk — were poised to cash in by promising to serve little pockets of land that already had service or where it was unlikely they’d ever sign up a single customer.

When FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel took leadership of the agency and scrutinized the plans, officials identified $2.5 billion about to be wasted on projects that didn’t meet the program’s basic requirements. So they took the money back.

I’m old enough to remember a time when Republicans claimed they cared about saving taxpayer dollars and fighting government waste. But Brendan Carr is too busy licking Musk’s cybertruck shoes to worry about his hypocrisy.

Fortunately, Carr’s record is beginning to get some attention from members of Congress — but more need to speak out about his dalliances with the far right and his trouble telling the truth. His actions and associations should disqualify him from ever serving as FCC chairman, no matter who the president is in 2025.

This is not a test. This is your emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the Annual Purge, sanctioned by the U.S. Government. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours.

That’s how “The Purge,” an annual —and thankfully fictional, at least for now — event held in a dystopian 2040 America is announced in a sequel of the long-running film series called, fittingly, The Purge: Election Year. The run of action horror films first launched in the early 2010s has become something of a B-movie sensation. Its pretense about a troubled America that tries controlled mayhem to stave off non-stop anarchy surely alarms some viewers — and thrills others. One thing I’m pretty sure about is that the producers didn’t mean for The Purge movies to serve as a policy white paper.

And yet here was Donald Trump, ex-president and GOP nominee for the last three elections, telling a smallish rally crowd in Erie, Pa. on Sunday afternoon that if returned to the White House, he will write his own sequel to The Purge — treating a violent Hollywood murder flick like it was the lost 31st chapter of Project 2025. The plot twist is that in Trump’s remake, everyday folks aren’t committing the crimes, but instead getting a whupping from an all-powerful police state.

- YouTube youtu.be

“See, we have to let the police do their job.” Trump said, even if “they have to be extraordinarily rough.” That was the start of a long, hard-to-follow ramble in which the Republican candidate claimed to have seen TV images of shoplifters walking out of stores with refrigerators or air conditioners on their backs — for which he blamed the permissive left. Trump’s solution would be “one really violent day” by the cops. Or even just “one rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will be out. And it will end immediately...”

Well, as you can imagine, Trump’s call for a National Day of Violence — many commentators on X/Twitter compared it to an American Kristallnacht — caused an immediate frenzy. CBS News interrupted Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs for a special report: “Trump’s Day of Violence.” New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn ran down the newsroom’s iconic red stairs and screamed at his top lieutenants to rip up tomorrow’s front page. And...

And, who am I kidding with this tired bit? Of course those things never happened. Most news organizations did mention the Trump rant — it was hard to ignore — but treated it as the umpteenth instance of Trump being Trump, and not as a dangerous escalation of national rhetoric. The future 2024 Word of the Year — sanewashing — came back this weekend in a big way among the handful of media critics exasperated at the lack of urgency.

“Trump constantly saying extreme, racist, violent stuff can’t always be new,” the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote in an essay. “But it is always reality. Is the press justified in ignoring reality just because it isn’t new? Are we not allowed to consider his escalations as dangerous, novel developments in and of themselves? And should we not note the coincidence that his remarks seem more escalatory as the pressures of the campaign mount?”

America — and especially the media — should take Trump’s rants seriously and literally.

Tomasky and others noted that Trump’s hateful weekend comments about immigrants were just as troubling as his endorsement of violence. At a Saturday rally in the ironically named Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (ironic because Trump hates chiens, or dogs), Trump unleashed a flurry of the kind of dehumanizing language that typically precedes ethnic cleansing. “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members,” the GOP nominee claimed. He called migrants “animals,” and, most bizarrely, claimed that they “will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”

Sanewashing? “Trump pounds immigration message after Harris’ border visit,” was the headline in Axios, while Bloomberg tweeted that “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Really? Trump’s words sounds more like they were sharpened in the flames of a cross at a KKK rally than any kind of serious policy. Is it a vulnerability for Harris that her speeches about the border don’t sound like they were drafted by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels? What different election are these journalists watching than the one that’s actually happening?

Trump also charged that Harris — the candidate who just trounced Trump in a nationally televised debate, according to 63% of the regular Americans who watched it — is “mentally impaired.” I know I sound ridiculous when I keep saying that I’m old enough to remember when the Howard Dean Scream or Gary Hart’s possible one-night stand were considered enough to end promising campaigns. But it’s much more ridiculous that Trump’s daily, career-ending comments get met with the America Shrug.

The simmering anger with the mainstream media’s Trump sanewashing is real, but it’s also about something much, much bigger. Trump’s increasing rage and extremism is, to many of us, the antithesis of how we see America. Yet poll after poll after poll continue to show that the Nov. 5 election is going to be a coin toss, with Trump backed by an immovable mountain of support, no matter what he says. There are still more books to be written on how we got here, but the current reality is that nearly 10 years of political Trump has created a toxic state of nihilism, the precursor to dictatorship.

The most dangerous myth is that Trump’s bizarre rants are nothing to worry about because they won’t lead to actual policies. Nothing could be more wrong. A potential Trump 47 might never impose a National Day of Violence, but he has pledged to expand legal protections for cops accused of brutality on the job, and threatened other Orwellian actions such as sending troops into Democrat-run cities to fight crime. On immigration, Trump’s Hitlerian language is the precursor to his stated policy of mass deportation, which would turn America upside down with military call-ups, dead-of-night raids in immigrant communities, and mass detention camps.

That’s why America — and especially the media — should take Trump’s rants seriously and literally. The only “purge” that the nation needs is the one that rational and empathetic Americans can carry out through the ballot box and not at the end of a nightstick. This is not a test.

For the past year, the world has watched in horror as Israel waged one of the most brutal and murderous military campaigns against a civilian population in the 21st Century.

What began as a war of collective punishment following October 7, 2023 quickly exploded into a full-scale genocide against the people of Gaza. Israel deployed the familiar trope about Hamas using civilians as “human shields” to justify the merciless targeting of population centers, dropping U.S. bombs on homes, hospitals, schools, and overcrowded refugee camps across the narrow strip of land that is home to some 2 million Palestinians.

Using starvation as a weapon, Israel has blocked most humanitarian aid from entering Gaza and brought the territory’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse. Lives spared by Israeli airstrikes face hell on Earth, displaced many times over by the attacks while enduring famine, disease, and unimaginable psychological trauma. Among the more than 40,000 deaths accounted for in the official death toll, at least 11,000 children have been murdered by U.S. bombs, and another estimated 10,000 people remain buried under the mountains of rubble that is now Gaza’s landscape.

For Gazans, this was always Biden’s genocide to end or to escalate. And for people throughout the Middle East, this was always Biden’s war to prevent or provoke.

The nightmare in Gaza set the stage for Israeli state terrorism on two additional fronts: first, beginning shortly after October 7 with escalating attacks by Israeli occupation forces and settlers in the West Bank; and now, with its bombing campaign and ground invasion of Lebanon to pull Hezbollah and Iran into a wider regional conflict.

Today, as a new barrage of Iranian missiles have been fired into Israel, setting off the sirens of major war in the region, one leader stands at the center of all the carnage: U.S. President Joe Biden.

While working in close collaboration with his Israeli counterpart, Biden has carried on a decades-long partnership in ethnic cleansing, colonialism, land theft, and apartheid.

From the White House, Biden has dutifully performed various roles to prolong the suffering in Gaza and expand Israeli aggression into a greater Middle East war. These include the roles of frustrated ally to an unhinged maniac, dishonest statesman in cease-fire talks, and loyal arms supplier to a regime of war criminals. For all of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stubbornness and belligerent bombast, it is Biden who has always held the lion’s share of leverage.

Biden’s routine hand-wringing in the face of genocide and Israeli intransigence can never excuse the endless arsenal of U.S. military aid still flowing into Netanyahu’s lap.

Bibi, Unbridled

After so many resolutions and rounds of global condemnation, the toothless authority of international law and global governing bodies has been laid bare.

Netanyahu is unrestrained and has used the blood of Gazans as political currency to retain power. Faced with scandals and flagging popularity, the Israeli despot has ignored calls for a cease-fire, moved the goalposts during negotiations, and resisted calls for his resignation in order to hold together his extreme right-wing Zionist government and stay in office. In Gaza, an estimated 180,000 people have been killed from all war-related causes, including starvation and disease. Some experts warn the total number killed by direct or indirect causes related to Israel’s genocide could exceed 335,000 by the end of this year.

For Netanyahu, no amount of Arab deaths and displacement—whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon—is too much to achieve these goals.

If Netanyahu is the monster in this ongoing nightmare, Biden is the mad scientist who keeps him alive.

Netanyahu has been able to cling to power with U.S. support and by heeding the most violent and racist impulses of Israeli society following October 7. But as growing numbers of Israelis, led by the family members of hostages, have demanded a cease-fire and Netanyahu’s resignation, the prime minister has again turned to provoke new threats.

Indeed, following Israel’s initial attacks on Lebanon using terrorist sabotage of mobile devices, its subsequent airstrikes across southern Lebanon and Beirut, and the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Netanyahu has seen a boost in popularity and an Israeli public again whipped into the frenzied bloodlust of war.

Biden’s Monster

Today, after repeatedly loading the canons of a global pariah, the White House speaks out of one side of its mouth to feign alarm at the specter of the wider war that Netanyahu always wanted. Out of the other side of its mouth, it gives full-throated support to Israel’s every provocation in Lebanon and loudly echoes Israel’s denunciations when the predicted response is delivered from Tehran.

“Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” Biden told reporters as the final missiles from Iran were intercepted. Vice President Kamala Harris agreed, saying she “fully supports” Biden’s decision to direct the U.S. military to help Israel shoot down the missiles.

“I condemn this attack unequivocally. I’m clear-eyed. Iran is a destabilizing, dangerous force in the Middle East,” Harris said, pretending the rest of the world hasn’t noticed Israel’s longstanding and recent actions which have proven far more destabilizing and dangerous to populations throughout the region.

In our organizing and our protests, we must see to it that Biden’s place in history is relentlessly targeted everywhere that history is told.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said of the latest Iranian retaliation that “the best answer is diplomacy.” Yet Biden joined Netanyahu’s threats that “Iran will pay,” promising “severe consequences.”

If Netanyahu is the monster in this ongoing nightmare, Biden is the mad scientist who keeps him alive.

Pundits will spin Biden’s handiwork as a dilemma, a delicate balancing act of diplomacy fraught with impossible choices. Yet, as Israel escalates the year-long genocide from Gaza to Lebanon, it is clear there was never a “red line” for U.S. support.

Not content with laying waste to Gaza, Israel is drawing in more adversaries and putting more and more civilians in its crosshairs. There should be no doubt that Israel has cemented its purpose as a cancer in the region—and the only leader with the power to extract this metastasizing tumor refuses to do so.

For Gazans, this was always Biden’s genocide to end or to escalate. And for people throughout the Middle East, this was always Biden’s war to prevent or provoke.

A choice has clearly been made.

Having withdrawn himself from a second term as president, Biden’s career may be invulnerable to the protests raging against this choice. But his legacy is as vulnerable as ever.

In our organizing and our protests, we must see to it that Biden’s place in history is relentlessly targeted everywhere that history is told.

Because we cannot allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to die in vain.

We can never stop attacking the machinery of colonialism and empire until it is forever broken.

After nearly a year since the Hamas-led terror attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of close to 1200 people (roughly 800 civilians and nearly 400 security forces though some Israeli civilians and soldiers may have been killed by friendly fire as the controversial “Hannibal Directive” was deployed on that date, according to reported testimonies of soldiers and officers), Israel’s destruction of Gaza continues unabated.

Israel has rejected calls from the international community for a ceasefire/prisoner swap deal and blatantly ignored an International Court of Justice ruling not to engage in any military offensive in Rafah where the situation in the southern Gaza city was already “disastrous.” Now, however, after having killed more than 41,000 Palestinians (though the toll could reach up to 186,000 dead according to a study published in early July in the prestigious medical journal Lancet) and making Gaza practically unlivable, Netanyahu’s neo-fascist government that makes Europe’s right-wing extremists seem like little farceurs has turned its focus to Lebanon. A joint operation between the IDF and Mossad spread terror by exploding walkie-talkies and pagers that people in Lebanon used, killing many and severely wounding thousands, while the Israeli military carried out massive airstrikes across southern Lebanon that have already killed more than 1,000 people, including many children, and wounded thousands.

Airstrikes have killed scores of senior Hezbollah figures, including its long-time leader, Hassan Nasrallah. But the airstrikes on Lebanon did not stop even after Nasrallah’s death despite calls for de-escalation, raising fears of a regional war between Israel and Iran. The Israeli military has even targeted central Beirut, and up to one million people may have been displaced. And as even further evidence that Israel is seeking to provoke a regional war, it launched a ground offensive in the south of Lebanon where heavy fighting is apparently taking place between Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters. Indeed, Iran seems now to have been dragged into a regional war by launching a major missile attack on Israel.

What is Israel after in Lebanon? Has Nasrallah’s death altered the direction of the conflict? Are we on the brink of a full-blown war in the Middle East? In the interview that follows, Mireille Rebeiz, a Lebanon and Hezbollah expert tackles these and other related questions. Rebeiz is Chair of Middle East Studies and Associate Professor of Francophone Studies & Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College (Pennsylvania).

C. J. Polychroniou: Almost a year after launching its devastating attack on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice, scores of international human rights organizations and leading international law scholars and historians have called a genocide, Israel has turned its focus on Lebanon. It blew up communication devices that the armed group Hezbollah had ordered months before the explosions, killing dozens and wounding thousands, and the Israeli military launched a wave of deadly attacks on Lebanon’s capital, one of which struck Hezbollah’s headquarters killing its long-time leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel’s war objectives in the Gaza Strip are to wipe Hamas off the earth and make Gaza unlivable. What is Israel trying to accomplish with its attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanon?

Mireille Rebeiz: From Israel’s point of view, the on-going war on Lebanon falls under its right to self-defense against terrorism.

Last week, we saw a series of attacks on Hezbollah fighters including the explosions of pagers and other wireless devices and the assassinations of several leaders. Although Israel has not officially commented on the attacks, evidence suggests that it has been planning this action for some time now.

Escalation continued with the assassination of Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and several other commanders. Israel dropped at least fifteen-times, American – manufactured, 2,000-pound bombs on south Beirut. Dubbed the “bunker busters” for their ability to pierce the ground before detonating, these bombs leveled several concrete buildings.

More recently, Israel started a ground invasion on south Lebanon and bombed Damascus by air.

The announced goals are clear: eliminate Hezbollah at all costs and send a message to Iran and Syria that Israel will no longer tolerate Iranian-backed militias in the region.

On the surface, one may look at these facts and consider that Israel is justified in its actions. However, international law tells a different story for Israel is piling violations of several rules and regulations related to armed conflicts. Furthermore, the war on terrorism is never innocent and always carries other motives.

Article 7 of Amended Protocol II on the Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices, to which Lebanon, Israel, and the United States are parties, explicitly bans these types of weapons and methods of warfare. Article 2(4) of Amended Protocol II defines “booby-trap” as “any device or material which is designed, constructed, or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object or performs an apparently safe act.”

Clearly, the pagers and other wireless devices have been tampered with to cause harm irrespective of its holder. As a result, at least 32 people, including two children were killed and thousands more were injured, and it is impossible to argue that every single person killed or injured is a Hezbollah fighter.

Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions specifically states that persons not taking part in the hostilities and those placed “hors de combat” should not be targeted and shall be treated humanely. The wireless communication device explosions and the intense bombing of south Beirut cannot guarantee any protection to civilians and those unrelated to Hezbollah. Many civilians -- Lebanese citizens, Palestinians and Syrian refugees -- live in south Beirut for its affordable housing.

Beirut itself ranks as the 6th most expensive city in the Arab world, coming after Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Riyadh, and Jeddah. Globally, it ranks as the 113th most expensive city out of 178.

According to the World Bank 2023 report, inflation rate in Lebanon is in the triple-digit. There is serious decline in income as the Lebanese pound lost over 90% of its value. This led to the erosion of the middle class, and half of the population plunged under poverty line with unemployment nearing 30%.

Major events aggravated the financial crisis in Lebanon: the collapse of the infrastructure, the severe shortage of fuel, the pandemic that put a lot of stress on medical care, and finally the Beirut port explosion of 2020.

These factors pushed many Lebanese and others to rent apartments in south Beirut, and Israel cannot guarantee that every resident of this part of town is a Hezbollah fighter.

There is no doubt that these tactics imply a major escalation and a serious violation of international law. Former CIA director Leon Panetta labelled these attacks in Lebanon as terrorism: “I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism.”

Since the United States of America is the one providing many of these weapons, there might be criminal implications under U.S Law as the violation of Article 7 (2) could amount to federal offense. This prompted Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to quickly dissociate the US from the attacks and call for restraints. This comes at a time when the Biden Administration is under investigation for the export of billions of dollars in arms to Israel in assistance of a foreign government accused of committing gross human rights violations including blocking humanitarian aid.

Furthermore, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a strategy that goes beyond the Israel – Hezbollah war. His political survival is dependent on him staying in power.

Before the October 7 attacks, Netanyahu was on trial for corruption. After winning the election, he aligned himself with extremists, forming a far-right government, one that sought to transform Israel into an autocratic theocracy. For instance, his government proposed a contentious law to reduce minority rights, make it harder to file complaints against corruption, and legalize the annexation of the West Bank. His plans triggered massive protests around the country.

The October 7 attacks were heinous, and they provided Netanyahu with the perfect excuse that would allow him to stay in power: he shifted the narrative to Palestinian rights – including the right to self-determination – as an existential threat to all Jews, justifying thus the need for a long war in Gaza.

In other words, it is in Netanyahu’s interest to keep Israel in a permanent state of war. To do so, he must reject all diplomatic negotiations and place the blame of their failure on the other party.

At this point, Netanyahu is buying time to present the messianic radicals, on whom he relies on to stay in power, with concrete results, ones that would save his image and political career. His undeclared goals would be the annexation of Gaza, the West Bank, and possibly south Lebanon. The hostages are not among his primary concerns.

Under international law, annexation of territory is illegal. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) said Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal and ordered Israel to stop its illegal settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip. The United Nations even declared these settlements as “settler-colonialism.” Netanyahu’s response was that the ICJ’s decision is based on lies.

The occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights is equally illegal, and the on-going ground invasion in Lebanon is not only a violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and an act of war, but also may be the excuse to occupy south Lebanon and annex it.

C. J. Polychroniou: Hezbollah emerged in Lebanon largely in response to the Israeli invasion of that country in 1982. It is an Iran-backed Shiite Islamist militant group and political party with lawmakers in the Lebanese parliament and is seen in fact as something like “a state within a state.” What does Hezbollah do in Lebanon and how much support does it have?

Mireille Rebeiz: Over time, Hezbollah’s popularity shifted inside Lebanon. Hezbollah itself was born in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon and imposed a brutal two-months siege on Beirut killing an estimated number of 17,000 to 19,000 people. While Israel retreated from Beirut, it kept south Lebanon under occupation till 2000. During this period, it illegally detained thousands of Lebanese resisting the occupation. Over 200 were detained and tortured in the Khiam Detention Center.

From 1982 till early 2000, many Lebanese supported Hezbollah and saw it as the guardian of Lebanon’s sovereignty and its liberator. The shift began in 2000 when Israel withdrew from the south. Many Lebanese started speaking up against Hezbollah’s armed presence in Lebanon, its alliance to the Syrian regime, and its commitment to Iranian ideology.

As a matter of fact, Hezbollah explicitly supported the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad despite the numerous reports of severe human rights violations in Syria. As to Iran, in its 1985 Manifesto, Hezbollah vowed its allegiance to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini and made explicit its wish to create an Islamic state in Lebanon.

And many paid a heavy price for speaking out. Former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri was assassinated on February 14, 2005, and fingers pointed at Hezbollah and Syria. Many Lebanese journalists and political figures were also assassinated: a blast killed the anti-Syrian journalist, Samir Kassir. The former Communist party leader George Hawi and the journalist and lawmaker Gibran Tueni were also killed in car bombs.

This wave of killings sparked the Cedar Revolution, which clearly expressed the Lebanese’s opposition to Hezbollah and Syria.

In the past two decades, this opposition continued and took different forms.

In 2005, the anti-Hezbollah and anti-Syria bloc won the parliamentary elections.

In 2015, the environmental movement “You Stink” was born. It criticized the State’s inability to sustainably manage waste, and it opposed all political parties, including Hezbollah. In 2019, massive protests erupted all over the country under the slogan of “All Means All” to denounce the corrupt elites.

There is no doubt that Hezbollah operates as “a state within a state.” In light of the weakness of the State of Lebanon, Hezbollah offers its own healthcare, education system and other social services to the Shiite community. It functions inside and outside the governmental structure and unilaterally holds the decision for peace/war.

In 1992, Hezbollah participated in parliamentary elections and won several seats in the Parliament. In 2005, it entered the government. Alone, they were never a majority. However, their presence was strong enough to oppose any parliamentary or governmental decision that would go against their own interests.

C. J. Polychroniou: Nasrallah was being considered as something of a pragmatist rather than an ideologue. It is now quite conceivable that the next Hezbollah leadership might be more driven by revenge than Nasrallah was. At any rate, what does Nasrallah’s death mean for Hezbollah, Lebanon, and the Middle East? Will Iran become directly involved in the conflict?

Mireille Rebeiz: Nasrallah’s death is a definite blow to the group, and it did not take long for Iran to respond. In fact, Iran launched several missiles into Israel to avenge the killing of three of its top leaders: Hamas Chairman Ismail Haniyeh, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, and Deputy Commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Abbas Nilforushan. Iran made it clear that this is a self-defense attack and that it will respond further should Israel attack Iran.

Ironically, Hezbollah started this war to support Hamas and the Palestinian cause. Now, the attention has completely shifted from Gaza and the West Bank to Iran, Israel, and the United States.

C. J. Polychroniou: Under president Joe Biden, US foreign policy in the Middle East has been a complete failure. Over the past several months, Biden has said on countless occasions that “we are closer than ever” to a Gaza ceasefire only to see Netanyahu turn Gaza into a graveyard. Biden called for a 21-day ceasefire along the Israel-Lebanon border only to see Netanyahu make him look again like a bumbling idiot. How do you explain the US-Israel relationship?

Mireille Rebeiz: The US is Israel’s closest and proudest ally. However, the failure of US foreign policy in the Middle East is in large part to blame for the recent events. At no point in the past two decades did the US lead any serious diplomatic dialogue on Israel – Palestine.

President Biden continues to support a far-right government in Israel irrespective of the consequences in the region and the major escalation we are witnessing. Many Americans are horrified by this support and the US’ potential complicity in atrocities in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s’ visit to the United Nations, his rejection of the 21-day cease-fire, and the immediate attacks that followed in Lebanon indicate a clear separation between what the US would like to see and what Israel wants.

Stephen Collinson speaks of a humiliating pattern indicating American impotency in curtailing Israel’s defiance, and the results are obvious: Gaza is leveled with over 41,000 civilians killed, of which 17,000 are children. Lebanon is under attack with a ground invasion in progress, and violence is escalating in the West Bank.

C. J. Polychroniou: Gaza is gone, and there are fears that Israel could turn Lebanon into a second Gaza. In your view, what does the future hold for Lebanon?

Mireille Rebeiz: So far, the rhetoric is that Israel will only bomb areas where Hezbollah fighters are located or areas suspected of storing Hezbollah’s weapons.

The level of destruction is massive, and the number of casualties is on the rise. I would like to believe that Lebanon will not turn into a second Gaza. However, the situation is fluid, and it depends on on-going diplomatic negotiations and the arrival of other actors on the scene such as the Houthis in Yemen or Kata’ib Hizballah in Iraq or even Iran.

In any case, I pray that Lebanon will be spared. Lebanon is in the middle of a major storm. As US-backed Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants are exchanging fires and settling debts, the Lebanese people are caught in the middle of the crossfire.

This week Mexico's former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, handed over the reins to Claudia Sheinbaum, a close ally in his Morena party and the country's first female head of state. While López Obrador is leaving office with soaring approval ratings, and has overseen significant reductions in poverty and unemployment, recent articles and op-eds use terms like "authoritarian" and "autocratic" to describe his legacy.

The criticism of AMLO and Morena’s supposed "authoritarian bent" has centered on a recently approved package of constitutional reforms to Mexico's judicial system. The Editorial Board of The Washington Post declared that “at stake are judicial independence and the rule of law,” and The Economist warned that “in America’s biggest trading partner the rule of law and democracy are under attack.” On August 22, U.S. ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar called the reforms a “major risk to the functioning of Mexico’s democracy.” Shortly afterwards, Canada’s ambassador also criticized the proposal, prompting López Obrador to suspend relations with both embassies.

The reforms, in particular the establishment of popular elections for judges and supreme court justices, will profoundly shake up the Mexican judiciary. However, there is little basis for alleging that they represent a threat to democracy. Whatever the drawbacks or merits of the measures, the United States—where an ultra-conservative Supreme Court has been plagued by egregious conflict of interest scandals—has no business interfering in Mexico’s domestic affairs, let alone a democratic and constitutional process of reform.

With the additional constitutional reforms proposed including measures to enshrine a ban on genetically modified corn, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), and open-pit mining, a democratically elected supreme court willing to uphold such measures represents a genuine threat to big agrobusiness, fossil fuel capital, and extractive enterprises on both sides of the border.

More troublingly, attacks against Mexico’s judicial reform appeared to have more to do with disciplining the incoming Sheinbaum administration and undermining the progressive elements of her party’s agenda than defending democracy and the rule of law.

The judicial package was just one of 20 constitutional reform initiatives submitted to the Mexican congress by AMLO in February. It comes after key measures of the governing Morena party’s agenda were blocked by the country’s high court. The reform provisions include measures to expedite case resolution; enforce gender parity; open supreme court sessions to the public; cap judicial salaries; keep challenged laws or policies active until ruled unconstitutional; and establish bodies to supervise and sanction judicial officials, as well as a less savory move to expand the list of crimes that warrant mandatory pretrial incarceration.

U.S. objections, however, are focused on one key transformation: the democratic election of the judiciary.

Until the reform, Mexico’s federal judges and magistrates, as well as local circuit and district judges, were appointed through a process overseen by the Consejo de la Judicatura Federal (Federal Judiciary Council), an unelected arm of the judicial branch. The supreme court is currently composed of 11 justices including the president of the court who oversees and participates in the plenary. They meet as a full group and in two five-member chambers; the justices are nominated by the president of Mexico, approved by the senate, and serve 15-year terms.

Under the newly approved judicial overhaul, federal judges and magistrates will be popularly elected for nine-year terms, with the possibility of reelection. The same process will take place at the state level for circuit and district courts. Supreme court justices (referred to as ministers in Mexico) and Federal Electoral Tribunal magistrates will also be popularly elected. The number of supreme court ministers will be cut to nine and their terms reduced to 12 years, while the two chambers would be eliminated in favor of the single body.

Contrary to claims of executive overreach, the reforms stipulate that candidates who meet the necessary qualifications be proposed in equal proportions by all three branches of government, then narrowed down via a lottery system. The first elections will take place in June 2025 for the supreme court, Federal Electoral Tribunal, and half of the federal judiciary. By 2027, all sitting magistrates and judges will be up for election.

Throughout AMLO’s presidency (2018–2024), Mexico’s supreme court has served as a backstop against some of the government’s more ambitious reforms, sometimes intervening on behalf of powerful business interests. In a 3-5 decision in March 2021, for example, a supreme court chamber struck down a recently passed Electricity Industry Law for privileging the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (Federal Electricity Commission), a public utility, over private sector investors. On two occasions, the court overturned electoral reforms which, like the judicial reform, sought to restructure national election oversight bodies and elect their authorities by popular vote.

Morena argues that the reforms are intended to root out corruption and nepotism in the judicial system and democratize a historically elitist and authoritarian judicial branch. This argument has merit: Internal studies have found family networks of up to 89 relatives employed in the courts; 53.4% of magistrates and 18% of judges had more than four relatives working in the judicial branch in 2022.

Judicial positions in Mexico are lucrative: That same year, more than 1,000 high-ranking judicial employees were taking in between 430,000 and 518,000 pesos per month, well above $21,500 per month at a time when the monthly minimum wage in most of the country stood below $260.

Sheinbaum has defended the new measures, explaining that rather than consolidate executive power, the reform abdicates it.

“With this reform, the next president is renouncing the power to personally name supreme court justices,” she told the public in a recent social media message. “The president is democratically elected. Deputies and senators are democratically elected. Now, judges, magistrates, and justices will be democratically elected.”

Yet the reforms were met with resistance from powerful corporate interests. The U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce warned that, without significant changes, the “social and economic impacts will be inevitable and devastating.”

In his two-page statement criticizing the measure, U.S. Ambassador Salazar wrote that the proposal “will threaten the historic trade relationship we have built,” while the Canadian embassy declared it was a source of concern for private investors.

Major U.S. outlets including The Washington Post and The New York Times also ran incendiary columns that suggested the measure would undermine governance and endanger trade relations.

Their arguments varied. Some contended that elections would provide an opportunity for organized criminal influence; others warned the reforms represented an authoritarian presidential power grab; some merely raised vague concerns about destabilizing the investment climate. Little evidence backs up these claims. Rather than the contents of the reforms, big business, in Mexico and in the United States, appeared to balk at the restructuring of a system that has generally favored its interests.

Much of the criticism took a misogynist tone. The Post’s August 25 editorial espoused a patronizing and not subtly gendered view of President Sheinbaum’s relationship with López Obrador. It referred to AMLO as “her boss” and “her patron,” as though Mexico’s first female president were a promoted secretary and not a veteran politician and climate scientist with the strongest electoral mandate in Mexican history.

At the same time, the measure drew protest from within the Mexican judiciary, prompting marches, work stoppages, and strikes by judges and court workers. They framed their actions as a struggle against a reckless consolidation of executive power and politicization of the bench by the outgoing president. Advocates for reform dismissed these protests as attempts to retain long-held privileges.

The package faced formal challenges from within the judiciary as well. On August 31, a judge in the state of Morelos—herself a vociferous opponent of the reform—issued an injunction to suspend debate in congress at the behest of a group of magistrates who argue they stand to lose their jobs without due process. Simultaneously, a judge in Chiapas issued another injunction to prevent the measure from advancing to state legislatures for ratification. Hours later, a district court judge suspended both injunctions, permitting the process to move forward.

International financial markets also reacted negatively, perhaps because they find the current corrupt judiciary more friendly to their interests than an election-based system that would demand more accountability to public interest and needs. Morgan Stanley downgraded its investment recommendation for Mexico, and Fitch Ratings expressed concerns that the reforms could negatively impact the country’s corporate investment climate. The Mexican peso, which had fallen significantly following Sheinbaum’s commanding June 2 presidential victory, dropped again as the reforms moved forward in congress.

At a moment of political transition, these market moves send a disturbing message tantamount to blackmail to a fledgling administration with an ambitious agenda for a public sector-led sustainable energy transition. With the additional constitutional reforms proposed including measures to enshrine a ban on genetically modified corn, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), and open-pit mining, a democratically elected supreme court willing to uphold such measures represents a genuine threat to big agrobusiness, fossil fuel capital, and extractive enterprises on both sides of the border.

Despite this tidal wave of opposition, the reforms passed the Chamber of Deputies on September 4, were approved in the senate on September 10, and were subsequently ratified by a majority of state legislatures, where Morena and its allies hold commanding majorities. On Sunday, September 16, Mexican Independence Day, the president signed them into law. Far from a presidential imposition, their implementation will be the result of Mexico’s constitutionally established democratic process.

Some critics on the left suggest that the reforms do not go far enough, exempting from popular election military tribunal judges and administrative magistrates. In an analysis for the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, distinguished jurist and human rights advocate Carlos Pérez Vasquez argued: “If the radical democratization of justice is the point of the proposed reform, why not go further, returning to our own history to restore, gradually, the existence of popular juries as a central element of the democratic legitimacy of the justice system?”

Nevertheless, accusations that the reforms will undermine judicial independence and politicize a neutral judiciary ignore the reality that Mexico’s judicial branch is already an active political agent, while charges that the measures represent an authoritarian executive power grab willfully mischaracterize the initiative. The reforms may be imperfect, and they may not address the profound structural obstacles to justice in Mexico, but they represent a legitimate political project with support across the country’s national and local representative bodies.

In a recent column, independent Mexican journalist and political analyst Viri Ríos, a critic of the proposal for judicial elections, dismissed the opposition’s claims that they would put the country on a path to dictatorship.

“Personally, I don’t support the judicial reform, but I’m a democrat and therefore I know that my disagreement doesn’t authorize me to call my opponent authoritarian, much less to use everything in my power to subvert the implementation of their agenda,” she wrote. “In a democracy, losing has consequences. Unfortunately, in Mexico it’s clear that the losers don’t want to accept them.”

That the United States, a nation that combines lifetime Supreme Court appointments with a state-by-state system of local judicial selection in which most hold popular elections for lower court judges, could credibly lecture Mexico about judicial reform and the perils of judicial democracy is laughable.

Moreover, Salazar’s threats constituted a brazen intervention into a sovereign nation’s internal politics—hardly a first for a U.S. ambassador, but unacceptable nonetheless. Instead, the United States might prioritize putting its own house in order and follow Mexico’s example to confront the unelected far-right ideologues who have hijacked U.S. democracy from the bench with total impunity.

Mexico has every right to experiment with its forms of democratic self-governance. Maybe the United States should give it a try.

Remember the summer of 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. That night in August when white nationalists marched through the campus of the University of Virginia in a rally dubbed Unite the Right carrying torches, with some carrying flags with the Nazi black swastika and some chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and soil” and, also, “Jews will not replace us.” Manifest antisemitism at its core.

Remember also in October 2018 the mass murder at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh of 11 Jewish worshippers by a lone gunman filled with hatred toward Jews. That was also antisemitism at its core.

Remember also in October 2018 the mass murder at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh of 11 Jewish worshippers by a lone gunman filled with hatred toward Jews. That was also antisemitism at its core.

And centuries before there was when King Edward I ordered the expulsion of all Jews from England in 1290. Then there was the plague in the 14th century, the Black Death, propelling the story that Jews were the culprit by poisoning wells; a story some argue led to the “Medieval Holocaust.” These events are among others through history of Jews being persecuted.

Then there is May of this year when chief prosecutor Karim Khan of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza war. Charges Netanyahu in absolute fashion, and erroneously, characterized as antisemitic in his video statement responding to Khan’s announcement, saying:

Israel is waging a just war against Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that perpetrated the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust... Mr. Khan takes his place among the great antisemites in modern times. He now stands alongside those infamous German judges who donned their robes and upheld laws that denied the Jewish people their most basic rights and enabled the Nazis to perpetrate the worst crime in history.

Quite an accusation in Prime Minister Netanyahu comparing Mr. Khan to enablers of the Holocaust. Quite an accusation given Netanyahu failed to mention Khan was also seeking the arrest of the three principal leaders of Hamas for war crimes and crimes against humanity primarily in the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

In interviews in September with BBC’s Nick Robinson and then with Newsweek, prosecutor Karim Khan discussed his actions as a necessary equal application of international law. In his interview with Newsweek, Khan said:

Throughout history, we see that international law has been applied in a haphazard manner. It has not been applied evenly. And we’re seeing simply now vividly the unequal application of the law, particularly because of where we are. The world is connected…that it must be that all life matters equally. And there are certain situations that have developed in which it seems to be that powerful people think it’s a law-free zone, and we have to show that law applies everywhere. It’s not something that you can take it or leave it. It’s not an à la carte menu. You have to accept law in its totality if we’re not going to have a Wild West developing or widening in which you can grab what you want and do what you want to anybody that’s less powerful than you.

Then Mr. Khan added:

And whether they’re the families in the kibbutzim that are mourning the people killed from the seventh of October, or that are so horrendously being kept today… or it’s Palestinians in the West Bank or in Gaza, they have the right, not as a charity, not as a favor to them, but they have a right to be seen by the law.

Now juxtaposition the perspective of equality articulated by Khan in his interview with Newsweek with how Prime Minister Netanyahu ended his speech on September 27 before the United Nations General Assembly. After framing Iran the pivotal enemy in the Middle East, Netanyahu concluded by portraying the U.N. itself as a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” For starters, he said this:

The singling out of the one and only Jewish state continues to be a moral stain on the United Nations. It has made this once-respected institution contemptible in the eyes of decent people everywhere. But for the Palestinians, this U.N. house of darkness is home court. They know that in this swamp of antisemitic bile, there’s an automatic majority willing to demonize the Jewish state for anything. In this anti-Israel flat-Earth society, any false charge, any outlandish allegation can muster a majority.

Then Netanyahu added:

And given the antisemitism at the U.N., it should surprise no one that the prosecutor at the ICC, one of the U.N.’s affiliated organs, is considering issuing arrest warrants against me and Israel’s defense minister, the democratically elected leaders of the democratic state of Israel.The ICC prosecutor’s rush to judgment… is hard to explain by anything other than pure antisemitism.

Netanyahu’s persistent charge of antisemitism leveled against anyone who criticizes Israel leads to this conclusion: Accusations of antisemitism are just another weapon in Netanyahu’s, if not Israel’s, arsenal.

Netanyahu’s weaponization of accusations of antisemitism is a dangerous double-edged sword. It could weaken the legitimacy of efforts to eliminate demonstrable antisemitism and the bigoted and often violent hatred toward Jewish people. On the other hand, Netanyahu’s weaponization also may legitimate hatred toward Palestinians and toward those, even in the Jewish community, who support equality and self-determination for Palestinians. The latter is Netanyahu’s explicit purpose in his rhetoric; that is, portraying anyone who supports Palestinian equality as antisemitic.

Netanyahu’s weaponization of charges of antisemitism has no relationship to the working definition of antisemitism developed by member states in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the United States and Israel among them. This is the definition used by the U.S. State Department.

The IHRA delineated examples of behavior and activities considered antisemitic encompassed in its definition. Targeting Israel only because it represents a Jewish collectively was one. But as IHRA also states, “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

ICC’s chief prosecutor Khan in his aforementioned interviews plainly states seeking the arrest of both Israel and Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity represents equity in application of international law.

Then also, remember the international criticism of apartheid in South Africa. Such rings similar to criticisms of the Middle East version of apartheid in Israel. Similar criticism; not antisemitic.

A ritual is performed every time Israel starts another war, before the white phosphorus rains down, before the fear and panic of people fleeing their homes, before the footage of stunned survivors sifting through the rubble of collapsed apartment blocks.

It’s called the cease-fire ritual—a public display of handwashing. It’s the charade of pretending that there are honest diplomats out there trying to search every avenue, stretch every sinew, to stop this bedlam from starting.

Much of it is choreographed. Other parts are improvised. But be sure about one thing: It is pantomime. It bears no relationship to reality.

Nothing can persuade its Arab neighbors that Israel cannot live with them in peace more than the course on which Israel is currently set—a course that targets and threatens Christians, Muslims, Shia, and Sunni alike.

Hours before Israel declared that its ground attack on Lebanon had begun, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot was vainly insisting in a media conference in Beirut that his proposed 21-day cease-fire was “still on the table.”

As he was doing so, the U.S., France’s co-sponsor, was briefing journalists that cease-fire talks had stopped. This position went through several iterations as the afternoon wore on, and the contradictions accumulated.

The U.S. simultaneously wanted a diplomatic solution, while describing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination as an “unalloyed good.” It claimed to have restrained Israel to a limited operation on the border, while also expressing anxiety about the humanitarian aspect of the operation. And it pledged to continue to work on de-escalating tensions while acknowledging that Israel was a sovereign country that made its own decisions.

If this charade sounds horribly familiar, that’s because it is.

Cut through the verbiage and the bottom line—as the Pentagon has confirmed—is that the U.S. supports a ground invasion of Lebanon, and cease-fire plans can go hang.

Desire for Vengeance

The same happened in Gaza a year ago. Israel’s “right to defend itself” is shorthand for flattening every neighborhood unfortunate enough to live next to it.

This macabre dance serves a purpose: Virtually every media outlet in the Western world on Tuesday described the unfolding operation in Lebanon as “targeted” or “limited”—precise commando raids that go in and come back out—just as they did during the initial phase of the Gaza war.

“We do not expect it will look like 2006,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, Israeli diplomats and generals could not stop themselves from blurting out the truth. Mike Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., said: “The American administration… did not limit us in time. They, too, understand that following Nasrallah’s assassination, there is a new situation in Lebanon and there is a chance for reshaping.”

A “reshaping” of Lebanon does not mean a targeted operation limited to the border. Nor was limitation in the thoughts of one Israeli army commander, who noted: “We have a great privilege to write history as we did in Gaza here in the north.”

Rage and hate speech have reached psychotic levels in Israel. The desire for vengeance directed against the people of Gaza has swiftly found a new target: the people of Lebanon.

Nir Dvori of Channel 12 News gloated that “Nasrallah died in torment” amid reports that the Hezbollah leader had suffocated. The head of the Shlomi town council welcomed the ground invasion, saying: “It is necessary to cleanse the area.”

Political commentator Ben Caspit dreamed of the “day after” such a cleansing operation, suggesting that even the grandmothers of any fighter in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force who crossed back over the Litani River should “die at that moment.”

Funny he should mention the Litani River, whose name has often been invoked as the upper limit of southern Lebanon that Israel wants to clear of Hezbollah rockets—because that, too, is turning into a myth. The military ambitions of this operation go far deeper into Lebanon.

Barely 12 hours after the U.S. State Department said it had limited Israel’s operation, the Israeli military issued evacuation orders to more than 20 towns and villages in southern Lebanon. “You must head immediately to the north of the al-Awali River,” near Sidon, army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on X (formerly Twitter).

Redesigning the Middle East

This indicates that Israel has claimed as its area of military operations the whole of southern Lebanon, almost one-third of the country. In a stroke, Israel doubled its area of operations.

This is in line with the promise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made in the hours after Hamas’ attack a year ago.

“We are going to change the Middle East,” Netanyahu told officials visiting Jerusalem from the country’s south, where Hamas had struck on 7 October 2023.

Jared Kushner, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and real estate investor who has apparently spent hours studying Hezbollah and considers himself an expert on the subject, wrote similarly on X: “September 27 [the date of Nasrallah’s killing] is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough… Anyone who has been calling for a cease-fire in the North is wrong.

“There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance.”

Netanyahu and his American backers will change the Middle East by invading Lebanon, that is for sure. But not quite in the way they imagine.

After leading the liberation of southern Lebanon after 18 years of occupation, and having led the battle against Israel in 2006, in Hezbollah’s eyes successfully, Nasrallah kept the northern border quiet for nearly two decades.

Under Nasrallah’s rule, Hezbollah was totally absorbed in another fight altogether: the civil war in Syria. This had many consequences. It downplayed the primacy of the struggle to liberate Palestine. And Hezbollah, as it grew in size and political importance, became easier for Israel’s Mossad to infiltrate.

Some of the major operations over the past month, such as the supply of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, were years in the making. The exact locations of Hezbollah’s bunkers, and the movement of targets between them, were also the result of years of work and research.

Dramatic Contrast

None of what transpired to deliver a body blow to Hezbollah was unprepared, which is why it contrasts so dramatically with the difficulties Israel has experienced in attempting to decapitate Hamas in Gaza.

But Israel was also helped by Hezbollah and Iran’s “strategic patience,” or their lack of response to its mounting attacks on their commanders and leaders. Hezbollah never took revenge for the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, the leader of its military wing. Nor did it reply in kind to the assassination of senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri earlier this year in its heartland of Dahiyeh in Beirut.

The meekness of the response from Hezbollah and Iran only gave Israel the confidence to redouble its blows on Lebanon and Syria.

Every time this happened, both Hezbollah and Iran went out of their way to say they did not want to start a war with Israel; and that their campaign was in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza and would stop the moment a cease-fire was reached.

And when they did strike, it was generally, although not exclusively, on Israeli military targets. Hezbollah’s rockets and propaganda videos were demonstrative, designed to show its power, not to use it.

In hindsight, this strategy has proved to be a strategic mistake, for which Hezbollah is paying today—because it gave Israel the confidence to do what it is now doing to Lebanon.

Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah have outnumbered Hezbollah’s replies by five to one.

This is not just the miscalculation of those who are routinely dubbed hardliners in Lebanon and Iran. Reformist Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said he was lied to by the Americans, who promised a cease-fire in Gaza if Iran could restrain itself from replying to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran.

It was the failure of Iran’s strategic restraint that led on Tuesday night to the bombardment of more than 180 missiles on targets across Israel. After the attack, Pezeshkian still maintained that Iran did not seek a war with Israel, but the policy of restraint has clearly been dumped. One can expect Hezbollah and all armed groups in Yemen and Iraq to be more active.

But an even bigger miscalculation is being made by Israel in its desire to strike while the iron is hot.

Untamed Aggression

Israel is reengineering the entire Middle East to hate it, while the Palestinian issue remains unresolved. It is reverse engineering a period of three decades, since the Oslo Accords, when the Palestinian conflict lost its supremacy and centrality in the Arab world.

Nothing is doing more than Israel’s untamed aggression to heal the deep divisions in the Arab world created by the counter-revolution to the Arab Spring.

When you drop 80 tonnes of explosives to kill Nasrallah and kill 300 others in doing so, you move him from being a symbol of resistance to a legend.

“The symbol is gone, the legend is born, and the resistance continues,” was how Lebanese politician Suleiman Frangieh, a scion of one of the country’s leading Maronite families, put it.

Ibrahim al-Amin, the editor of Al Akhbar, a newspaper close to Hezbollah, compared Nasrallah to Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who is regarded as the third imam in Shia Islam.

He wrote: “Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah did not imagine himself in the image of Hussain when he fell as a martyr. He is not in Hussain’s position when the world has let him down. Rather, he is in the image of Hussain who got up and fought in defence of a right that the cost of collecting is very high… [Nasrallah] has become an eternal symbol for every rebel in the face of injustice, and… he was martyred in defense of Jerusalem and Palestine.”

Nasrallah had a charismatic appeal as an orator to his Shia constituency and the pro-Palestinian masses in the Arab world, in the same way that former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had for the Arab nationalist movement in his time.

In death, Nasrallah promises to do that much.

Profound Consequences

Of course, this is not the view of the Arab elites who have spent so much of their careers cozying up to the U.S. and Israel. But even they have to acknowledge the passions coursing through their people.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman used Israel as a path to being taken seriously by Washington. But even he is brutally candid about his limits as a leader.

“Seventy percent of my population is younger than me,” the 39-year-old ruler reportedly told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. “For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.”

A Saudi official disputed this account of Mohammed bin Salman’s conversation with Blinken, but it bears the ring of truth.

Yes, the region is being redesigned by an Israel that has broken its leash.

Nothing can persuade its Arab neighbors that Israel cannot live with them in peace more than the course on which Israel is currently set—a course that targets and threatens Christians, Muslims, Shia, and Sunni alike.

Netanyahu, more than anyone else, is persuading them that an Israel that behaves like this, does not belong to this region.

This will have profound strategic consequences for the future. So is Nasrallah’s death truly an “unalloyed good” for the region?

Beware what you wish for, because it just may happen.

Tonight is the vice presidential debate and it’s likely the final debate of the election and the last opportunity for voters to see both tickets side-by-side. The backdrop will be the once-in-a-generation devastation of Hurricane Helene.

When Walz and Vance take the stage, tens of thousands of people won’t know if their loved ones are alive or if they have a home to go back to. Many more will just be beginning a recovery effort that will take years and cost an estimated $90 billion or more. And Helene is just one sign of the catastrophic destruction that climate change could bring.

We deserve some answers from these men who are running to be second in line to the presidency. CBS debate moderator Norah O'Donnell must ask both JD Vance and Tim Walz what their administrations would do to stop disasters like Helene from becoming the new normal. And, in particular, she needs to be ready to hold JD Vance accountable to actually delivering a response.

With the backdrop of Helene, O'Donnell has an opportunity to show a different path tonight. She can ask strong questions and be ready with facts to hold Vance accountable.

The reality is that our politicians are not confronting the climate crisis at the scale and speed that science and justice demand. Our Vice President is boasting about record oil and gas production in a time when scientists have warned we must be decarbonizing as fast as possible. And her opponent, Donald Trump, is a climate denier who has promised oil and gas billionaires to do their bidding in exchange for a billion dollars. When the candidates were asked about climate change in the last debate, Trump entirely dodged the question, instead pivoting to an irrelevant tangent about auto-plants and tariffs, despite the fact that Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act actually created manufacturing jobs. ABC news moderators didn’t follow up or press the question.

In the year 2024 that doesn’t cut it. Scientists say we have just a handful of years left to stop catastrophic climate change. Helene’s apocalyptic nature is only a sign of the years to come. That makes the next four years of American politics an absolutely critical time for bold climate policy. We could be investing in resilient renewable electricity grids, updating our bridges and our roads, and making sure our homes and infrastructure are ready for disaster. We could be restoring wetlands, mangroves, and forests; expanding FEMA; and building a workforce that is ready to respond to disasters. And above all, we need to decarbonize our economy as fast as humanly possible.

But looking at media coverage, you’d hardly know the urgency of the climate crisis. The vast majority of media coverage of disasters like Helene doesn’t identify climate change as a factor. Even when broadcast news does talk about climate change, only 12% of the time do they mention burning fossil fuels as the problem. And in a bizarre attempt at neutrality, climate deniers in the Republican Party are regularly platformed without being fact-checked or held accountable for their lies.

With the backdrop of Helene, O'Donnell has an opportunity to show a different path tonight. She can ask strong questions and be ready with facts to hold Vance accountable. She should have on hand statements from JD Vance outlining his denial of human-caused climate change—a sharp reversal from his status as a green tech investor just a few years ago. She should be ready to cite opposition to the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark green energy bill that invests $12 billion in Ohio’s green energy economy and has created good, union jobs.

In a time when we face unprecedented disaster, we need our media institutions to be a source of truth and honesty and to be ready to hold those in power accountable. The tens of thousands of people who have lost their homes to Helene, the people who have had to evacuate from wildfires, the elderly and young people who have died from heat waves, the young people who are scared for their future—we are owed answers.

As of this writing, Israel’s rampage in Lebanon has killed more than a thousand people in two weeks, wounded thousands more (including many maimed for life), and displaced hundreds of thousands.

The Israeli onslaught — including the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with a 2,000 pound, U.S.-made bomb that killed others too — has mostly garnered approval from American leaders, particularly the president and vice president.

Continuing its genocidal assault of Gaza, bombing Yemen for the second time this year, and carrying out aerial bombardment in Lebanon at a speed and on a scale perhaps unseen in the 21st century, Israel launched a ground invasion on Tuesday, one it described as "limited" in scope. As the invasions and attacks escalate and expand across the region — and Washington continues to send Israel weapons — here are six key things to know about the crisis in Lebanon and how it could be resolved.

1. Israel has a long history of attacks on Lebanon.

In 1982, at the height of Lebanon’s catastrophic, 15 year civil war, Israeli forces invaded, attacking Lebanese villages and Palestinian refugee camps with tanks, airstrikes, and shells.

Israel laid siege to Beirut and collaborated with far-right Christian Lebanese militias as they carried out a notorious massacre of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and the Shatilla refugee camp, killing thousands.

It was during these years that Hezbollah formed to fight the Israeli occupation.

2. Israel occupied Lebanon for 15 years.

Israel occupied a wide strip of Southern Lebanon from 1985 until 2000.

During that time, the Israeli military propped up the South Lebanon Army (SLA) militia, which detained Lebanese and Palestinian dissidents at a notorious prison — administered under Israeli protection — where Amnesty International and other human rights organizations documented systematic torture.

Israel justified its brutal occupation by claiming it needed a “buffer zone” to protect itself — the same excuse it is using to justify its attacks in southern Lebanon today.

3. Hezbollah is a political and social organization, not just a military one.

Though Hezbollah formed as a military resistance movement, the organization plays a much larger role in Lebanese society.

Hezbollah began participating in elections after the end of the civil war and remains one of the country’s largest parties today. Hezbollah also runs an extensive social services infrastructure, maintaining hospitals and schools, providing for families of those killed in war, and carrying out reconstruction since Israel’s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000.

So when Israel detonated hundreds of pagers to attack members of Hezbollah, people targeted included medical, educational, and other non-military personnel.

4. Israel invaded Lebanon again in 2006.

As Israeli forces bombard Lebanon today, they are reviving fresh memories from the last Israeli invasion, in 2006. That assault, which Israel escalated following a brief exchange of rockets across the Lebanon-Israel border, lasted for 34 days, killed over 1,000 Lebanese civilians, and destroyed civilian infrastructure, such as the Liban Lait milk factory.

In the words of an Israeli officer who commanded a rocket unit, “what we did was insane and monstrous; we covered entire towns in cluster bombs.” Unexploded munitions in Southern Lebanon have remained over the years since, posing a grave threat to residents — especially children.

The 2006 Israel-Lebanon war was fought simultaneously with the first major Israeli assault on Gaza following the withdrawal of settlers there.

5. A permanent ceasefire in Gaza could halt the fighting in Lebanon.

Given the history, it’s not surprising that there have been frequent military exchanges on the Israeli-Lebanese border. But the past year of violence is rooted directly in the catastrophic Israeli offensive in Gaza.

Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel on Oct. 8, 2023 and Israel has carried out its own cross-border strikes. Though Hezbollah has rockets capable of striking almost any Israeli city, it has largely — with a few exceptions — limited its attacks to villages across the border, which were largely evacuated after October 7.

Hezbollah has said it will stop firing rockets when Israel ends its assault in Gaza. Indeed, when Israeli forces and Hamas reached a temporary ceasefire and exchange of hostages and prisoners in November 2023, Hezbollah honored the ceasefire.

6. Suspending U.S. arms sales is key to getting a ceasefire.

Ending the growing disaster in Lebanon — and preventing its escalation into an expanded war — requires the same solution as ending the carnage in Gaza: an immediate and lasting ceasefire. And that means the U.S. must stop sending arms to Israel.

President Biden, in his final address to the UN General Assembly on September 24, said that it is time to “end this war.” But his actions say the opposite. In August, the White House approved $20 billion in new weapons transfers to Israel despite months of well-documented abuses by Israeli forces in Gaza and months of Israeli threats to invade Lebanon.

The devastation in Gaza, and now perhaps Lebanon as well, will take generations to recover from. But the first step is for Washington to stop sending the weapons — in line with what the majority of Americans are demanding.

Ken Klippenstein, an independent reporter operating on Substack and an investigative alum of the Intercept, announced (Substack, 9/26/24) that he had been kicked off Twitter (now rebranded as X). His crime, he explained, stemmed from posting the 271-page official dossier of Republican vice presidential candidate’s J.D. Vance’s campaign vulnerabilities; the US government alleges that the information was leaked through Iranian hacking. In other words, the dossier is a part of the “foreign meddling campaign” of “enemy states.”

Klippenstein is not the first reporter to gain access to these papers (Popular Information, 9/9/24), but most of the reporting about this dossier has been on the intrigue revolving around Iranian hacking rather than the content itself (Daily Beast, 8/10/24; Politico, 8/10/24; Forbes, 8/11/24). Klippenstein decided it was time for the whole enchilada to see the light of day:

As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself.
“The terror regime in Iran loves the weakness and stupidity of Kamala Harris, and is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Donald J. Trump,” Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, responded when I asked him about the hack.
If the document had been hacked by some “anonymous”-like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combating foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.

The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement that alleged Iranian hacking (9/18/24) was “malicious cyber activity” and “the latest example of Iran’s multi-pronged approach…to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process.”

Where’s the beef?

The Vance report isn’t as salacious as Vance’s false and bizarre comments about Haitians eating pets (NPR, 9/15/24), but it does show that he has taken positions that have fractured the right, such as aid for Ukraine; the report calls him one of the “chief obstructionists” to providing assistance to the country against Russia. It dedicates several pages to Vance’s history of criticizing Trump and the MAGA movement, suggesting that his place on the ticket could divide Trump’s voting base.

On the other hand, it outlines many of his extreme right-wing stances that could alienate him with putative moderates. It says Vance “appears to have once called for slashing Social Security and Medicare,” and “is opposed to providing childcare assistance to low-income Americans.” He “supports placing restrictions on abortion access,” and states that “he does not support abortion exceptions in the case of rape.”

And for any voter who values 7-day-a-week service, Vance “appears to support laws requiring businesses to close on Sundays.” It quotes him saying: “Close the Damn Businesses on Sunday. Commercial Freedom Will Suffer. Moral Behavior Will Not, and Our Society Will Be Much the Better for It.” That might not go over well with small business owners, and any worker who depends on their Sunday shifts.

‘Took a deep breath’

Are the findings in the Vance dossier the story of the century? Probably not, but it’s not nothing that the Trump campaign is aware its vice presidential candidate is loaded with liabilities. There are at least a few people who find that useful information.

And the Washington Post (9/27/24) happily reported on private messages Vance sent to an anonymous individual who shared them with the newspaper that explained Vance’s flip-flopping from a Trump critic to a Trump lover. Are the private messages really more newsworthy than the dossier—or is the issue that the messages aren’t tainted by allegedly foreign fingerprints? Had that intercept of material involved an Iranian, would it have seen the light of day?

In fact, the paper (8/13/24) explained that news organizations, including the Post, were reflecting on the foreign nature of the leak when deciding how deep they should report on the content they received:

“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of the Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”
Double standards for leaks

There seems to be a disconnect, however, between ill-gotten information that impacts a Republican ticket and information that tarnishes a Democrat.

Think back to 2016. When “WikiLeaks released a trove of emails apparently hacked from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman email account, unleashing thousands of messages,” as Politico (10/7/16) reported, the outlet didn’t just merely report on the hack, it reported on the embarrassing substance of the documents. In 2024, by contrast, when Politico was given the Vance dossier, it wrote nothing about its contents, declaring that “questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents” (CNN, 8/13/24).

The New York Times and Washington Post similarly found the Clinton leaks—which were believed at the time to have been given to WikiLeaks by Russia—far more newsworthy than the Vance dossier. The Times “published at least 199 articles about the stolen DNC and Clinton campaign emails between the first leak in June 2016 and Election Day,” Popular Information (9/9/24) noted.

FAIR editor Jim Naureckas (11/24/09) has written about double standards in media, noting that information that comes to light through unethical or illegal means is played up if that information helps powerful politicians and corporations. Meanwhile, if such information obtained questionably is damaging, the media focus tends to be less on the substance, and more on whether the public should be hearing about such matters.

For example, when a private citizen accidentally overheard a cell phone conversation between House Speaker John Boehner, former Speaker Newt Gingrich and other Republican congressmembers, and made a tape that showed Gingrich violating the terms of a ethics sanction against him, news coverage focused on the illegality of taping the conversation, not on the ethics violation the tape revealed (Washington Post, 1/14/97; New York Times, 1/15/97).

But when climate change deniers hacked climate scientists’ email, that produced a front-page story in the New York Times (11/20/09) scrutinizing the correspondence for any inconsistencies that could be used to bolster the deniers’ arguments.

When Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Michael Gallagher wrote a series of stories about the Chiquita fruit corporation, based in part on listening without authorization to company voicemails, the rest of the media were far more interested in Gallagher’s ethical and legal dilemmas (he was eventually sentenced to five years’ probation) rather than the bribery, fraud and worker abuse his reporting exposed.

Meet the new boss

There’s a certain degree of comedy in the hypocrisy of Klippenstein’s suspension. Since right-wing billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, he has claimed that his administration would end corporate censorship, but instead he’s implemented his own censorship agenda (Guardian, 1/15/24; Al Jazeera, 8/14/24).

The Independent (1/29/23) reported that Musk “oversaw a campaign of suppression that targeted his critics upon his assumption of power at Twitter.” He

personally directed the suspension of a left-leaning activist, Chad Loder, who became known across the platform for his work helping to identify participants in the January 6 attack.

Al Jazeera (2/28/23) noted that “digital rights groups say social media giants,” including X, “have restricted [and] suspended the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists.” Musk has likewise fulfilled censorship requests by the governments of Turkey (Ars Technica, 5/15/23) and India (Intercept, 1/24/23, 3/28/23) officials, and is generally more open to official requests to suppress speech than Twitter‘s previous owners (El Pais, 5/24/23; Washington Post, 9/25/24).

Meanwhile, Musk’s critics contend, he’s allowed the social network to be a force multiplier for the right. “Elon Musk has increasingly used the social media platform as a megaphone to amplify his political views and, lately, those of right-wing figures he’s aligned with,” AP (8/13/24) reported. (Musk is vocal about his support for former President Donald Trump’s candidacy—New York Times, 7/18/24.)

“Twitter Antisemitism ‘Skyrocketed’ Since Elon Musk Takeover—Jewish Groups,” blasted a Newsweek headline (4/25/23). Earlier this year, Mother Jones (3/13/24) reported that Musk “has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents…spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers.”

‘Chilling effect on speech’

Now Musk’s Twitter is keeping certain information out of the public view—information that just happens to damage the presidential ticket he supports. With Klippenstein having been silenced on the network, anyone claiming X is a bastion of free speech at this point is either mendacious or simply deluded.

Klippenstein (Substack, 9/26/24) explained that “X says that I’ve been suspended for ‘violating our rules against posting private information,’ citing a tweet linking to my story about the JD Vance dossier.” He added, though, that “I never published any private information on X.” Rather, “I linked to an article I wrote here, linking to a document of controversial provenance, one that I didn’t want to alter for that very reason.”

The journalist (Substack, 9/27/24) claims that his account suspension, which he reports to be permanent, is political because he did not violate the network’s code about disclosing personal information, and even if he did, he should have been given the opportunity to correct his post to become unsuspended. “So it’s not about a violation of X’s policies,” he said. “What else would you call this but politically motivated?”

Klippenstein is understandably concerned that he is now without a major social media promotional tool. “I no longer have access to the primary channel by which I disseminate primarily news (and shitposts of course) to the general public,” he said. “This chilling effect on speech is exactly why we published the Vance Dossier in its entirety.”

UPDATE: Klippenstein (Substack, 9/29/24) reports that his publication of the Vance dossier is being censored not only by X, but by Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google as well: “The platforms said that the alleged Iranian origin of the dossier — which no one is calling fake or altered — necessitated removing any links to the document.”

In November, abortion rights measures will appear on ballots across ten states, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and New York, where Latinos make up a significant portion of the electorate. For decades, pundits and politicians have recycled long-held misconceptions about Latino voters and abortion access, citing our conservative and religious beliefs. Anti-abortion extremists have long fueled these misconceptions through misinformation and disinformation campaigns targeting Latino communities with egregious lies and inflammatory rhetoric about abortion. Yet, polling, focus groups, and direct interactions with Latino communities have debunked these outdated tropes. The Latino electorate will prove decisive in securing reproductive freedom and abortion access through ballot measures around the country, particularly in states where Latinos are a significant portion of the electorate.

For Latinos, the freedom to decide, a pillar of our American democracy, is critical. Meanwhile, Latinos are being hit directly with anti-abortion efforts that take away that freedom such as the six-week abortion ban put into effect by the Florida Supreme Court and the 1864 abortion ban upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, people of color and Latinas have felt the impact of a lack of abortion access, an element of basic healthcare. A 2023 report by the National Partnership for Women and Families estimated that nearly 6.5 million Latinas, or 42% of all Latinas of reproductive age in the country, live in a state that either had or was likely to ban abortion.

Ironically, it will be abortion access and anti-choice efforts to restrict freedom of choice that will mobilize Latino voters this election. In a poll conducted by three national reproductive justice organizations, 87% of Latinas named abortion and women’s rights as one of their top priorities as they head to the polls. Another battleground poll conducted by Somos PAC and BSP Research found that 61% of Latino registered voters expressed a more positive/favorable view of Kamala Harris after hearing that she will protect abortion rights, versus only 19% of Latinos who said they had a more negative view of Harris after hearing that. In key states to secure the White House and both chambers, Latinos make up large chunks of the electorate: Arizona (25%), Colorado (15%), Florida (20%), Nevada (20%), and New York (12%).” In the face of unprecedented attacks on basic healthcare access and targeted attempts by extremists to mislead and divide our community on this issue, this November Latinos will be key deciders on abortion access across the country.

Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.

While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”

That was in 1961.

Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.

No longer 100 Holocausts.

More than 1,000 Holocausts.

If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.

What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet? And see what had become a global crematorium and an unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khruschev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”

As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget.

What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?

In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.

The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing. “Escalation dominance.”

But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.

China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Senator William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”

Of course there’s plenty to deplore about Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using “tactical” ones in Ukraine have come from Moscow. There’s now public discussion – by Russian military and political elites – of putting nuclear weapons in space.

We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements. Among crucial steps, it’s long past time to restore three treaties that the United States abrogated – ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, and Open Skies.

On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”

That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East. On September 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unequivocally that Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was “a form of terrorism.” The United States keeps arming Israel, but won’t negotiate with Iran.

The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead, and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase the risk of devastation.

We can too easily forget what’s truly at stake.

Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals and systems – programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.

Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.

And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break the rules.”

Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.

Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away. And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”

Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan – formerly a supreme cold warrior -- stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.”

But such attitudes would be heresy today.

As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted under the euphemism of “modernization.”

And here’s a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.

The United States should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. It’s an approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge of nuclear war.

The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.

We don’t know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.

Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet, calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putin’s interests.

A zero-sum view of the world.

A one-way ticket to omnicide.

The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to greenlight NATO-backed Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.

Consider what President Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in his historic speech at American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”

That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

And where is this all headed?

Daniel Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that was hand-delivered to every office of senators and House members, he wrote: “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.” Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”

In the quest for sanity and survival, isn’t it time for reconstruction of the nuclear arms-control infrastructure? Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.

And some great options don’t depend on what happens at the negotiation table.

Many experts say that the most important initial step our country could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of all ICBMs.

The word “deterrence” is often heard. But the land-based part of the triad is actually the opposite of deterrence – it’s an invitation to be attacked. That’s the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five western states

Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a president just minutes to determine whether what’s incoming is actually a set of missiles – or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill message that’s mistaken for the real thing.

The former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” and “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”

And yet, so far, we can't get anywhere with Congress in order to shut down ICBMs. “Oh no,” we’re told, “that would be unilateral disarmament.”

Imagine that you're standing in a pool of gasoline, with your adversary. You’re lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as “unilateral disarmament.” It would also be a sane step to reduce the danger -- whether or not the other side follows suit.

The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.

The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased with sky-high tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.

Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs in the unique category of “use them or lose them.” So, as Secretary Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.”

The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and General James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”

In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancelation of the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs – they also called for getting rid of the entire land-based leg of the triad.

Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way, the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.

During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King declared: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”

I want to close with some words from Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, summing up the preparations for nuclear war. He wrote:

“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”

This article is adapted from the keynote speech that Norman Solomon gave at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC on Sept. 24, 2024.

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least—and brace yourself for this—$100 million in Pentagon funding.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

The Pentagon Goes to School

Yes, the Pentagon’s funding of universities is indeed rising once again and it goes well beyond the usual suspects like MIT or Johns Hopkins University. In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least—and brace yourself for this—$100 million in Pentagon funding, from Johns Hopkins’s astonishing $1.4 billion (no, that is not a typo!) to Colorado State’s impressive $100 million. And here’s a surprise: Two of the universities with the most extensive connections to our weaponry of the future are in Texas: the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and Texas A&M.

In 2020, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy appeared onstage at a UT-Austin ceremony to commemorate the creation of a robotics lab there, part of a new partnership between the Army Futures Command and the school. “This is ground zero for us in our research for the weapons systems we’re going to develop for decades to come,” said McCarthy.

Not to be outdone, Texas A&M is quietly becoming the Pentagon’s base for research on hypersonics—weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Equipped with a kilometer-long tunnel for testing hypersonic missiles, that school’s University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics is explicitly dedicated to outpacing America’s global rivals in the development of that next generation military technology. Texas A&M is also part of the team that runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the (in)famous New Mexico facility where the first nuclear weapons were developed and tested as part of the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer.

“I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.”

Other major players include Carnegie Mellon University, a center for Army research on the applications of AI, and Stanford University, which serves as a feeder to California’s Silicon Valley firms of all types. That school also runs the Technology Transfer for Defense (TT4D) Program aimed at transitioning academic technologies from the lab to the marketplace and exploring the potential military applications of emerging technology products.

In addition, the Pentagon is working aggressively to bring new universities into the fold. In January 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a defense-funded research center at Howard University, the first of its kind at a historically Black college.

Given the campus Gaza demonstrations of last spring, perhaps you also won’t be surprised to learn that the recent surge in Pentagon spending faces increasing criticism from students and faculty alike. Targets of protest include the Lavender program, which has used AI to multiply the number of targets the Israeli armed forces can hit in a given time frame. But beyond focusing on companies enabling Israel’s war effort, current activists are also looking at the broader role of their universities in the all-American war system.

For example, at Indiana University research on ties to companies fueling the killings in Gaza grew into a study of the larger role of universities in supporting the military system as a whole. Student activists found that the most important connection involved that university’s ties to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, whose mission is “to provide acquisition, engineering… and technical support for sensors, electronics, electronic warfare, and special warfare weapons.” In response, student activists have launched a “Keep Crane Off Campus” campaign.

A Science of Death or for Life?

Graduating science and engineering students increasingly face a moral dilemma about whether they want to put their skills to work developing instruments of death. Journalist Indigo Olivier captured that conflict in a series of interviews with graduating engineering students. She quotes one at the University of West Florida who strongly opposes doing weapons work this way: “When it comes to engineering, we do have a responsibility… Every tool can be a weapon… I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.” By contrast, Cameron Davis, a 2021 computer engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, told Olivier about the dilemma faced by so many graduating engineers: “A lot of people that I talk to aren’t 100% comfortable working on defense contracts, working on things that are basically going to kill people.” But he went on to say that the high pay at weapons firms “drives a lot of your moral disagreements with defense away.”

The choice faced by today’s science and engineering graduates is nothing new. The use of science for military ends has a long history in the United States. But there have also been numerous examples of scientists who resisted dangerous or seemingly unworkable military schemes. When President Ronald Reagan announced his “Star Wars” missile defense plan in 1986, for instance, he promised, all too improbably, to develop an impenetrable shield that would protect the United States from any and all incoming nuclear-armed missiles. In response, physicists David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund circulated a pledge to refuse to work on that program. It would, in the end, be signed by more than 7,000 scientists. And that document actually helped puncture the mystique of the Star Wars plan, a reminder that protest against the militarization of education isn’t always in vain.

James E. Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to U.S. intelligence, helped develop the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the U.S during its post-9/11 “war on terror,” even sitting in on a session in which a prisoner was waterboarded.

Scientists have also played a leading role in pressing for nuclear arms control and disarmament, founding organizations like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1945), the Federation of American Scientists (1945), the global Pugwash movement (1957), the Council for a Livable World (1962), and the Union of Concerned Scientists (1969). To this day, all of them continue to work to curb the threat of a nuclear war that could destroy this planet as a livable place for humanity.

A central figure in this movement was Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project over moral qualms about the potential impact of the atomic bomb. In 1957, he helped organize the founding meeting of the Pugwash Conference, an international organization devoted to the control and ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. In some respects Pugwash was a forerunner of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which successfully pressed for the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021.

Enabling Endless War and Widespread Torture

The social sciences also have a long, conflicted history of ties to the Pentagon and the military services. Two prominent examples from earlier in this century were the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Program (HTS) and the role of psychologists in crafting torture programs associated with the Global War on Terror, launched after the 9/11 attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan.

The HTS was initially intended to reduce the “cultural knowledge gap” suffered by U.S. troops involved in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq early in this century. The theory was that military personnel with a better sense of local norms and practices would be more effective in winning “hearts and minds” and so defeating determined enemies on their home turf. The plan included the deployment of psychologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists in Human Terrain Teams alongside American troops in the field.

Launched in 2007, the program sparked intense protests in the academic community, with a particularly acrimonious debate within the American Anthropological Association. Ed Liebow, the executive director of the association, argued that its debate “convinced a very large majority of our members that it was just not a responsible way for professional anthropologists to conduct themselves.” After a distinctly grim history that included “reports of racism, sexual harassment, and payroll padding,” as well as a belief by many commanders that Human Terrain Teams were simply ineffective, the Army quietly abandoned the program in 2014.

The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”

An even more controversial use of social scientists in the service of the war machine was the role of psychologists as advisors to the CIA’s torture programs at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and other of that agency’s “black sites.” James E. Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to U.S. intelligence, helped develop the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the U.S during its post-9/11 “war on terror,” even sitting in on a session in which a prisoner was waterboarded. That interrogation program, developed by Mitchell with psychologist John Bruce Jessom, included resorting to “violence, sleep deprivation, and humiliation.”

The role of psychologists in crafting the CIA’s torture program drew harsh criticism within the profession. A 2015 report by independent critics revealed that the leaders of the American Psychological Association had “secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror.” Over time, it became ever clearer that the torture program was not only immoral but remarkably ineffective, since the victims of such torture often told interrogators what they wanted to hear, whether or not their admissions squared with reality.

That was then, of course. But today, resistance to the militarization of science has extended to the growing use of artificial intelligence and other emerging military technologies. For example, in 2018, there was a huge protest movement at Google when employees learned that the company was working on Project Maven, a communications network designed to enable more accurate drone strikes. More than 4,000 Google scientists and engineers signed a letter to company leadership calling for them to steer clear of military work, dozens resigned over the issue, and the protests had a distinct effect on the company. That year, Google announced that it would not renew its Project Maven contract, and pledged that it “will not design or deploy AI” for weapons.

Unfortunately, the lure of military funding was simply too strong. Just a few years after those Project Maven protests, Google again began doing work for the Pentagon, as noted in a 2021 New York Times report by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger. Their article pointed to Google’s “aggressive pursuit” of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project, which will attempt to “modernize the Pentagon’s cloud technology and support the use of artificial intelligence to gain an advantage on the battlefield.” (Cloud technology is the term for the delivery of computing services over the internet.)

Meanwhile, a cohort of Google workers has continued to resist such military projects. An October 2021 letter in the British Guardian from “Google and Amazon workers of conscience” called on the companies to “pull out of Project Nimbus [a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military and government] and cut all ties with the Israeli military.” As they wrote then, “This contract was signed the same week that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children. The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians.”

Of course, their demand seems even more relevant today in the context of the war on Gaza that had then not officially begun.

The Future of American Science

Obviously, many scientists do deeply useful research on everything from preventing disease to creating green-energy options that has nothing to do with the military. But the current increases in weapons research could set back such efforts by soaking up an ever larger share of available funds, while also drawing ever more top talent into the military sphere.

The stakes are particularly high now, given the ongoing rush to develop AI-driven weaponry and other emerging technologies that pose the risk of everything from unintended slaughter due to system malfunctions to making war more likely, given the (at least theoretical) ability to limit casualties for the attacking side. In short, turning back the flood of funding for military research and weaponry from the Pentagon and key venture capital firms will be a difficult undertaking. After all, AI is already performing a wide range of military and civilian tasks. Banning it altogether may no longer be a realistic goal, but putting guardrails around its military use might still be.

Such efforts are, in fact, already underway. The International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) has called for an international dialogue on “the pressing dangers that these systems pose to peace and international security and to civilians.” ICRAC elaborates on precisely what these risks are: “Autonomous systems have the potential to accelerate the pace and tempo of warfare, to undermine existing arms controls and regulations, to exacerbate the dangers of asymmetric warfare, and to destabilize regional and global security, [as well as to] further the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force and obscure the moral and legal responsibility for war crimes.”

The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”

Instead of listening almost exclusively to happy talk about the military value of AI by individuals and organizations that stand to profit from its adoption, isn’t it time to begin paying attention to the skeptics, while holding back on the deployment of emerging military technologies until there is a national conversation about what they can and can’t accomplish, with scientists playing a central role in bringing the debate back to Earth?

The most immediate and visible consequences of Israel’s rapidly escalated assault in Lebanon are being felt in Lebanon itself.

As with Israel’s year-long devastation of the Gaza Strip, Israeli military operations are claiming many civilian lives. According to the Lebanese health ministry, more than 1,000 people, including at least 87 children, have been killed by those operations during the past two weeks. More than 90,000 people have been displaced from their homes.

The death toll sharply increased Friday with the Israeli attacks south of Beirut that killed Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Those attacks, on a densely populated neighborhood, flattened several residential buildings.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel’s fight is with Hezbollah, not Lebanon, but Lebanon is suffering from the fight. Even before the recent attacks, Lebanon was in a deep economic crisis. Its accompanying political crisis will not be made any better by attempting to disembowel an organization that is one of the Lebanon’s major political parties, which has ministers in government and lawmakers in the parliament, and has been a member of coalitions including Christians and others.

The Israeli assault, including the killing of Nasrallah, will not eliminate the ability, and certainly not the willingness, of elements within Lebanon to respond forcefully to Israel’s actions. Israel’s operations — like those against Hamas — are based on the false rationale that threats of violence against Israel originate with the malign nature of certain groups, and that the only appropriate response is thus to kill as many members, and preferably leaders, of those groups as it can.

The principal driver of anti-Israeli violence is anger over Israel’s own actions. This does not depend on the nature or even the existence of any specific group. As the long history of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians illustrates, if any one resistance group is beaten down or fades into irrelevance, the anger and desire to strike back will find other channels.

It should be recalled that Hezbollah’s establishment and rapid rise in strength in the early 1980s owed much to widespread anger over an earlier Israeli attack on Lebanon — a full-scale invasion in 1982 that, among other ugliness, featured the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Hezbollah won much popular support by presenting itself as the chief defender of the Lebanese against Israeli depredations.

Israel has a history of decapitating Hezbollah, and the approach has not gone well for Israel. In 1992, it used an attack by helicopter gunships to kill the secretary-general of Hezbollah at the time, Abbas al-Musawi. The most significant effect in Lebanon was to open the position for Nasrallah, who proved to be a more effective leader of the group than Musawi was.

Additional history relevant to the kind of violence likely to grow out of the current fighting includes two lethal bombings in Buenos Aires, each of which probably was a reprisal for Israeli attacks on Lebanese Shia interests back in the Middle East. In March 1992, a truck bomb with a suicide driver exploded at the front of the Israeli embassy, killing 29 and wounding 242. A claim of responsibility by the Islamic Jihad Organization — widely perceived to be a cover name for Hezbollah — stated that the attack was reprisal for the killing of Musawi the previous month.

In May 1994, Israeli commandoes kidnapped Lebanese Shia guerrilla leader Mustafa Dirani, while at the same time raiding a Hezbollah camp in southern Lebanon. Two months later, a suicide truck bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires killed 85 and injured over 300. As an official Israel report later acknowledged, the attack may have been payback for the Israeli operations in Lebanon.

The recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon — especially the killing of Nasrallah — give Hezbollah at least as much motivation as it had in the 1990s to retaliate. Regardless of how much Israeli strikes may have weakened Hezbollah’s ability to fight a conventional war in the Levant, its capacity for irregular operations elsewhere is probably undiminished. The chance of terrorist reprisals against Israeli-related soft targets during the next few months is high.

If such an attack occurs, the reaction of outside observers, especially in the United States, probably will include something along the lines of, “Hezbollah is a terrorist group, and that’s what terrorist groups do.” Such a response will perpetuate the mistake of viewing terrorism as a fixed group of bad guys rather than as a tactic that different groups and nations have used for different purposes. That mistake impedes understanding of the nature of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and its underlying causes.

Israel has long used terrorist tactics in this conflict, including car bombings and other clandestine assassinations. It added to that record with its recent use of explosive-rigged pagers. The impossibility of controlling who would become victims when thousands of the devices were detonated remotely, along with the clandestine nature of the operation, fully qualified it as a terrorist attack. That the principal intended targets were members of Hezbollah does not remove that qualification, partly because being a member of Hezbollah—a multifaceted political as well as paramilitary organization—is not the same as being a combatant involved in fighting Israel.

Even insofar as true combatants were involved, a useful comparison is with the deadliest attack by Hezbollah against U.S. interests: the suicide truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, in which 241 U.S. military personnel died. The vast majority of Americans would consider that incident to be terrorism, despite the reservations of sticklers who say that because the victims were military personnel on an overseas deployment, the event should instead be considered warfare. If the bombing of the Marine barracks is terrorism, then Israel’s pager operation certainly is too, given that the targets were not even on a foreign military mission but were mostly in their own homes, businesses, or neighborhoods when the devices exploded.

Even more fundamental than niceties about how to define terrorism is the broader pattern of political violence that causes innocent persons to suffer. Regardless of whether the violence is inflicted by F-16s or by truck bombs, the suffering is just as bad and the relevant moral issues basically the same. If Israel uses one method of inflicting such violence — and it has inflicted far more of it than its adversaries have inflicted on it — while Hezbollah uses a different method, that difference reflects the available capabilities of each side rather than any morally or politically relevant distinction.

U.S. policymakers should reflect on all this, especially the prospect of terrorist reprisals, as they shape their responses to the escalated warfare in Lebanon. They also should reflect on the hazards of the United States again becoming a target of terrorism itself. Hezbollah will be seeking to retaliate against Israel, but with the United States already having become more of a potential target because of its association with the Israeli destruction of Gaza, that hazard will increase to the extent it allows itself to become associated as well with the Israeli offensive in Lebanon.

The attack that killed Nasrallah was one more in a long series of Israeli actions taken without even informing the United States, let alone taking into account any U.S. views. But the continued unconditional support that the United States nonetheless gives to Israel, especially including munitions that Israel uses in its lethal attacks, makes the United States also responsible, in the eyes of the world, for the resulting casualties and suffering.

If you want to understand the horror still unfolding in Appalachia, and actually if you want to understand the 21st century, you need to remember one thing: warm air holds more water vapor than cold.

As Hurricane Helene swept in across a superheated Gulf of Mexico, its winds rapidly intensified—that part is really easy to understand, since hurricanes draw their power from the heat in the water. And as Jeff Masters points out:

Helene’s landfall gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.

But Helene also picked up ungodly amounts of water—about 7% more water vapor in saturated air for every 1°C of ocean warming. In this case, that meant the mountaintops along the Blue Ridge above Asheville were—according to Doppler radar measurement—hit with nearly 4 feet of rain. That meant that Asheville—listed recently by the national media as a “climate haven” and bulging with those looking for a climate-safe home—is now largely cut off from the world. The interstates in and out of the town were severed for a while over the weekend; the beautiful downtown is drowned in mud. It’s obviously much worse in the outlying towns up in the surrounding hills. People forget how high these mountains are—Mt. Mitchell, near Asheville, is the highest point east of the Mississippi (and, worth noting, the forests on its summit slopes have been badly damaged by acid rain).

I know how this works, because my home state of Vermont is mostly steep mountains and narrow valleys. Once the rain drops, it’s funneled very quickly down the saturated hillsides; placid streams become raging torrents that fill up those bottomlands, covering farm fields with soil; when the water starts to drain, everything is coated with mud. These towns are going to be cut off for a while—our mountain hamlet in Vermont was effectively isolated for a couple of weeks last summer. And these are places where cellphones don’t work in the best of times. Things get pre-modern very fast.

Were it happening just in one place, a compassionate world could figure out how to offer effective relief. But it’s happening in so many places. The same day that Helene slammed into the Gulf, Hurricane John crashed into the Mexican state of Guerrero, dropping nearly 40 inches of rain and causing deadly and devastating floods in many places including Acapulco, which is still a shambles from Hurricane Otis last year. In Nepal this afternoon at least 148 people are deadare dead and many still missing in the Kathmandu Valley. Just this month, as one comprehensive twitter thread documented, we’ve seen massive flooding in Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Marseilles, Milan, India, Wales, Guatemala, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Croatia, Nigeria, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, with the Danube hitting new heights across Central Europe. It is hard to open social media without seeing cellphone videos from the cars-washing-down-steep-streets genre; everywhere the flows are muddy-brown, and swirling with power.

But all that water has to come from somewhere—the extra vapor in the air implies that in some places water is disappearing skyward, and those stories are at least as dangerous, if not as dramatic in a daily way. (How do we know that drought is on the increase? That’s easy—a new “drought emoji” of a dead tree is about to be approved).

Brazilian president Lula traveled to the Amazon last week to highlight the intense drought gripping the region; it’s fueled fires that have covered as much as 60 percent of the county with smoke. It used to be that Amazon fires were mostly the work of prospectors and would-be farmers, using the dry season to get rid of the forest; now, though, many of the fires are burning in pristine areas far from active attempts at deforestation. It just gets dry enough that the rainforest can catch fire. As Manuela Andreoni reported in the Times, Lula’s new environment minister, the highly credible Marina Silva, has cracked down on the bad guys, but it hasn’t been enough to stop the burning

“Maybe 2024 is the best year of the ones that are coming, as incredible as it may seem,” said Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate at the University of Oxford. “The climate models show a big share of the biome is going to become drier.”

In essence, the Amazon rainforest is an exquisite mechanism for passing moisture from the ocean to the interior, but as more of the forest disappears that mechanism is quickly breaking down—and with implications for regions as far away as California.

All of this is a way of saying something I’ve said too many times before: we’re out of margin. We’re now watching the climate crisis play out in real time, week by week, day by day. (117 Fahrenheit in Phoenix yesterday, the hottest September temperature ever recorded there, smashing the old daily mark by…eight degrees).

This means that our political leaders are finally going to have to make hard choices (or not, which is its own way of choosing). Brazil, for instance, is hoping to drill for oil at the mouth of the Amazon—which at least, given Brazil’s relative poverty, is somewhat understandable, if still insane. America’s politicians, under much less economic pressure, are facing similar choices, some of them as soon as the lame duck session after the November elections. Expect, for instance, a renewed push to open up new permits for LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast. Pausing those permits was the most important step the Biden administration took to rein in Big Oil, and Houston’s been outraged ever since; it’s why they’re pouring money into the Trump campaign. And it’s why they have their errand boys in the Congress—outgoing Senator Joe Manchin, Wyoming’s John Barrasso—proposing a trade: permitting reform that would make it easier to build renewable energy in America, in exchange for ramping up LNG exports that would undercut renewable energy in Asia.

The numbers on whether this trade “makes sense” are complicated and contentious. Here’s a report from Third Way arguing yes, here’s a set of charts from the veteran energy analyst Jeremy Symons arguing that it will dramatically raise gas prices for those American consumers still tied to propane. New peer-reviewed numbers from the gold-standard methane scientist Bob Howarth at Cornell make it clear that these LNG exports are worse than coal; that prompted 125 climate scientists to write to the administration asking them to “follow the science.”

In the end, this decision will likely come down to politics. It’s not just Big Oil that’s willing to make such a trade—New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich, in line to be Democratic leader on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when Manchin yachts back to West Virginia, has come out for the trade, assuredly because New Mexico gets a large share of its government revenues from taxing the natural gas under its part of the Permian basin. Northeastern Democrats will vote against, fearing not just climate destruction but the rise in gas prices as we send the commodity abroad. Meanwhile, the good people of the Gulf suffer from the grievous local environmental impacts of these giant plants, and the amount of methane in the atmosphere keeps rocketing up.

If Trump wins, there’s no need for a deal—the LNG projects will be approved, and permitting reform for renewables will be dead. If Harris wins and the Dems hold the Senate, at least there’s a chance that environmentalists can make it easier to build solar and wind without yielding on the massive carbon bomb and EJ disaster that is LNG export. That’s why I’m in Montana today, trying in my small way to help Jon Tester in his uphill fight to retain a Senate seat. And it’s why I’m in the swing states most of the time between now and November 5. Thousands of Third Act volunteers are deploying themselves far and wide to win this contest—you can join us on the Silver Wave tour in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. (Please join us, even if you haven’t reached sixty yet—we don’t check IDs and we love working with young people).

The bottom line is, we’re in a terrible corner now. That’s what all those pictures of floating cars really means. We don’t have room left to make tradeoffs and deals; physics isn’t in a bargaining mood. Every battle is dishearteningly existential now.

For Arab Americans, Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza looms large and will play a significant role in this November’s election. This is one of the key observations emerging from a mid-September nationwide poll of 500 Arab American registered voters conducted by John Zogby Strategies for the Arab American Institute.

A full year of this devastating assault on Gaza has reshaped the Arab American electorate, souring their attitude toward the Democratic Party, sapping their enthusiasm to vote in this election, and negatively impacting their inclination to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris for President.

Since we first began polling Arab Americans 30 years ago, the community has consistently favored the Democratic Party, with the margin of that support holding steady at nearly two to one for the past decade and a half. The Biden administration’s handling of the crisis in Gaza, however, has eroded that support resulting in Arab Americans now evenly divided between the two parties—38.5% for each. Equally revealing is the fact that by a slight margin (46% to 44%) voters in the community say they would prefer to see Republicans controlling the next Congress.

Arab American voter turnout has consistently been in the 80% range. But this year only 63% of the community say they are enthusiastic about voting in November, likely impacting voter turnout in November.

All of this has taken a toll on Harris’ prospects for winning Arab American votes in her contest with former President Donald Trump. While President Biden won 59% of the Arab American vote in 2020, compared with 35% for Trump, this year’s poll shows that in a multi-candidate matchup both candidates are in a virtual dead heat in the 41-42% range. More ominous for Harris is that when only considering likely voters, Trump leads 46% to 42%.

Arab American voter turnout has consistently been in the 80% range. But this year only 63% of the community say they are enthusiastic about voting in November, likely impacting voter turnout in November.

While a few unscientific “polls” have suggested that a third-party candidate would garner a majority of the Arab American vote, this AAI poll shows that not to be the case. All of the third-party candidates combined receive just 12% of the Arab American vote. Instead, it’s Trump who is the beneficiary of the community’s anger and, I might add, even despair over the Biden administration’s failure in addressing the crisis in Gaza.

This may be surprising given Trump’s record and recent statements, but there are a few factors that may account for this development. On the one hand, it may be that as a result of the year-long trauma, there is a desire to punish Democrats. Additionally, it appears that despite Trump’s dismal record with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his total support for Israel’s aims in the war, the data from the AAI poll shows that sub-groups previously aligned with the Republican Party are returning to the fold and voting for that party’s candidate. All of which lends emphasis to the way the Gaza crisis has impacted this election.

Further evidence of Gaza’s role is the 81% of Arab Americans who say that Gaza will be an important consideration in their vote. For example, when asked if Harris were either to demand an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza or to withhold diplomatic support for and arms aid to Israel until it implements a ceasefire and withdraws its forces from Gaza, Harris’ vote among Arab Americans would increase to around 62%. This new Harris tally captures one-third of Trump voters, while virtually wiping out the votes that would go to the third-party candidates. If Trump were to make the same demands on Israel, he too would benefit increasing his vote tally to 56%. This increased vote count for Trump comes from one-quarter of Harris voters and one-half of the votes going to third-party candidates.

The year-long unfolding genocide in Gaza and the catastrophe now facing Lebanon has impacted every component sub-group within the community

While these measures are needed and important to end the war, announcing such a policy change in the midst of a campaign might be considered a heavy lift. Other less dramatic steps could have been taken to win more Arab American support. For example, Harris lost an important opportunity to send a message to Arab Americans demonstrating concern for Palestinians when her campaign refused to include a Palestinian American with family in Gaza to speak at the Democratic convention. When asked if it would have made a difference in how they would vote if the Harris campaign had invited a Palestinian American to speak, the response was a substantial “yes.” If the campaign had done so, Harris’ vote tally from Arab Americans would have increased to 61%. That moment was squandered, but others may still arise and if Harris still wants Arab American support, then these opportunities shouldn’t be passed over.

In our 30 years of polling Arab American voters, we haven’t witnessed anything like the role that the war on Gaza is having on voter behavior. The year-long unfolding genocide in Gaza and the catastrophe now facing Lebanon has impacted every component sub-group within the community, with only slight variations among religious communities and countries of origin, immigrant or native-born, gender and age groups. With little over one month remaining before the election, Arab Americans and, as our polls of U.S. voters have shown, those who share their concerns (young and non-white voters) will be watching to see if their deeply felt concerns with Gaza and now Lebanon will be recognized and respected with a promise for change.

When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium at the U.N. General Assembly last week, dozens of governments walked out of the chamber. The global opprobrium of Netanyahu and his government is due to Israel’s depraved violence against its Arab neighbors. Netanyahu purveys a fundamentalist ideology that has turned Israel into the most violent nation in the world.

Israel’s fundamentalist credo holds that Palestinians have no right whatsoever to their own nation. The Israeli Knesset recently passed a declaration rejecting a Palestinian State in what the Knesset calls The Land of Israel, meaning the land west of the Jordan River.

The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.

To call the land west of the Jordan the “heart of the Land of Israel” is breathtaking. Israel is one part of the land west of the Jordan, not the entire land. The International Court of Justice has recently ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian lands (those outside of Israel’s borders as of June 4, 1967, before the June 1967 war) is plainly illegal. The U.N. General Assembly has recently voted overwhelmingly to back the ICJ ruling and called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories within one year.

There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power.

It is worth recalling that when the British empire promised a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs constituted around 90% of the population. At the time of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, the Palestinian Arab population was approximately 67% of the population, though the partition plan proposed to give the Arabs only 44% of the land. Now Israel asserts the claim to 100% of the land.

There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power. Without the U.S. military backing, Israel could not possibly rule over an Apartheid regime in which Palestinian Arabs constitute nearly one half of the population yet hold none of the political power. Future generations will look back in amazement at the success of the Israel Lobby in manipulating the U.S. military to the severe detriment of U.S. national security and global peace.

Yet in addition to the U.S. military, there is another source of Israel’s profound injustice to the Palestinian people, and that is the religious fundamentalism purveyed fanatics such as the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Minister of Finance, and Minister of National Defense Itamar Ben-Gvir. These fanatics hold fast to the biblical Book of Joshua, according to which God promised the Israelites the land "from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west." (Joshua 1:4).

At the U.N. last week, Netanyahu once again staked Israel’s claim to the land on Biblical grounds: “When I spoke here last year, I said we face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land. Moses told us that our actions would determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.”

What Netanyahu did not tell his fellow leaders (most of whom had in any event vacated the hall), was that Moses laid out a genocidal path to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 31):

[The LORD] will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you, just as the LORD has spoken. “The LORD will do to them just as He did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when He destroyed them. “The LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do to them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.”

Israel’s violent extremists believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people. Their Biblical hero is Joshua, the Israelite commander who succeeded Moses, and who led the Israelites’ genocidal conquests. (Netanyahu has also referred to the Amalekites, another case of a God-ordained genocide of foes of the Israelites, in a clear “dog-whistle” to his fundamentalist followers.) Here is the Biblical account of Joshua’s conquest of Hebron (Joshua 10):

Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron, and they fought against it. They captured it and struck it and its king and all its cities and all the persons who were in it with the edge of the sword. He left no survivor, according to all that he had done to Eglon. And he utterly destroyed it and every person who was in it.

There is a deep irony to this genocidal account. It almost surely is not historically accurate. There is no evidence that the Jewish kingdoms arose from genocides. Most likely they arose from local Canaanite communities adopting early forms of Judaism. Jewish fundamentalists adhere to a 6th century BCE text that is most likely a mythical reconstruction of purported events several centuries earlier, and a form of political bravado that was common in ancient Near Eastern politics. The problem is 21st century Israeli politicians, illegal settlers, and other fundamentalists who propose to live by—and kill by—6th century BCE political propaganda.

Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law. Israel is duty bound to the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, not to the Book of Joshua. According to the recent ICJ ruling and UN General Assembly resolution backing it up, Israel must withdraw in the coming twelve months from the occupied Palestinian lands. According to international law, Israel’s borders are those of June 4, 1967, not the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea.

Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law.

The ICJ ruling and U.N. General Assembly vote is not a ruling against the state of Israel per se. It is a ruling only against extremism, indeed against extremism and malevolence on both sides of the divide. There are two peoples, each with roughly half the overall population (and with no shortage of internal social, political, and ideological divisions within the two communities). International law calls for two states, living side by side, in peace.

The best solution, which we should strive for and hope for sooner rather than later, is that the two states, and the two peoples, get along, and actually draw strength from each other. Until then, however, the practical solution will be peacekeepers and fortified borders to protect each side from the animosity of the other, but with each having the chance to prosper. The utterly intolerable and illegal situation is the status quo, in which Israel rules brutally over the Palestinian people.

Hopefully, there will soon be a State of Palestine, sovereign and independent, whether the Knesset wants it or not. This is not Israel’s choice, but the mandate of the world community and of international law. The sooner the State of Palestine is welcomed as member state of the U.N., with the security of both Israel and Palestine backed by U.N. peacekeepers, the sooner will peace come to the region.