Black Liberation Media

Days after Secretary of State Antony Blinken signaled that there would be no U.S. inquiry into Israel's killing of Turkish American activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi in the occupied West Bank last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday called on the Department of Justice to open an investigation of the young campaigner's death.

Sanders noted that both U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, both called for "full accountability" for Eygi's killers.

"Let's be clear: There will be no accountability if the United States defers to the extremist Israeli government to investigate its own actions," he said in a statement.

Harris’ statement gives us a very clear window into just how little she and her boss care about the death of an American citizen at Israel’s hands.

“The killing of Aysenur Eygi is a horrific tragedy that never should have happened…Aysenur was peacefully protesting in the West Bank—standing up against the expansion of settlements—when her young life was senselessly cut short. No one should be killed for participating in a peaceful protest. The shooting that led to her death is unacceptable and raises legitimate questions about the conduct of IDF personnel in the West Bank. Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”

Harris then stated that she accepted Israel’s version of the incident, saying, “Israel’s preliminary investigation indicated it was the result of a tragic error for which the IDF is responsible. We will continue to press the government of Israel for answers and for continued access to the findings of the investigation so we can have confidence in the results. There must be full accountability.”

Both Biden and Harris affirmed Israel’s absurd story that a trained sniper accidentally fired a shot that ricocheted off a rock and managed to hit Aysenur with a kill shot to the head that ended her life in minutes. It is a cartoonish narrative of a magic bullet that wouldn’t be remotely credible in a movie script.

phys.org

The consequences of this election could extend for millennia.

The “somewhat threatening” messages sent to ActBlue users are part of a campaign of baseless allegations against the fundraising platform.

Kroger executives have "proven they'll take advantage of their customers to bolster their profits," said watchdog Accountable.US.

Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Thursday called out her state’s Democratic attorney general, and vowed to help “fight” the criminal charges against 11 pro-Palestine protestors at the University of Michigan.

“Instead of getting justice, not one criminal charge in the Flint Water Crisis, you're going to spend time in trying to use the power of your office to silence people's First Amendment right,” she said, adding: “Literally, we have protests and marches for Black Lives Matter, for immigrant rights, for climate, for reproductive health, nothing. But when it's for Palestine, all of a sudden we have people saying, what Constitution?”

Hasan asked Tlaib how she herself was thinking about November—and the Democratic nominee for president.

“This question comes up a lot, but it's like, why is it on us and not on the party?” she responded. “I mean, look, this is real: a majority of Americans want us to end the support of the genocide,” prompting applause from the room.

Mehdi floated the question once more, asking Tlaib whether she had endorsed Harris — upon which Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, another panelist, chimed in. “Hey hold on, I offered it and it was rejected, so like I don’t even know if they want it,” prompting the room to applaud once more. “Real talk: do they want it?”

Marxist.com

A St. Louis County, Missouri, judge upheld the murder conviction of Marcellus Williams, ruling that a prosecutor who contaminated key evidence by handling it without wearing gloves before Williams’s trial had not acted in “bad faith,” but instead was merely following his normal procedure.

Williams maintains his innocence in the killing. No crime scene evidence linked him to the murder inside Picus’s home, and Williams long argued that testing of the weapon used to kill Picus could prove he was innocent. The trial judge denied his attorneys’ request to test the knife for DNA before trial, and he was convicted in 2001 based on the questionable testimony of two informants. DNA testing done in 2016, however, revealed unknown genetic material on the knife’s handle.

Based in part on the unidentified DNA, Bell filed a motion in January to vacate Williams’s conviction, invoking a relatively new Missouri law that allows elected prosecutors in the state to undo convictions they believe their offices wrongly obtained. The court was scheduled to hold an evidentiary hearing on the case, where a special-appointed counsel was slated to argue that Williams should be freed. Yet additional testing on the knife revealed at the last minute that neither Larner nor his investigator could be excluded as the source of the unknown DNA. In other words, whatever crime scene DNA might have been on the knife was irrevocably lost by the prosecution team’s handling of it before Williams’s trial.

Rojo Bushnell, of the Midwest Innocence Project, said Williams’s legal team would continue to seek relief via the courts and Gov. Mike Parsons, who could grant clemency. “We will continue pursuing every possible option to prevent Mr. Williams’s wrongful execution,” she said in her statement. “There is still time … to ensure that Missouri does not commit the irreparable injustice of executing an innocent person.”

More than half a dozen groups representing human rights organisations, former diplomats, and activists have filed briefs urging a US federal court to rehear a case alleging the Biden administration is complicit in genocide in Gaza.

In February, a US federal judge in Oakland, California, dismissed a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of failing to prevent a genocide in Gaza,** saying that the court did not have jurisdiction over the issue**. The ruling was a legal blow to Palestinian plaintiffs' who are either in Gaza or have family members there.

The amicus curiae briefs were filed on Monday and argue that the court should review its decision not to weigh in on whether the US president’s action violates the law when engaging in foreign policy.

“The Panel’s decision is one of profound importance, doing serious damage to Congress and the Judiciary, the rule of law, and the United States’ credibility in the world,” one brief filed by former US intelligence officers and diplomats said.

"US statutes prohibit committing or assisting genocide and mass atrocities, mankind’s worst crime”.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20218492

> UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, has survived 75 years of Israeli-Palestinian strife. Can it survive the latest conflict? > > By Ben Hubbard > > For this article, Ben Hubbard conducted more than three dozen interviews and visited refugee camps in the West Bank. He has spent more than a decade covering the Middle East, and reported from inside Gaza for The Times during the Hamas-Israel war in 2014. > > Sept. 12, 2024

The Democratic and Green party candidates each command close to a third of the Muslim-American vote

Students are one of the biggest contributors to rising economic inactivity, with deteriorating mental health a key factor

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva says Amazonia suffering its worst drought in more than 40 years

China has endured a summer of extreme weather and heat waves across much of its north and west.

We’re all doomed, says freshwater ecologist Dr Mike Joy

Lcsupply.com

On stage last night during the presidential debate, as the war on Gaza grinds on, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump battled over who had the most pro-Israel and anti-Iran credentials. After a brief moment of hope that Harris might offer something different to American voters, this seemed to confirm a grim status quo: No matter who is elected president, the U.S. will remain deeply invested in structures of violence and repression across the Middle East.

On Israel, Harris spent time during the debate stating her commitment to helping Israel “defend itself,” which is Harris-speak for a continued blank check of U.S. military support for Israel. This oft-repeated Harris position, now enshrined on her campaign website, undermines the hope that many Democratic voters might have had for a future Harris administration that would prioritize an end to Israel’s war in Gaza

On the presidential debate stage Tuesday, former President Donald Trump spewed reliably racist and lie-riddled diatribes about towns being taken over by “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, for her part, didn’t bother to counter the sentiment, the central ideological violence at the heart of Trump’s message. Harris, albeit in the predictably moderated tones of a Democratic border authoritarian, upheld the right-wing lie that immigration — the migration of poor people, that is — should be stopped.

Both candidates purported to offer diametrically opposed visions for the country’s future. When it came to immigration and the U.S. border, however, only one narrative was available throughout the night: Immigration is a social ill, if not a criminal endeavor, to be deterred as much as possible.

On Sept. 11, 1973, the elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende of Chile was toppled in a right-wing military coup led by future dictator Augusto Pinochet and supported by the CIA

Counterpunch.org

FAIR.org

"You don't have to agree with the tactics of climate activists to understand the importance of defending their rights to protest and to free speech."

The president of the AFL-CIO called the November election a "fundamental choice," slamming Trump as "an unhinged serial union buster who betrays working people."

AG: Did you even consider disbanding and supporting Harris?

HAS: In July, immediately after President Biden dropped out of the race, we reappeared in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, DC demanding that Vice President Harris speak to us, meet with us. We extended our hand, asking what her policy on Gaza was. What was her policy on the genocide? We wanted to know exactly what was in her mind, since she had worked actively with the president since the genocide began. We wanted to hear from her mouth, in front of us, what she would do if she became the president on January 20.

The media took our message, our demands for a permanent, unconditional ceasefire and a full arms embargo, and we were met with complete rejection, no comment, no meeting. That's what led up to our decision that we had no choice but to do what we began in October, that we would denounce the party's position on genocide and begin a campaign against her, as we did on August 19, 2024, outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

AG: So you're looking to win a moral victory by helping to cost the Democrats the election?

HAS: Yes, our strategy is to punish the president and the vice president now running at the top of the ticket for the genocide. It should be known in history that people of conscience came out and ensured her defeat. We want to send an undeniable signal to the political class that they can never engage in genocide and win.

We're counting on the people of this country to respond to this moment, this moral urgency, that a genocide is happening, that we are investing billions of dollars in the destruction of an innocent people on the verge of destruction.

The Green Party of England and Wales has voted to recognise Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide, becoming the first major British political party to do so.

Having made Gaza a prominent plank of its campaign in several areas during the July general election, the party won an unprecedented four seats in parliament.

The motion, which was passed at the party's annual conference on Sunday afternoon, branded Israel's assault on Gaza a "genocide" - and declared support for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement

A far-right demo was far surpassed by the mobilisation of anti-racists and Palestine solidarity activists, but more can be done to capitalise on this, report James Black and Ross Maidment

TheConversation.com

alt-text for thumbnail embed: text saying “law is harm” and then a smaller “fuck cops & judges”, next to a trans flag with half of it covered by the black anarchist triangle. This is all over a 2d digital art wooden background.

Since the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003, Cheney has consistently been cast as the chief villain of what has proved to be one of the largest foreign policy blunders in U.S. history, and nearly 10 years after he left office, Vice only served to bolster his image as a mastermind of evil. He was so universally despised that when he left office in 2009, he had an approval rating of 13%, a mark so low that no major-party figure has even come close to it in recent memory.

Last week, Cheney followed the lead of his daughter Liz, a former member of Congress, and released a statement about the 2024 election in which he pledged to support Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris, for her part, welcomed the endorsement of Cheney and his daughter.

“What they both, as leaders who are well respected, are making an important statement that it’s OK and if not important to put country above party,” Harris said.

For a Democrat to call Cheney “well respected” is akin to hell freezing over. The party that once called for his prosecution as a war criminal has embraced him wholeheartedly in one of the most remarkable about-faces of all time and one that reeks of political opportunism.

Shortly after Kamala Harris released her policy agenda on Sunday evening, users on X spotted something in the metadata: Much of the language appears to have been lifted from Joe Biden’s campaign website.

On Sunday night, X user Corinne Green pointed out that the issues section of Harris’s website contained metadata with language urging voters to reelect Joe Biden. This language was visible when links to the campaign site were shared, and in the website’s description on Google searches.

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All of this creates the impression that at least some of the Harris campaign’s policy language was copied and pasted from Biden’s documents. That would be an embarrassing miscue from the Harris campaign, which partly came into being because of a perception that a refresh was needed to garner enthusiasm in the Democratic Party.

It doesn’t help that the section on her website about her Israel-Palestine policy seems very similar to what Biden’s campaign was saying.

Brown will become the first Ivy League university to hold a vote on divestment since the war on Gaza began

When the student encampment in support of Gaza was dismantled at Brown University in Rhode Island back in April, it was incumbent upon one request from protesters: that the university hold a vote to divest from companies engaged in Israel’s human rights violations against Palestinians.

That rare vote is scheduled to take place next month, and with the anniversary of the 7 October attacks approaching, pro-Israel voices on campus are now stepping up pressure on the Corporation of Brown University - its board and leadership - to avoid the vote entirely.

On Monday, a group of students made up of members of Brown Students for Israel, among others, are making the case in front of the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management (ACURM) that a vote on divestment is “functionally antisemitic” and that “there is no genocide in Gaza”, according to a memo that has not yet been released to the public.

Middle East Eye has examined the 39-page document drawn up by the students, entitled ‘The Case Against Divestment’. It insists that “investment in military equipment producers keeps Israelis… safe.”

"White supremacist and antidemocratic movements have always used the claim that so-called Black savages are coming to destroy, especially when political power is up for grabs," said one critic. "This is no different."