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Menachem Ordman called for the Israeli government to launch a counterterror offensive.

By JNS

One of the survivors of Tuesday’s terrorist shooting in northwestern Samaria recounted the incident, saying that he “saw the barrel of a rifle pointed at me at point-blank range.”

Speaking from his hospital bed on Wednesday before undergoing surgery to remove shrapnel from his arms, 33-year-old Menachem Ordman said that he was sitting in his car when the vehicle with the terrorists pulled up to him.

“They opened heavy fire; it took me a moment to realize that I was still alive. I saw a rifle barrel aimed at me from point-blank range. I was standing at the junction to talk on the phone, and then a car from the opposite lane passed by, from which they fired at me,” the father of five from the Samaria town of Mevo Dotan explained.

“I noticed that I had been wounded, there was blood all over the car. I was sure that I was going to die.”

Four IDF soldiers were lightly wounded during the attack that occurred between the Israeli communities of Hermesh and Mevo Dotan, near the Arab village of Ya’abad.

The terrorists escaped. The hunt to catch them is ongoing.

“My arms were wounded by bullets, and I will undergo surgery today to remove the shrapnel, and God-willing, I will be released tomorrow,” said Ordman, who is being treated at Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in Hadera.

Ordman called for a massive military operation to root out the terrorism in Judea and Samaria.

“I have looked death in the face. They shot at me from point-blank range while I was inside the car. We need to go on the offensive and finish this saga,” he said.

On May 30, a 32-year-old Israeli man was killed in a nearby terrorist shooting, close to the Jewish community of Hermesh in Samaria.

The post Israeli terror shooting survivor: ‘I saw the rifle barrel pointed at me’ appeared first on World Israel News.

President Joe Biden laughed off a reporter’s questions about whether there were any recorded tapes of his involvement in a $5 million bribery scheme with a Ukrainian executive from Burisma Holdings when he was the vice-president.

The post WATCH: Biden laughs off $5 million bribery allegations appeared first on World Israel News.

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This weekend,  friends and family will be meeting up in Montreal to celebrate Kari Polyani Levitt’s 100th birthday.

While Kari’s health is fragile, she remains firm in her incisive understanding and analysis of World events, committed to national sovereignty and …

The post Prof. Kari Polyani Levitt: Regaining Canada’s Sovereignty: June 14, 2023 We Celebrate Kari’s 100th Birthday appeared first on Global Research.

The Bharatiya Janata Party saw last month’s state election in Karnataka as a crucial test of its ability to win votes in South India. The party’s loss to Congress suggests it could be more vulnerable than anticipated ahead of next year’s national election.

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waves to the his supporters during a political event organized by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Davangere, India, on March 25, 2023. (Abhishek Chinnappa / Getty Images)

On May 10, the Indian state of Karnataka went to the polls, and the result was a surprising and decisive defeat for Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Modi and his movement have faced setbacks before, but the nature of the BJP’s ambitions in Karnataka made this one especially striking.

Karnataka was the only BJP-ruled state in South India. It took decades of social engineering and political mobilization to make the BJP a viable party in the state, paving the way for its meteoric rise during the 2000s and 2010s. This time, however, the BJP’s momentum was halted.

The nature of its defeat reveals the limits of its overall electoral strategy and sheds light upon the weaknesses of the BJP more generally, as well as the state of India’s opposition with national elections due to be held next year.

A Southern Strategy

The BJP came to power in Karnataka in 2019 through the mass defection of members of the state parliament, part of its wider strategy of orchestrating defections through Operation Kamala. After the 2018 elections, the BJP had become Karnataka’s largest party without winning an overall majority. The Indian National Congress (INC) and a smaller regional party, the Janata Dal (Secular) or JD(S), won the rest of the seats and formed a coalition government under JD(S) leader H. D. Kumaraswamy.

The JD(S) is dominated by the family of H. D. Deve Gowda, who briefly served as India’s prime minister in 1996–97. Its base lies among the Vokkaliga caste and among religious minorities of the Old Mysore region of Central Karnataka. It has struggled in recent years to remain relevant since it lacks a clear ideology beyond wanting to win power, compared to the Hindu nationalist BJP and secular INC.

The BJP came to power in Karnataka in 2019 through the mass defection of members of the state parliament.

The coalition government seemed set to govern for several years. However, in 2019, fifteen INC and JD(S) members resigned from their respective parties and joined the BJP. This defection caused the coalition government to lose its majority, with by-elections due to be held for the seats of the defectors.

The BJP went on to win twelve of those fifteen seats in December 2019, a few months after Modi’s landslide victory in that year’s national elections, enabling the BJP to take power outright. The BJP made a veteran regional kingpin, B. S. Yediyurappa, chief minister.

Yediyurappa had done more than anyone else to help the BJP become a force in the state. He is a member of the Lingayat community, a Hindu sect and one of the largest communities in Karnataka. His leadership of that community assisted the BJP in forging a cross-caste coalition along with its traditional Brahmin, upper-caste, and urban middle-class base. However, this would be the high-water mark of the BJP’s ambitions in Karnataka.

The BJP in Power

Relations between Yediyurappa and the BJP high command have never been good. Yediyurappa has a reputation for being more moderate on communal issues than the rest of the BJP and more focused on development than ideological purity. These poor relations resulted in him creating a breakaway party in the 2013 state elections. That split resulted in a heavy BJP defeat, with Congress forming a government under long-time regional politician Siddaramaiah.

Yediyurappa and the BJP later reconciled, but he never regained the trust of the BJP high command. In July 2021, he resigned after calls for his resignation by BJP cadres over corruption and nepotism charges and was replaced by Basavaraj Bommai, another Lingayat, as chief minister. With Bommai taking power, problems began to show themselves with the BJP administration in the state.

The BJP’s top brass flagged up this year’s Karnataka election as key to maintaining its project of winning power across South India.

Bommai himself was less charismatic and popular than Yediyurappa, which made him a more pliable figure who was more in line with the BJP’s top leaders. His policies in the state took a right-wing turn from those of his predecessor, engaging in explicit communal policies associated with the BJP’s hard-line wing — most famously through banning the hijab for students.

Bommai’s administration quickly went off track. Allegations that there was a 40 percent commission fee for contractors stoked up public discontent at corruption within the government. At the same time, rural communities were angry about low payments for crops — a recurring criticism of BJP administrations — and the highly unequal patterns of growth over the past two decades. The state government’s low spending on health and education exacerbated the latter problem. There was also countermobilization from Muslims and caste communities that had been left out by the BJP’s reservation changes.

Because of these challenges, the BJP’s top brass flagged up this year’s election as a vital key to maintaining its project of winning power across South India. The situation also created hope in the opposition camp for a breakthrough.

The Congress Challenge

Congress went into the Karnataka election with much to prove. The party has been in the doldrums ever since Modi’s rose to power, losing states it had controlled for decades and experiencing its worst ever national-level performances in 2014 and 2019. There was a general sense that the party had hit rock bottom under the well-meaning but ineffectual leadership of Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the family that had dominated Indian politics since 1947.

This prompted efforts at inner-party reform. First Rahul Gandhi resigned as Congress president after the 2019 defeat and asked his party to choose a new leader. They finally elected one in 2022 through the first competitive election for party chief in decades, choosing an experienced parliamentarian from Karnataka, Mallikarjun Kharge. Kharge, who comes from a Dalit background, became the first Congress leader from outside the Gandhi family since 1999.

Congress has been in the doldrums ever since Modi’s rose to power, losing states it had controlled for decades.

Rahul Gandhi also decided to launch a nationwide yatra, or march, across India from late 2022 to early 2023, covering over twenty-two hundred miles across one hundred fifty days. His goal was to revitalize the grassroots of the party, put forward a defense of Indian secularism, and attack the BJP’s “pro-rich” economic policies. The march earned plaudits for Gandhi and boosted the morale of long-suffering INC party workers, although its electoral impact had not been proven.

Thirdly, the party has sought to forge opposition unity and create a united front against the BJP. Progress in this area has been slow, especially since Congress has been unable to prove to the other parties that it should be the dominant partner in any alliance. The party thus hoped that a win in Karnataka would allow it to recover its image as the main national challenger to the BJP.

BJP Missteps

The BJP and Congress conducted two very different campaigns. The BJP relied heavily on its national leadership, especially the omnipresent pair of Modi and his home minister, Amit Shah. Modi crisscrossed the state, cutting ribbons, giving speeches, and hoping to focus the election on his personal charisma and appeal, which is still a potent asset even after nine years in power.

However, there was a contradiction in the BJP campaign. Figures like Yediyurappa focused on development issues to de-communalize the election, amid fears that the appeal of Hindutva ideology had peaked in the state. Yet others like the BJP’s Karnataka party president, Nalin Kumar Kateel, wanted to prioritize communal polarization.

Kateel’s campaign was heavy-handed. He told party members in January in the run-up to the election to concentrate on “love jihad,” a far-right conspiracy theory which claims that Muslim men are attempting to seduce and brainwash Hindu women, over the poor development outcomes of the BJP administration. He also urged them to mobilize Hindu nationalist anger against the famous nineteenth-century Muslim ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan.

The BJP relied heavily on its national leadership, especially the omnipresent pair of Narendra Modi and his home minister, Amit Shah.

In addition, the BJP’s candidate selection process was fraught and poorly managed. The national leadership of the BJP chose younger party members at the expense of veteran incumbents, specifically Lingayat party members including Yediyurappa and another former chief minister, Jagadish Shettar. This prompted many of those passed over to defect to Congress or run as independents.

The reasoning behind this counterproductive move seems to have been a desire to avoid anti-incumbency sentiment by bringing in new faces, as well as to ensure greater loyalty to the BJP on the part of its representatives, but the strategy backfired. It provoked the old guard of the party and sparked fears that a BJP victory would result in a hard-line Hindutva and Brahmin chief minister. The JD(S) particularly warned about the danger of a North Indian Brahmin becoming chief minister and focused much of its campaign on anti-Hindi and pro-Kannadiga concerns.

The architect of this ill-fated policy seems to have been B. L. Santosh, a Brahmin from Karnataka, national general secretary of the BJP, and member of the hard-line Hindu nationalist paramilitary group the RSS, of which Modi and most key figures of the BJP are longtime members. Santosh has an image as a hard-liner and is personally opposed to Yediyurappa.

The problems with the BJP campaign highlight the difficulties the party faces in maintaining its complicated coalition: trying to strike a balance between moderation and communalism, low caste and high caste, regional languages and Hindi. In addition, it has trouble preserving its reputation for good governance when it pushes unpopular policies or faces corruption allegations. In the face of such challenges, it is easier to focus on Modi’s personal popularity, which explains his role at the center of the BJP campaign.

Strong but Not Invincible

In comparison to the BJP, Congress ran a very decentralized campaign based on a strong grassroots organization. The party lacked a single face, divided as it was between Siddaramaiah and Congress state leader D. K. Sivakumar, both of whom hoped to be chief minister after the election. Yet the two men avoided rowing in public and kept the focus on attacking the BJP.

The party’s candidate selection reflected this emphasis on unity, as Congress intentionally selected figures who were considered most likely to win instead of rewarding established party workers. However, Congress managed to avoid the costly defections that hurt the BJP. Its campaign focused on the corruption allegations that had undermined Bommai’s popularity and included pledges to alleviate poverty through social welfare programs and support for farmers and women, while rolling back the BJP’s anti-Muslim policies.

In comparison to the BJP, Congress ran a very decentralized campaign based on a strong grassroots organization.

Rahul Gandhi and his family campaigned widely in the state — the first time he had campaigned alongside his mother and his sister in years. This helped drum up support among Congress loyalists by highlighting how important the election was to the party’s first family.

The results vindicated the Congress strategy. The party achieved its best result in the state since 1989, both in terms of popular vote and seat share, with 43 percent of the vote and 135 seats. It consolidated its traditional base among Dalits and Muslims while also increasing its vote share in other communities across Karnataka.

Votes
%
+/-
Seats
+/-

Indian National Congress
16,789,272
42.9
+4.75
135
+55

Bharatiya Janata Party
14,096,529
36
-0.35
66
-38

Janata Dal (Secular)
5,205,489
13.3
-5
19
-18

While the BJP’s vote share only dipped slightly from 2018, Modi’s party lost a third of its seats, dropping from 104 to 66. For its part, the JD(S) lost more than half of its seats due to defections of its Vokkaliga and Muslim base to Congress — probably because of strategic voting from both communities to defeat the BJP and assist its main rival.

The results were a stinging blow for the BJP and Modi personally, who invested so much personal prestige in campaigning for his party.

The results were a stinging blow for the BJP and Modi personally, who invested so much personal prestige in campaigning for his party. There has been a vicious blame game within the party, with fingers pointed at Yediyurappa for not bringing enough Lingayat votes and Santosh for poor candidate selection as well as criticism of overreliance on Modi. Meanwhile, Congress was jubilant, having succeeded beyond its wildest hopes.

The Karnataka election has demonstrated that the BJP is not invincible. There are weaknesses that the opposition can exploit at state level, and Modi’s personal appeal can only go so far when he is not directly on the ballot. The popular resonance of Hindutva campaigns can also reach a saturation point. The BJP is thus in a weaker position going into 2024 than seemed likely this time last year, even though the opposition still faces extremely long odds in its bid to oust Modi.

Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45 chronicles how Labour ended many of the UK’s worst barbarities through socializing key industries and creating public goods like the National Health Service. That project is now on the back foot — but won’t ever be fully defeated.

Still of Labour leader and prime minister Clement Attlee surrounded by supporters in Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45.

When I first watched Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or–winning drama I, Daniel Blake in 2017, it was one of the rare moviegoing experiences I have had where you could audibly feel the entire audience’s empathy come out for the central character. The weighted sighs, the squirming in the seats, the grabbing of tissues, the shaking of heads were all constant and only increased as the film went on. Ken Loach has a tendency to bring that out of his audiences.

It’s not cynical, and it’s not artificially manufactured, either. Loach says what he means, and he says it loudly and clearly.

Art should communicate its politics through its formal visual language first. This approach goes against recent trends of artists rejecting any subtext to deliver cheap political pandering. But Loach, like Sergei Eisenstein, Bimal Roy, or Jean-Luc Godard, is the rare artist whose work doesn’t feel hackneyed when he gets out his megaphone. It’s because what he stands for is unmistakable, both in his words and his images.

The Spirit of ’45 is likewise forthright. It goes through the years starting from mid–World War II in 1935, explaining the trajectory of England’s social progress through the Labour Party’s reforms like nationalization of utilities, creation of public housing, and development of the National Health Service (NHS), then walks the viewer through the bit-by-bit collapse of those same reforms from the year of Margaret Thatcher’s decisive election victory onward. The documentary includes old footage of all kinds of laborers, working-class, and poor people, as well as political speeches. Interspersed is commentary from writers and analysts like John Reese and Raphie de Santos as well as people who lived through World War II and the 1945 election like Labour minister Tony Benn.

Still from The Spirit of ’45.

In classic Loach style, the words of these men and women are precise and concise, relaying the impact of capitalist depredations and socialist reform in simple terms. This becomes key in discussing the vast difference between the Labour Party of the past, and the mealy mouthed and unprincipled politicians rampant in every political party (including Labour’s leadership) today.

In the documentary, George Lansbury, Labour Party leader from 1932 to 1935, gives a speech to a large crowd of working-class Brits and tells them, “You don’t make profit and wealth by pushing business papers around.” Labour leaders who led the fight for publicly owned services in England speak in refreshingly direct terms and relay the benefits of policies to working people in understandable and relatable language.

The manifesto they wrote is defiantly direct, including phrases like, “The Labour Party is a socialist party and proud of it,” and “The great interwar slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men.” These are contrasted with the words of conservatives like Winston Churchill and Thatcher, who both spoke in vague, theoretical platitudes and meaningless buzzwords.

The reforms were won rapidly: nationalization of health care in 1946, transportation and mines in 1947, electricity in 1948, water and gas in 1949, the docks in 1965. Like in I, Daniel Blake, the National Health Service, perhaps the single most positively influential British policy of the twentieth century, is a major focus of The Spirit of ‘45. It’s the central beam of the film’s success story of Labour’s postwar political sweep, because all sense of livability in a civilized society comes down to the maintenance of health and the right to life.

A man named Sam Watts recalls his childhood shortly after the war where his family lived in squalor, in beds infested with fleas, gnats, bedbugs, and cockroaches. He recalled “getting in bed and sleeping amongst them,” then “waking up in the morning to go to school with bites and dirty legs.” Scenes of miners digging on the slopes of a large pile of coal as thick black smoke swirls around them periodically like a tornado are particularly harrowing. Eileen Thompson, a former nurse, recalls that after World War I, she saw limbless soldiers on roads and in alleys; Britons shared a widespread national belief that they should never have to see such misery among their fellow citizens again.

One of the most compelling arguments the film makes is at the beginning, in the trenches of the war, where soldiers discussed how the propaganda of war asks young men to join a collective project to fight fascism. As they came back from the victory against Nazi Germany, many pondered why the collective power marshaled to wage war could not be mustered in times of peace. The rallying cry became, “If we can produce so much for war, much can be done for peace” — a missile against the arguments that we can’t afford social services but can afford infinitely expanding war budgets.

Still from The Spirit of ’45.

The Spirit of ’45 showcases how labor movements can create decisive political victories and how a global conservative movement can slowly destroy those progressive reforms beyond repair over a long-term project. The documentary paints today’s version of Labour government reform as not about the people but rather “just state bureaucrats having replaced corporate bureaucrats.” Loach paints a slow destruction over time in the final hour of the film: one hundred eighty-four working mines fall to just fifteen after privatization and a changing economic climate that made importing coal cheaper; railroads see an upswing of crashes, broken rails, and deaths after being handed over to private corporations (some of which later had to actually be brought back under government ownership because they had gone bust in the free market).

Loach’s hopeful message at the end of the film may seem rather ominous and even disheartening considering the movie came out ten years ago, before the global embarrassment of Brexit, the shamelessly dishonest public flaying of Jeremy Corbyn, and Keir Starmer’s pledging fealty to the inhumane disenfranchising of the working poor led by Tory politicians. Today, Labour looks all but dead.

But throughout his long career as a filmmaker, Loach has never admitted defeat. Reese says in the film, “All the way through human history, in one guise or another, this thought,” that working-class organizing can actually transform society, “is constantly being reiterated, suppressed, goes underground, and explodes again in a different form.” This is the essence of “the spirit of ’45.” In the United Kingdom and much of the world, it may appear snuffed out now. But it will surely come again.

US climate defenders have long faced serious threats, but the intensity of the crackdown on Stop Cop City protesters in Atlanta is an escalation. It’s reminiscent of conditions in Latin America, where climate protesters’ lives are frequently on the line.

Law enforcement drive past the planned site of a police training facility that activists have nicknamed “Cop City,” following the first raid since the death of environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán near Atlanta, Georgia, on February 6, 2023. (Cheney Orr / AFP via Getty Images)

When Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was shot fifty-seven times and killed by law enforcement officers at Cop City outside Atlanta in January, much of the American environmental movement was stunned.

The Guardian wrote in its coverage that experts believed the killing of Terán, known as “Tortuguita,” was “‘unprecedented’ in [the] history of environmental activism.” Keith Woodhouse, a professor of history at Northwestern University, told Jacobin that it was the first time in American history that law enforcement officers had shot and killed an environmental activist engaged in forest defense.

Even beyond the gratuitously violent killing of a very possibly unarmed twenty-six-year-old, the state’s response to the Stop Cop City movement has frequently been framed over the last several months as a chilling escalation of the tactics it is willing to engage in to quash environmental defense — a watershed moment, of sorts, for the US climate movement.

At the end of May, an Atlanta Police Department SWAT team working in coordination with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided a residential home in East Atlanta, arrested three board members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, and charged them with money laundering and charity fraud in an apparent attempt to kneecap their efforts to organize legal support for arrested protesters.

The Atlanta Solidarity Fund’s work has been especially vital in recent months as Cop City protesters have been subject to mass arrests and trumped-up charges including domestic terrorism. Several activists are facing up to twenty years in prison for placing flyers on mailboxes in a Bartow County neighborhood. Governor Brian Kemp has warned that “domestic terrorism will not be tolerated in this state.” His words have received backing from the Department of Homeland Security, which has listed Cop City protesters alongside mass shooters and violent white supremacists as terror threats facing the country.

To be clear: only one police officer has been injured in the course of policing, and while police say that officer was wounded by a protester, there’s evidence to suggest he may well have been hit by friendly fire. The supposed violence of the Stop Cop City protest pales in comparison to the violence the construction of Cop City will inflict — the destruction of hundreds of acres of forest, the loss of public land, and the expansion of the corporate police state in what is already one of the most surveilled, inequitable cities in the country.

As the climate crisis intensifies, the question is whether the persecution of climate defenders in the United States will intensify along with it — whether the brazenness and severity of the campaign against the Stop Cop City activists is a preview of what is to come elsewhere.

Climate defenders in the US have long faced threats to their lives and livelihoods. But the intensity of the threats protesters in Atlanta are facing is reminiscent more of the risks climate defenders routinely face in the Global South, where both activists and journalists are routinely jailed and killed in their defense of land and water. Of the 401 human rights defenders killed last year, nearly half were killed defending the climate. Of those, the majority were killed in countries like Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Honduras — places where the United States has historically exported policing strategies and devalued life.

Of the 401 human rights defenders killed last year, nearly half were killed defending the climate. Of those, the majority were killed in countries like Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Honduras.

Now, as states and corporations race to seize land and accumulate resources, that kind of policing may be coming home.

“It’s been normal for a while that militarized states, whose purpose is the facilitation of capital, are using mechanisms and strategies of counterinsurgency . . . to repress movements defending land and water,” Jared Olson, an investigative reporter working in Latin America, told Jacobin. “Now that’s coming back north. Now you’re seeing a little bit of that increasingly creep into the United States.”

The killing of Terán may be unprecedented for the modern US climate movement, but the militarization of policing climate protesters in the country did not start this year in Georgia. The use of counterinsurgency tactics to police climate defenders in the United States goes back at least to 2016, when the global security firm TigerSwan used a variety of methods including aerial surveillance, social media monitoring, radio eavesdropping, and undercover infiltration to build dossiers on the climate defenders at Standing Rock. The Intercept reported earlier this year that TigerSwan has since pitched its counterinsurgency approach to handling pipeline protests to a variety of other oil companies. Three years before TigerSwan was contracted to work at Standing Rock, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service covertly surveilled opposition to an Enbridge pipeline project in the western part of the country.

Georgia is also far from the only state with a domestic terrorism law on the books that can be used to persecute climate defenders. Since 2016, more than twenty states have enacted laws restricting protest rights — with a number of those laws specifically penalizing protesters who impede “critical infrastructure.”

For Olson, the manipulation of the legal system — even more than direct physical violence — is the principal strategy states and corporations are using to slow organizing and protect extractive interests. He pointed to the arrest and arbitrary detention of a number of Guapinol defenders in Honduras as an example.

“In Latin America, oftentimes you show up expecting to see bloodshed — which does happen — but what’s generally happening on a larger scale is criminalization,” Olson said.

It’s not just states and corporations that are responding to crisis conditions. It’s also the climate movement, which, recognizing the extreme time pressure it’s under, has been changing its tactics. That’s one of the reasons Woodhouse expects the level of violence protesters face to continue to rise in the coming years, even if neither he nor Olson believe the United States will become as dangerous for climate defenders as Latin America due to their differing historical and political conditions.

Since 2016, more than twenty states have enacted laws restricting protest rights — with a number of those laws specifically penalizing protesters who impede ‘critical infrastructure.’

“I think that there is a very high likelihood that we’re going to see more and more confrontations between activists and police and more and more heavy-handed action by police, in part just because we’re going to see more and more direct action by activists,” Woodhouse said. “That’s sort of where the climate movement has been moving in fits and starts for ten, fifteen years now.”

There’s another important way the US climate movement is increasingly mirroring its counterparts in Latin America: the Stop Cop City movement is not simply about the fate of a swath of forest, but rather about the future of the city of Atlanta and the militarized police state itself. It’s a threat to corporations and their enforcers in a way that less intersectional climate movements have not been — as evidenced in part by the simple and head-spinning fact that the majority of the funding for Cop City is coming not from the city itself or any kind of state entity but rather from the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is contributing $60 million in donations from corporations to finance the project. Donors to the foundation’s fundraising drive for the project include Bank of America, Chick-fil-A, Georgia Pacific, Rollins, and Coca-Cola, who are all betting that the police trained at the facility will help them continue to change Atlanta from a city for people to live in to a city for them to profit from.

The Stop Cop City movement has centered the fact that the training center is being built on stolen Muscogee land, the ancestral home of people driven away by the US military not two centuries ago. The climate crisis itself is the result of projects like this one, the extraction of both people and resources from the land to feed the inexhaustible capital and war machines. Seen through that lens, the killing of Terán, who was indigenous, appears not as an aberration but as a return to form.

“I think the United States was built off the murder of environmental defenders, so I don’t necessarily see this as an escalation,” Jayson Maurice Porter, a postdoctoral research associate in environment and society at Brown University, said. “I don’t see [Terán] as a first example of an environmental defender killed by the state.”

There are other, local historical echoes. Fort Moore, just outside of Columbus, Georgia, remains home to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation — the institution formerly known as the School of the Americas, where US military personnel trained scores of the worst human rights defenders in Latin America during the latter half of the twentieth century, the people whose institutions continue to brutalize climate defenders in the region today. The School of the Americas was launched as a means of fighting the Cold War and protecting US corporate interests abroad, but it shouldn’t be a surprise when those same tactics are deployed domestically too.

“There’s been all sorts of thinkers who talk about how fascism actually isn’t an aberration; fascism is just a particular moment when imperialism comes back and bites its own tail — when, for whatever reason, the colonial violence in Africa becomes Nazi violence against Jews,” Olson said.

At its core, Stop Cop City is about nothing less than fighting for democracy and habitability and the right to dissent. The level of repression the dissenters have faced is a reminder of the movement’s power, the new worlds its coalition might just be able to build.

“For this generation of environmental activists, it’s sort of second nature to bring together a lot of different issues that used to be seen maybe as distinctive and disparate,” Woodhouse said. “It’s a more totalizing critique.”

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An investigation by the IDF into the Egyptian border attack has revealed the errors made by the Israeli forces but Shai Iluz, father of Ori Yitzhak Iluz, one of the three soldiers killed in the incident.

The post WATCH: IDF admits to errors in Egyptian border attack appeared first on World Israel News.

China and Brazil, as two prominent nations, have recognized the value and importance of fostering collaboration in various domains, including culture and education. The strategic partnership between these two emerging global powers has created a fertile ground for cultural exchange, mutual understanding, and educational cooperation. Educational cooperation has also been a cornerstone of the bilateral partnership