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As Big Tech execs and their lobbyists seek to protect the investment potential of AI, they will no doubt wield academic research from corporate-linked experts to make their case. (Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Artificial intelligence has a lot of potentially huge upsides, but it is also big and scary because it could get out of control and possibly end all human life, according to some scientists. And so naturally the tech companies that stand to make bank off the menace are aping one of the original big and scary industries: Big Tobacco.
That’s the thrust of a recent study flagged for me by Dr Max Tegmark after our fascinating and terrifying Lever Time discussion about his dire AI warnings that have been making headlines across the planet.
Tegmark likens the situation to the plot of Don’t Look Up, in which experts tout the benefits of the incoming comet rather than sounding the alarm about its dangers. The 2021 paper he sent me offers some answers about why: it shows how Big Tech has infiltrated the academic institutions studying and often promoting AI — with little regard for the potentially catastrophic downsides.
The researchers at the University of Toronto and Harvard who spearheaded the study offer a conclusion: “Just as Big Tobacco leveraged its funding and initiatives to identify academics who would be receptive to industry positions and who, in turn, could be used to combat legislation and fight litigation, Big Tech leverages its power and structure in the same way.”
Their proof is in the data. Among the tenure-track research faculties at universities they studied, “58 percent of AI ethics faculty are looking to Big Tech for money” and when “expanding the funding criteria to include graduate funding as well as previous work experience, we note that 97% of faculty with known funding sources (65% total) have received financial compensation by Big Tech.”
The researchers explain what this means:
Big Tech is able to influence what [faculty] work on. This is because, to bring in research funding, faculty will be pressured to modify their work to be more amenable to the views of Big Tech. This influence can occur even without the explicit intention of manipulation, if those applying for awards and those deciding who deserve funding do not share the same underlying views of what ethics is or how it “should be solved.”
If you want some recent proof of this influence, take a look at this Reuters report showing that Google “moved to tighten control over its scientists’ papers by launching a ‘sensitive topics’ review, and in at least three cases requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light.”
Notably, some of Big Tech’s funding of AI research goes specifically to AI ethics experts often quoted throughout the media. Executives at these companies understand the political power of those experts and their research. Quoting a US Senate aide, journalist Rana Foroohar recounts this in Don’t Be Evil:
“It’s about social and intellectual capture, which is actually much more effective both short- and long-term. Google supports researchers working in areas that are complementary to Google business interests and/or adverse to its competitors’ business interests; things like relaxed copyright laws, patent reform, net neutrality, laissez-faire economics, privacy, robots, AI, media ownership. . . . They do this via direct grants to the researchers, funding of their centers and labs, conferences, contributions to civil society groups, and flying them out to Google events.”
In this way, the company not only builds goodwill, but successfully “grooms academic standard-bearers, prominent academics who will drive younger peers in a direction that is more favorable to the company,” says the aide.
Right now, this is all playing out most prominently in the EU, where tech lobbyists are trying to water down AI regulations amid warnings that the technology could pose an existential threat to all life on the planet. Here in the United States, Politico has been touting an AI lobbying “gold rush” in Washington, as companies and the K Street influence machine have dollar signs in their eyes.
These real-world Peter Isherwells don’t want lawmakers to know — or legislate against — the potential dangers, because that might get in the way of what a new Morgan Stanley memo noted: “Cognitive computing creates potential investment opportunities, as companies develop the technology and use it to transform their business.”
As they seek to protect that investment potential, tech execs and their lobbyists will no doubt wield academic research papers from corporate-linked experts to make their case — and in many cases, policy makers might not even know of those links.
That was Big Tobacco’s trick a few decades ago — and now it’s Big Tech’s strategy today.
A large group of WGA members picket in front of Paramount Studio gate in Los Angeles, California on May 4, 2023. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Thousands of Writers Guild of America (WGA) writers in New York City and Los Angeles are on strike fighting the impact of technological innovation on their industry and earnings. These entertainment writers are in many ways the original gig workers. Even for unionized writers, job security never lasts more than a few weeks. Much like other gig workers including Uber drivers and DoorDash delivery workers, technological innovations driven by Silicon Valley firms have been used to drive down wages and to justify rewriting the terms of employment in the industry to workers’ detriment. Where taxi drivers saw their work moved onto apps like Uber and its independent contractor model, writers saw their shows moved from broadcast networks to streaming services — with entertainment bosses insisting that residuals, the compensation writers receive on reruns and other future revenue generated from their work, no longer need to be paid.
At their core, the challenges facing both kinds of workers are driven by Silicon Valley’s ethos of rule-breaking in the name of “disruption” that is slowly impacting every sector of the economy. The impact of tech firms on Hollywood began in the 2000s, resulting in the 2007–8 strike, which ensured that streaming services like Netflix and other internet-based media would be covered by the WGA contract.
The primary sticking points of the current strike are about technology. As the WGA West published their list of demands and the companies’ counter proposals, the main issues are the extent to which streaming residuals are based on the number of streams and the preservation of writers rooms (a demand that is about ensuring minimum levels of staffing for writers), which have been threatened by streamers’ movement to shorter seasons than broadcast shows, as well as a ban on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the script generation process.
The fight for streaming residuals based on the popularity of the show is the most indicative of technology’s impact on the industry. Historically, writers would work on a broadcast television show, and then every time the show airs, including decades later through syndication, all the writers who worked on the episode would receive a residual payment. Shows like Friends and Seinfeld continue to pay the rent for writers on these shows.
Residuals ensured that writing remained a middle-class job, evening out writers’ incomes between writing gigs. It also ensured that if a show was a hit, the writers got a piece of the money still being made from their creation. Today, writers for hit streaming shows such as Bridgeton or Wednesday stand to receive nothing beyond their initial payment for writing the show; if these shows become a hit or the streamers resell their work, the bosses will make money from the reruns but the writers will not.
The denial of this residual highlights the impact of Silicon Valley’s magical thinking in the entertainment industry. Just look at the math. The WGA West reports that their demands would cost the studios an additional $429 million a year, which is less than half of recent summer blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever made at the box office. The studios have rejected the proposal, resulting in each of them losing over a billion dollars each in stock value on the first day of the strike. They have the money to pay the streaming residuals, but doing so would require greater transparency in reporting shows’ streaming volume. This threatens the core myth of streamers’ relationship to Wall Street: only growth in subscriptions matters, not profitability.
Ever since Amazon convinced Wall Street that the company was a sound investment despite not running a profit for years, Wall Street investors have flooded money into tech firms such as Uber and DoorDash, which have also failed to prove they can ever consistently turn a profit. In Hollywood, this logic manifested in streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+ arguing that the number of subscribers they hold, not profitability, should be the metric by which Wall Street measures the streamers’ success. The streamers’ argued that if subscriptions continue to grow, they will become profitable eventually.
If Hollywood studios began paying streaming residuals, they would have to agree to a level of transparency on the number of streams individual shows or movies received.
But subscription numbers, much like determining Uber’s value by the number of rides performed, could be juiced by pouring venture capital money into coupons and subsidized deals, which encourages temporary customers. Unlike Amazon’s years of unprofitability, which resulted in the company’s investment in a vast network of distribution warehouses all throughout the United States and world, all of Uber’s free rides and Disney+’s discounts are not building an infrastructure upon which future earning can be generated — they are a casino-style bet that customers will stay and pay significantly more money in the future.
This system seemed to come crashing down last year, when Netflix’s stock tanked, and the company was forced to introduce advertising to the platform despite years of insisting they would not. Despite this concession, and Netflix’s agreement to share viewership data with advertisers, the union contends the company continues to refuse the level of transparency needed to properly compensate writers for the value they have created. Silicon Valley broke Hollywood’s existing business model with streaming, and no one knows if their new model based on subscriptions will ever even work. If Hollywood studios began paying streaming residuals, they would have to agree to a level of transparency on the number of streams individual shows or movies received, which might reveal that the emperor in fact has no clothes.
While the entertainment industry has long been a gig industry, Silicon Valley logic has attempted to further gigify writing in the image of what they did in lower-wage service industries. WGA’s demand to preserve the writers’ room would prevent the industry from becoming staffed largely by freelancers and ensure that younger, more diverse writers can gain experience to move up in the industry, seeks to counter this trend.
For example, the studios are demanding that comedy variety writers be paid only a “day rate” in which a writer’s contract could only be a single day long. Currently, late show writers are only guaranteed thirteen-week contracts; going to a day rate would essentially turn writers in the industry into the equivalent of Uber drivers. There is nothing fundamentally different between writing for a traditional TV show and a streaming service, but the studios are trying to shift to this gig model and eliminate the writer protections, which the WGA has fought for, just like gig apps argued their tech innovations allow them to misclassify workers as independent contractors.
Writers walk the picket line on the second day of the television and movie writers’ strike outside of Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, California, on May 3, 2023. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)
Making matters worse, the companies are seeking to replace writers with AI technology. The fear is that first drafts of TV shows will be produced by AI, then a smaller number of writers would “punch up” the scripts. As anyone who has used ChatGPT knows, this seems unlikely to produce high-quality scripts. And AI-generated scripts might not even be copyrightable, as the US Copyright Office has ruled that AI-generated artwork is not entitled to legal protections because it is inherently based on plagiarizing past works of art.
The end result is that the WGA strike is an existential battle for the future of the profession. While the challenges to preserve a model that has produced decent-paying jobs is daunting, the situation could be worse. WGA’s last strike in 2007–8 ensured that the streaming services were covered under the WGA contract in the first place. Had the union not won that battle, they might not have survived to this point.
If successful, this strike offers a path forward for the labor movement in fighting the gigification of labor and Silicon Valley’s insistence that tech need not follow existing laws or feel beholden to its workers in any way. The WGA stands well-positioned to lead this fight, because they do not fit the stereotypical notion most Americans have of what a labor union is. In contrast to factory-based industrial unions of the Depression and New Deal eras, such as the United Auto Workers or Steelworkers, the WGA is a guild drawing on traditions that precede the AFL-CIO, going back to the nineteenth-century Knights of Labor. During our current tech-based Gilded Age, turning to union models from the last such age could prove useful.
Historically, guilds were formed by artisans to protect the conditions of their industries by establishing standards and ensuring members adhere to these standards. Where a union negotiates with the employer, the guild negotiates with its members, setting standards that members will not undercut. The WGA both fights to ensure that employers follow the contract and that members do not attempt to work outside the contract. But a major problem facing the WGA is whether the actors and directors’ guilds will join their fight or undermine their strike like the directors did in 2007 when they settled their contract before the WGA did. The WGA might get their own members to hold the line, but if the other guilds don’t follow suit, the union could be in trouble. (A solidarity rally last Wednesday which included all the major entertainment unions hinted that this time might be different.)
If this strike is successful, the WGA could provide a powerful model of service sector app-based gig workers to take on their Silicon Valley foes.
Furthermore, unlike industrial unions, guild membership is based on demonstrated skill, not merely employment at a given factory. As such, writers “earn” a WGA card from working enough jobs. A major benefit of guilds in fighting tech firms is that they mirror the network structure of these firms. The guild structure matches the reality that writing is gig work. No movie or TV production lasts forever. Many in the labor movement have called for portable benefits to match the reality that workers increasingly move between employers and often work for multiple employers at the same time. Yet the WGA and other artist guilds have been doing just this for decades. They have achieved benefits portability without compromising on core labor issues such as employee status, which have plagued many efforts to provide benefits and rights to app gig workers.
Additionally, unlike an industrial union, guilds maintain standards by negotiating on the number of workers, the price paid, and costs incurred by gig-based employment. Guild unions recognize the hard truth that for gig work to be truly profitable for workers, restrictions must be placed on the number of workers in the industry and the minimum standards of membership in the guild. This is often hard for trade unionists schooled in the industrial unions that have dominated American labor to digest, but it is essential for maintaining standards and full-time employment in diffuse and gig-based industries.
If this strike is successful, the WGA could provide a powerful model of service sector, app-based gig workers to take on their Silicon Valley foes. Where the WGA demands streaming residuals, Uber drivers could demand a say in setting the pay and conditions of each ride, as the New York Taxi Workers Association and the Deliveristas have done in New York City. The WGA is fighting for minimum staffing levels; DoorDash drivers could fight for greater control over the number of delivery workers on the streets. Where WGA demands streaming transparency and no AI, Lyft drivers could demand greater transparency of algorithmic management and tracking, such as a recent CWA-led effort in Colorado.
Uber drivers and their unions see the tech-based similarities between their struggles and the WGA strike. As Bhairavi Desai, president of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which has organized Uber drivers, explained, “We stand in full solidarity with writers . . . the mighty Writers Guild gives us hope to push back and win against the tide of Uberization. It’s not about streaming, just like for us it’s never been about an App. The fight is against tech finance upending generations-old labor protections in the name of technology.”
The WGA strike is not only a massive fight to defend decent-paying writing jobs, but also a battle over how the labor movement as a whole can fight Silicon Valley’s tech-based disruption logic, which seeks to expand the gig economy’s abusive and exploitative model into every industry.
First published on May 3, 2018
In the past, Germany let itself be dragged in the First World War and has inflicted immeasurable suffering on the Russian people during the Second World War.
We will not allow such a crime …
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Mourners turn road rage victim’s funeral into nationalistic demonstration with calls for revenge and PLO, Hamas flags.
By World Israel News Staff
On Sunday, thousands of mourners attended the funeral of 19-year-old Arab-Israeli Diyar Omri, who was killed during an apparent road rage incident with an Israeli Jewish driver the previous day.
Mourners at the funeral called for vengeance, chanting slogans including “through spirit and blood we will redeem you, oh martyr” and “your blood will not be in vain.”
Both the Palestinian flag and the flag of the Hamas terrorist group were waved at the funeral.
The funeral was held in the northern village of Sandala, Omri’s hometown, where residents called for a one-day general strike to protest Omri’s killing.
This incident has heightened tensions between Israeli Jews and Arabs in the area, and has prompted threats from Palestinian Arab terror groups like Hamas.
The suspected shooter, 32-year-old Denis Mukin, was identified by Israeli police on Sunday.
Mukin has been remanded for a week pending further investigation. Tests indicated he was intoxicated during the road rage incident, which ended when he fired several shots at Omri.
Mukin has pleaded self-defense, claiming that he felt his life was in danger.
However, a police detective has stated that Mukin’s account does not fit video footage of the incident that circulated on social media.
Mukin’s lawyer argued that he was afraid that the victim would produce a weapon to attack him when he ran to his vehicle during the confrontation.
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Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. is probably a very nice, worthwhile movie. I can’t tell for sure, only because this adaptation of Judy Blume’s landmark coming-of-age book is so far from any reality I’ve ever experienced, watching it was like watching a bland fantasy film about a land that never existed, peopled by […]
Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu speaks to the media at the CHP headquarters on November 1, 2015 in Ankara, Turkey. (Burak Kara / Getty Images)
The Turkish opposition candidate challenging incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently addressed the nation in a pair of viral videos — including the most widely shared social media clip in Turkish history, which is Twitter’s most popular video outright since the start of 2022. With a typically avuncular twinkle, Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu freely admits to being a member of Turkey’s Alevi religious minority and accuses Erdoğan of “slandering and stigmatizing” the Kurds to win election votes.
In fact, Kiliçdaroğlu has spent decades glossing over his minority identity rather than risking losing votes from Islamist, nationalist Turks — and he has offered support to both Erdoğan’s recent military attacks on the Kurds abroad and liquidation of the Kurdish-led domestic opposition. On the one hand, he has latterly made pragmatic overtures to the Kurdish-led opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP): but with the other hand, he has formed the symbol of the ultranationalist, hard-right Grey Wolves paramilitary group, in a sop to the millions of voters who loathe any move toward recognition of minority rights.
The epochal May 14 election undoubtedly represents Turkey’s best chance in a generation to depose Erdoğan, who has ruled for two decades with an increasingly iron fist. Particularly since the 2015 collapse of peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a failed 2016 coup attempt, Erdoğan’s rule has been marked by the destruction of effective parliamentary opposition, jailing of political opponents, and decimation of civil society. Erdoğan tried and failed to manipulate crucial 2019 elections where his party lost control of Istanbul, and these elections are widely seen as a kill-or-cure crisis point for what remains of Turkish parliamentary democracy, with Kiliçdaroğlu promising immediate reforms to reintroduce the separation of powers and rule of law. The president is using the entirety of the political, media, and judicial apparatus at his disposal to cling to power — with the possible use of military force to cling onto office hardly out of the question.
At this crucial juncture, Kiliçdaroğlu, who has a slight poll lead, certainly represents the best hope for an exhausted nation. But as HDP MP and foreign affairs co-spokesperson Hişyar Özsoy observes, as its name suggests, Kiliçdaroğlu’s “Nation Alliance” is “mostly nationalistic” — and Kiliçdaroğlu’s appeals to the Kurds mostly pragmatic. As such, Erdoğan’s challenger potentially stands to benefit from progressive rhetoric and public will for political transformation without offering genuine emancipation to the most marginalized. Crucial as the election is, the real political work will begin after, Kurdish politicians in Turkey, northern Syria, and Europe tell Jacobin.
Nonetheless, the wind of change is undeniably in the air. I speak to Özsoy after a long day campaigning in the Kurdish heartlands. “People are excited, angry, frustrated, anxious. You see fear, then courage, then hope. It’s very confusing,” he says. Meanwhile, Murad — an ecological activist and HDP voter who lives in Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city, Amed (Diyarbakir) — says that journalists who have come to the city seeking even a single Erdoğan voter to include in their pieces for balance have left empty-handed. “Even those who previously received money from the state, and defended it on this basis, don’t believe Erdoğan will remain in power,” Murad adds.
Erdoğan’s two-decade rule was already bound to face its most serious challenge to date in the May 14 elections. But February’s devastating earthquake, which killed over fifty thousand people in Turkey alone, may have permanently altered the balance of power. “Corruption, nepotism, criminal behavior and cronyism have left Turkey unable to protect its citizens,” says Nilûfer Koç of umbrella political organization the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK).
This is a result not just of fiscal mismanagement, but cynical profiteering. Erdoğan came to power on the back of a promise to adhere to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) program of aggressive privatization. While his relations with the IMF have soured, Erdoğan continues to transfer vast sums of public money into the pockets of his cronies — with a coterie of “Big Five” companies winning more public-private partnership projects than any other countries worldwide. Aggressive privatization has led to deaths from blizzards, train crashes, and a catastrophe at Istanbul’s megaproject airport, as power grids fail and unplanned urbanization leaves cities exposed to catastrophe.
Kiliçdaroğlu has spent decades glossing over his minority identity rather than risking losing votes from Islamist, nationalist Turks.
Gael le Ny, a Basque journalist who recently visited the epicenter of the earthquake zone, adds that even in a city like Adiyaman where “about 67 percent of the population” typically backed Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), it was now difficult to find anyone with a good word to say about the AKP as they picked through the rubble of their homes. Unorthodox economic decisions by Erdoğan have contributed to runaway inflation, leaving ordinary citizens destitute. “This winter, I visited many houses where people couldn’t afford to heat their homes,” Murad says. “People can’t afford to fill their stomachs or meet their basic needs.”
Erdoğan has maintained his grip on power through increasingly authoritarian measures aimed at centralizing control of the legislature and judiciary and crushing the civil-society sphere. At the time of writing, police had just swept through Amed arresting over 150 journalists, politicians, and artists linked to the HDP. More broadly, 40 percent of rank-and-file HDP members have faced criminal charges, sixty of sixty-five of its democratically elected mayors have been summarily jailed and replaced with state-appointed overseers widely despised by local populations, eleven HDP MPs are in jail, and the HDP will soon become Turkey’s ninth pro-Kurdish party in succession to be banned outright. Kurdish lawyers, journalists, and artists are all also targeted — Turkey is among the world’s worst jailers of journalists.
It’s business as usual in Erdoğan’s Turkey; but now Kiliçdaroğlu is consistently polling higher than Erdoğan, with the restoration of democratic, parliamentary norms a central campaign promise. “People are seeing the fact that in 2018, Erdoğan’s promise was: ‘give me power, centralize, I will stabilize and centralize the country to make it richer and safer’ — but none of these promises were kept,” Özsoy says, arguing that even many formerly pro-AKP voters recognize the damage Erdoğan’s centralization of power has done to Turkey’s social fabric. For the first time, the HDP is not running its own presidential candidate, fulfilling a king-maker role by leaving Kiliçdaroğlu free for a tilt at the presidency, with its supporters expected to back him.
So, who is Kiliçdaroğlu? His Republican People’s Party (CHP) represents the Kemalist tradition dating back to the foundation of the Turkish Republic, standing for a more or less authoritarian, centralized Turkish nationalism on the basis of a unitary national identity — anathema to the Kurdish movement’s calls for decentralization and pluralism. “The CHP has prolonged the life of the Erdoğan regime because of its ‘national unity’ sickness,” Koç says. He points to its support for Turkey’s deadly ground invasions of Kurdish-led North and East Syria. The assault killed hundreds of civilians and resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Kurds, Christians, and Yezidis by Turkish-backed militias sanctioned by the United States for sheltering former ISIS members and committing atrocities.
The HDP is not running its own presidential candidate, leaving Kiliçdaroğlu free for a tilt at the presidency, with its supporters expected to back him.
In this context, Kiliçdaroğlu’s recent claim that Erdoğan is weaponizing the Kurdish issue rings hollow to many Kurdish voters. The veteran politician could have opposed the government on these issues before, but elected to court nationalist votes through supporting Turkey’s foreign military ventures and has remained silent on the plight of thousands of jailed Kurds. By claiming there are no “right or left politics” in Turkey, and thus advancing right-wing nationalist candidates in elections, Kiliçdaroğlu has further demonstrated a cynical opportunism. Rather than heralding a transformative new approach to the national question in Turkey, Kiliçdaroğlu’s comments on his Alevi identity and the Kurdish issue are simply intended to forestall Erdoğan’s expected attack lines. This is what makes them palatable to voters disgruntled with Erdoğan’s own politics. As one commentator has suggested, Kiliçdaroğlu is effectively reconstructing the AKP’s original political constituency by appealing to religious, conservative voters — including rural Kurds.
Accordingly, the CHP’s electoral alliance includes ultranationalist and conservative Islamic parties, including two AKP splinter groups. As Özsoy notes, this is a “strange coalition” and a “politics of consensus is by definition limiting.” These parties have made it clear that they would not tolerate the HDP, or its successor party, participating in government, despite the fact that it has signaled tacit support for Kiliçdaroğlu. (The HDP will seek to evade the expected ban by running its parliamentary candidates via a smaller coalition partner, the Green-Left party, through which it hopes to win up to one hundred seats.)
Wary of further alienating conservative voters already angered by his overtures to the Kurds, and under pressure from his right-wing coalition partners, Kiliçdaroğlu is yet to offer a serious, systemic alternative to the neoliberal economic policies, extractive approach to impoverished, rural regions, and repression of fundamental labor rights which have left many ordinary Turkish citizens laboring for a pittance.
CHP policy toward North and East Syria, the multiethnic polity established around the Syrian Kurdish region of Rojava, illustrates this nuance. For now, Kiliçdaroğlu’s focus is likely to be on rebuilding Turkey post-earthquake (and post-Erdoğan), making another devastating ground invasion less likely. The CHP candidate has stated he will not back future cross-border operations.) But Kiliçdaroğlu has appealed to nationalist voters in Turkey by promising to repatriate the millions of Syrian refugees currently living in his country. This, taken along with his more conciliatory diplomatic style, will mean normalizing relations with Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and potentially entrenching ethnic cleansing in the Kurdish north through the forcible return of Syrian refugees to these regions via a deal with Damascus.
It remains to be seen whether Erdoğan will quietly step aside if he loses the election.
Salih Muslim, a leading Syrian Kurdish politician, says: “We would like for all refugees to return to their homes, but not to be used as a tool for population exchange in the Kurdish areas. We are opposed to forcible demographic change, and we see how the situation is in regions under regime control.”
Kiliçdaroğlu is also likely to continue backing the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus, a position which again diverges from the European consensus, rather than backing any more transformative federal solution. But overall, he is likely to pursue a more unambiguously pro-NATO, pro-Western line than Erdoğan, who has sought to play Washington against Moscow and style himself a crucial interlocutor between the two blocs. Kiliçdaroğlu will likely crack down on refugee flows, scrap Turkey’s Russian-provided air defense system, and bring an end to Erdoğan’s recent strategy of using Turkey’s NATO veto to secure concessions for fresh attacks on and repression of the Kurds — as when demanding Finland and Sweden extradite scores of Kurdish politicians, exiles, and journalists, including a Swedish-Kurdish MP with no links whatsoever to Turkey.
Europe and the United States will be happy to see Turkey return to the fold — so happy, in fact, they may well reward Kiliçdaroğlu with reentry into crucial Western weapons technology, perhaps even the F-35 fighter jet program from which Erdoğan is currently excluded. Seen through the NATO prism, Syrian refugees who may suffer forcible return into Assad’s brutal prison system, and the civilians and Kurdish political, civil society, and military leaders who continue to lose their lives in Turkey’s brutal air war across northern Iraq and Syria, are disposable collateral. To some extent, the Kurdish movement has benefited from friction between Ankara and Washington, and if Turkey toes the line by participating more wholeheartedly in Russia’s international isolation, the West may be more willing to turn a blind eye to excesses against the Kurds.
But even if Kiliçdaroğlu is only seeking to distance himself from the ancien régime through pragmatic appeals to the embattled Kurdish minority, the restoration of rule of law and potential release of some political prisoners would be a huge relief for the progressive, pro-Kurdish opposition. “Though there may be an end to Erdoğan’s rule, nobody is expecting the Kurdish issue to go away,” says Özsoy. “But in a new political landscape, with some degree of separation of powers and a somewhat free judiciary and media, we can reposition and continue wage a democratic struggle for our rights.”
Particularly in Kurdish regions, many votes for Kiliçdaroğlu are more likely to be votes against Erdoğan than votes for his opponent’s “strange coalition.” “It’s not that people have hope in Kiliçdaroğlu,” says Murad, “They just want Erdoğan to go.” Whether this is enough to countermand Erdoğan’s still significant nationalist voter base, and whether the incumbent is likely to quietly step aside if he loses the election, remains to be seen. But only then will there be space for the progressive opposition to begin broadening its program of empowering local democracy, municipalities, and grassroots political organizing.
When I ask her what will change if Erdoğan’s rival does assume the presidency, Koç’s response is clear: “First, I don’t know which ‘opposition’ you are talking about. For me, as a Kurd, a woman, and a cosmopolitan, the HDP is the real alternative for a secure future in Turkey.”
The media seem more worried about the human rights of Palestinian terrorists than the rights of victims of Palestinian terrorists.
By Bassam Tawil, Gatestone Institute
The death on May 1 in an Israeli prison of Khader Adnan, a senior member of the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) organization, has received worldwide coverage in major media outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, and The New York Times.
Meanwhile, two Palestinian men detained by the Islamist organization Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, died after a supposed unexpected “deterioration” in their health conditions in just the past month.
The deaths of the men in Hamas custody, however, was not given nearly the same attention by the international media and human rights organizations as the death of Adnan. The same newspapers and media organizations that highlighted the case of Adnan — who died after an 86-day hunger strike — chose to ignore the deaths of the two Palestinian detainees in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
The United Nations, whose “experts” are now demanding “accountability” from the Israeli government following Adnan’s death, also remained silent over the death of the two men held by Hamas.
The attitude of the mainstream media in the West, international agencies and human rights organizations towards these deaths expose their double standards and their ongoing obsession with Israel. The failure to report the deaths of the two prisoners in Gaza underscores their apparent lack of concern for the human rights of Palestinians living under the rule of Hamas, an extremist group designated as a terror organization by the US, Canada, and the European Union, among others.
The media seem more worried about the human rights of Palestinian terrorists than the rights of victims of Palestinian terrorists. Note, for example, how Omar Shakir, the “Israel and Palestine” director of Human Rights Watch, hailed the leader of the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also designated by many countries as a terror group. Has Shakir condemned the deaths of the two Palestinian men in Hamas custody? Not yet.
Adnan was neither tortured nor mistreated in Israeli prison. He chose to go on hunger strike after his arrest in February 2023 on charges of membership in a terror group and incitement to violence. He even refused to undergo medical evaluation or receive medical treatment during the hunger strike.
Adnan was fully aware that he was putting his life at risk by refusing food and medical care. He made a conscious decision, knowing full well it could lead to his death.
This also was not Adnan’s first hunger strike in an Israeli prison. In the past, he went on a hunger strike for several weeks, again putting his life at risk. Then, after receiving assurances from Israeli authorities that his detention would not be extended, he had ended his hunger strike.
The stories of the two Palestinian men who died in Hamas custody are vastly different from that of Adnan.
The first man, Mohammed Al-Sufi, 43, was an Islamic preacher from the town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. On April 20, the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Interior announced the death of Al-Sufi.
Al-Sufi’s 16-year-old son, Abdullah, told the Palestinian Center for Human Rights that his father and he were arrested on April 19 by Hamas security officers shortly after they returned home from a visit to Egypt. Abdullah said that he was punched and beaten by the officers, who accused his father and him of smuggling drugs into the Gaza Strip. He also said that he heard his father being interrogated in a nearby room and denying the charges. After a while, he heard the officers calling his father to wake up. Hours later, at Abu Yusef Annajar Hospital, Al-Sufi was pronounced dead.
Al-Sufi’s family insist he died from torture while in Hamas custody. They say he was arrested because he had criticized Hamas for serving as a proxy for Iran, which he said was responsible for killing Muslims in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Gaza Strip. The family has threatened to avenge his death at the hands of the “Hamas gangs.”
Al-Sufi’s family and friends published a poster on social media with his picture alongside a caption reading:
“I’m Sheikh Mohammed Al-Sufi. I was assassinated by Hamas on orders from Iran because I criticized the killers of Muslims in Syria and Iraq.”
Hussein Foujo, a Palestinian resident of the Gaza Strip who dared to speak out against the death of Al-Sufi in Hamas detention, said he received threats from a relative of the Hamas security officers involved in the arrest and alleged torture of the Islamic preacher.
The second detainee, Ahmed Al-Louh, 56, died on May 1 after being rushed from a Hamas prison to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. According to sources in the Gaza Strip, Al-Louh was arrested by Hamas security officers on March 8 for “criminal-related offences.” Hamas said that he, too, died after a “sudden deterioration in his health condition.”
Foreign journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have so far failed to report about the death of the two Palestinians. Foreign journalists did not visit, or even try to contact, the families of the two men who died in Hamas custody in the Gaza Strip. The UN and human rights organizations — who expressed so much concern over the death of the hunger striker in an Israeli prison — have yet to comment on the suspicious deaths of the two Palestinians in Hamas detention in the Gaza Strip, which could constitute crimes against humanity.
No one cares about the two men who died in Hamas custody, apparently because Israel is not associated with their deaths. Had Al-Sufi and Al-Louh died in an Israeli prison, they would have made headlines in The New York Times, the BBC and CNN.
The newspapers and media organizations turning a blind eye to human rights violations committed by Hamas against Palestinians are implying, through their failure to cover these suspicious deaths, that there is nothing newsworthy about Palestinians reportedly being tortured to death in Palestinian prisons.
The media’s indifference to these deaths appears the result of the “racism of low expectations.” “They treat Muslims like monkeys in a zoo,” said Egyptian scholar Hamed Abdel Samad.
It is as if journalists and so-called human rights groups assume that Muslims are such savages that it would be laughable even to expect civilized behavior from them; so why report it at all?
The cases of Adnan, Al-Sufi and Al-Louh further show how consistently foreign journalists and professed human rights groups covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spend their waking hours hunting down stories that reflect negatively on Israel. Some of these “correspondents” appear so blinded by their bigotry that, under the banner of being “pro-Palestinian,” they are ready to give Hamas a free pass to arrest, torture and kill as many of their fellow-Palestinians they wish.
There is much damning evidence (here, here, here, here, here and here) of anti-Israel bias in the mainstream media and so-called human rights organizations in the West. Those who ignore human rights violations committed by both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority against Palestinians do a massive disservice to the Palestinians whom they claim to support, but who remain horribly mistreated by their own leaders (here, here, here and here).
Failure to publicize these human rights abuses simply allows Hamas to continue its crimes against the Palestinians with callous impunity — and without an iota of concern about criticism from the media, the UN, the international community or self-professed human rights groups.
Bassam Tawil is a Muslim Arab based in the Middle East.
The post Palestinians: More human rights violations no one talks about appeared first on World Israel News.
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