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Volunteers use a length of textile as a slide to move dead victims recovered from the rubble after the Rana Plaza garment building collapsed in Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, on April 25, 2013. (Munir Uz Zaman / AFP via Getty Images)
“The fire in the garment factory began on the fourth floor, where polo shirts, neatly folded in boxes, made a fine feast for the hungry flames,” wrote the New York Times. Fifty-two people died in the November 25, 2000, disaster at Chowdhury Knitwears, thirty-five miles from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
In the ensuing years, I learned that this fire was a typical incident. Month after month, year after year, industrial disasters like fires plagued the garment industry in Bangladesh. I started feeling inured to the impact of articles like that of the Times, because I knew they would keep coming like clockwork yet nothing would change.
Then, ten years ago this week, the potential for everything to change arose. The garment industry saw its biggest disaster in its history: Rana Plaza, an eight-story building in Bangladesh’s capital, collapsed, killing over 1,130 people and leaving more than 2,500 others injured or permanently disabled.
Management in the factories had known that the building was coming apart on April 23. A television crew had even filmed it. Workers were forced to go to work anyway on April 24.
According to worker testimony, one garment company in the building, Ether Tex, threatened to withhold a month’s pay from workers who didn’t come in that day. Who knows how many other threats and abuses workers were subjected to as they considered whether their work or their life was more important.
It must have been a considerable number. The garment manufacturers’ association conceded that there were more than three thousand workers in the building at the time. When the heavy diesel generators started up at about 9 a. m., they set off the final collapse of the building.
Bangladeshi civilian volunteers assist in rescue operations after the Rana Plaza garment building collapsed in Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, on April 24, 2013. (Munir Uz Zaman / AFP via Getty Images)
Rana Plaza was far more gruesome than even the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911, in which 146 garment workers died as a result of a fire at a Manhattan factory. All of a sudden, the whole world was watching the garment industry, again. People in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the Global North actually noticed that the garment sector in Bangladesh and elsewhere was rife with health and safety problems. And Bangladeshis immediately understood that Sohel Rana, the building owner, should be held accountable.
Rana had secured a permit to build on top of the site of a filled-in pond. He illegally built three stories above the permit and allowed industrial activities in a building constructed for commercial uses. To top it off, he had reassured the public, garment factory managers, and workers that the building was safe on April 23, the day before the collapse, when there were already cracks showing in the building.
Relatives of the injured and deceased, workers, and politicians in Bangladesh also immediately called for accountability against the powerful garment manufacturers’ cartel in the country. But most of the money made on a piece of clothing goes neither to the workers who make it nor to the factory owner in countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, or Turkey, let alone the owner of the building that houses the factories.
Rather, it is overwhelmingly left in the hands of manufacturing and retail brands in the Global North like Walmart and Zara. For example, Walmart’s revenues in 2021 were almost 40 percent higher than the entire GDP of Bangladesh that year. This gives Walmart the bulk of the power in the industry by allowing them to put price pressure on their contractors, with the implicit threat of their ability to move production elsewhere always looming. In turn, contractors are able to force their mostly women workers to accept low wages, long hours, and harassment and assault.
Since the 1990s, the anti-sweatshop movement in the United States has attempted to force brands to be held accountable for the conditions in which workers make their clothes. For years, some very slow changes notwithstanding, the manufacturers and retailers refused to budge.
After Rana Plaza, this changed to a significant degree. It had to — there was simply too much public attention to a disaster on an enormous scale. In essence, the world said, “No more Rana Plazas.” Years of campaigning to link the brands and retailers at the top of the contracting pyramid that makes up the garment industry finally started to pay off. When people started looking for responsible parties, names like Benetton, Zara, the Children’s Place, Primark, and Walmart came up as some of the many brands that were sourcing from the numerous garment factories in the building. No longer were they able to simply elide guilt by avoiding formal legal ownership of the factories or the production process.
What happened next is part of the tragedy in this story. Within two weeks of Rana Plaza, international NGOs, representatives of Global North brands, and Bangladeshi unions sat down to hammer out the Accord on Building and Fire Safety in Bangladesh. Building off an existing model developed in preceding years, it brought almost two hundred brands into a legally binding framework to ensure safer factory conditions. Many brands could now be sued for factory disasters like Rana Plaza.
The accord did ensure safer conditions during its five-year initial run. The body provided independent inspections, a mechanism for remediation for factories that were willing to cooperate, a blacklist for those that would not, and a legally binding compact that international brands were liable for. By May 2021, it had informed over 1.8 million workers about workplace safety and inspected over 1,600 factories.
Even its harshest good-faith critics acknowledge that it has saved many lives by averting fires and other building safety problems.
Those in charge of the accord slowly, and in a limited way, began to incorporate responses to criticisms, like the accord’s lack of focus on issues like wages and union organizing. And regardless of the accord’s focus, the fact that many eyes from around the world were now on Bangladesh’s garment industry helped foster more openness toward independent trade unionism, sorely lacking prior to 2013.
In 2012, there was one unionized factory in Bangladesh; shortly after Rana Plaza, there were ninety-six. Today, there are around 1,200, with one trade union leader estimating that about one hundred of them have good unions.
But all of that attention did not hit on the key to a sustainable solution that could outlive the new post–Rana Plaza political leverage and transform the industry. By 2018, Bangladesh’s politically powerful garment manufacturers brought a court case to end the accord. Slowly, the accord was unwound.
This despite the fact that the accord had not created a sufficient space for organized and empowered workers to advocate continuously for themselves in a condition of extreme global and workplace inequality. The accord was a temporary governance solution for narrow ends, not a permanent mechanism for the kind of change that can only come from workers themselves organizing through institutions like unions. Unions have expanded in Bangladesh, but nowhere near the point needed to act as a substantive check on the garment industry bosses.
As a result, there appears to have been little thought — and less commitment — to what would happen after the leverage of the accord was gone. With Rana Plaza receding into the past, garment manufacturers and international brands and retailers now faced little pressure to improve working conditions.
The proof is in the pudding. With the accord’s power receding in Bangladesh over the past five years, Bangladeshi garment worker deaths on the job have already begun ticking up. By 2020, the number of workplace deaths had been reduced to one, but the following year, after the accord’s implementation was handed off to a local body, they jumped back up to thirteen. Workplace accidents also increased. And as the pandemic began, brands cut garment orders immediately, leaving entire countries like Bangladesh at the mercy of the whims of the global economy. Trade unionism in Bangladesh’s garment sector is headed back to the repressed state it was in before 2013, according to garment union leaders I’ve spoke with. It was, as scholar and filmmaker Chaumtoli Huq told me, a “lost opportunity” to significantly boost worker and union power in Bangladesh.
In a sad sense, we are right back where we started. For now, the Bangladeshi factories are safer. But it’s almost as hard as ever to unionize in those factories. Bangladesh has grown wealthier since the tragedy, but the country remains 129th out of 191 countries on the United Nations’ Human Development Index. This situation will persist absent a garment workers’ revolt. In the meantime, as Rana Plaza fades from public memory, those 1,130-plus deaths appear to have been all but forgotten by the world beyond Bangladesh.
A pro-life supporter holds a crucifix during a demonstration outside a Planned Parenthood Reproductive Health Services Center in St Louis, Missouri. (Michael Thomas / Getty Images)
For years, the alliance between the antiabortion movement and the GOP has been a constant of American politics, one of the great success stories of collaboration between social movements and political parties.
Until recently, the partnership seemed only to make both sides stronger. But the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision last summer, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has profoundly altered the political context, revealing the deep unpopularity of the movement’s objectives. It constitutes both a crowning achievement for the decades-old marriage and what looks to be the start of an unprecedentedly turbulent period for it.
Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman spoke with Mary Ziegler, the Martin Luther King Jr Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, about the strategic dilemma the movement and its political allies face now that the abortion issue has been thrust back to the center of the US American political agenda.
Seth Ackerman
For many years, we tended to take it for granted that there was a pro-life movement that had tremendous influence over the Republican Party and had managed to get the party to adopt a policy stance that was not particularly popular.
It all seemed to run smoothly for a long time — at least from an outsider’s perspective. But since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, the relationship has come under strain.
So, just for some background, if you go back to the eve of Dobbs, how did the pro-life movement exert power over the Republican Party?
Mary Ziegler
Well, things were already changing before Dobbs, but basically there were a couple different ways. The larger antiabortion groups that had gained power over the years had various metrics for measuring how loyal Republican candidates were to the movement, which they would then use to motivate voters: candidate ratings, voter guides, and the like. And what they would tell Republicans was not that there were necessarily that many antiabortion voters, but that antiabortion voters were more committed.
So the story that I think a lot of Republicans believed for a long time was not that most voters were opposed to abortion — because they knew that wasn’t true — but that the voters who were opposed to abortion cared more. The average Democratic or independent voter might feel a certain way about abortion, but abortion was not a top issue for them, almost ever. Whereas for people opposed to abortion, that might be the only thing they would think about when they went to the polls. There was this image of the single-issue voter.
The other thing that was happening, although this is more complicated, was on the donor side. And the reason this was more complicated is because pro–abortion rights organizations like Planned Parenthood always outraised and outspent equivalent organizations within the antiabortion movement. But there were still single-issue donors on the Right who expected politicians to do specific things about abortion, and catering to them could be important. For example, the guy who founded Domino’s Pizza, Tom Monaghan, was one of these people.
And then finally, as the country became more gerrymandered and more polarized, there were a lot of areas of the country where it was good politics to be extreme on abortion. So not all of this was just skullduggery; some of it was just genuine polarization. You began to see a divergence between the influence of the antiabortion movement within certain state legislatures and in some safe House districts versus the party as a whole. In those places, positions that might have been damaging to the party as a whole would be advantageous to state legislators, gubernatorial candidates, and members of the House (not really senators so much). Those trends all increased starting in the 2000s.
Seth Ackerman
So you’re saying there were very conservative places where politicians increasingly had an incentive not just to vote how the pro-life organizations wanted them to vote. They actually intended to present extreme positions to the public.
Mary Ziegler
Yes — and sometimes push further than those organizations.
Because one of the things that was happening at the same time was that the antiabortion movement itself was becoming divided.
The larger groups that I mentioned were essentially the antiabortion establishment. They were no less extreme in terms of what they wanted to have happen, but they were savvier. Their attitude was, we need to do things that are realistic. They were more pragmatic in the sense that they wanted to win as much as they could in the short term. So they were willing to accept less than absolutely perfect policies in the interim.
You began to see a divergence between the influence of the antiabortion movement within certain state legislatures and in some safe House districts versus the party as a whole.
But there were lots of other groups with different strategy ideas. And part of what was happening was that politicians became more willing to go even further than the larger establishment groups were advising. And sometimes even to lift up more extreme voices in the movement.
Seth Ackerman
What groups are we talking about here?
Mary Ziegler
So there are the more old-school establishment groups like the National Right to Life Committee and Americans United for Life. Some of them are actually becoming more extreme — or rather, they’re proposing more extreme ideas; substantively, everybody in the movement is more or less on the same page. But these are basically single-issue groups. They don’t talk about gay rights for most part; they’re just antiabortion groups.
Then you have what you might call multi-issue Christian right groups, which were more ascendant starting in the ’90s. They combined advocacy on other issues — usually their big issues were anti-LGBTQ stuff and religious freedom, broadly defined — with antiabortion stuff. For example, the Alliance Defending Freedom or the American Center for Law and Justice, which was Jay Sekulow’s group.
Then you have groups that have been in the ascendant more recently. These tend to be younger groups that are more extreme, like Students for Life [of America]. And I think they’re now making a bid to be the new dominant force.
Students for Life had antecedents in earlier years, like Collegians for Life, but it was restarted with money from an angel investor in the mid-2000s. More recently it formed a PAC and now it’s really a powerhouse in both state legislatures and on the Hill. And it’s more overtly extreme on some issues. Like, it’s opposed to the pill, which it says is an abortifacient.
Seth Ackerman
Wait, which pill are we talking about?
Mary Ziegler
Like the birth control pill.
Seth Ackerman
Really?
Mary Ziegler
Yep. I mean, you can go on their website, they’re not hiding it.
Seth Ackerman
Is there a denominational distinction on this issue? Like, within the movement, does opposition to birth control pills have a Catholic coloration?
Mary Ziegler
No, that’s not what they’re trying to argue — they’re trying to argue that it’s abortion. I mean, clearly there’s a history of that within Catholicism. But nowadays the opposition to birth control within the movement is broader than that and about more than that.
And then, finally, there are bottom-up state-level groups. So if you think of SB 8 in Texas — the “Bounty Bill” — those were not people from a national group. They were local activists. But then they started to say, we can come up with a strategy that everyone will want to imitate. So you start to see some of that happening now, too, where state groups are proposing strategies that diverge from the national movement and then seeing if those catch on nationally.
Seth Ackerman
You said this landscape was already changing before Dobbs. I would guess the Donald Trump years — where the leader of the party was not someone who in the past had been attached to the pro-life movement — must have had some impact on the basic terms of the bargain between the pro-life movement and the Republican Party?
Mary Ziegler
Yes, it did. Trump was obviously an interesting figure for the movement. Because on the one hand, they didn’t trust him in the beginning. But on the other hand, as you know, Trump was very unpopular. So as a result, he was more beholden to socially conservative voters than a lot of the politicians who had come before him.
For example, someone like George W. Bush might have said the right things. And in fact he was actually a devout evangelical who had personally had a born-again experience and in some ways had the perfect biography for people in the antiabortion movement.
But he was also the last Republican to actually win the popular vote. So Bush at various points basically said, I don’t want to use my political capital on something that’s unpopular — and I don’t have to. He thought he had enough support without the most extreme elements of the antiabortion movement, so he could just not do what they wanted a certain amount of the time. He would do antiabortion things he thought were popular — like, he signed bans on specific late-term abortion procedures, for example. But when it came to things that were more unpopular, he just didn’t use his political capital. And the same thing happened with Ronald Reagan, by the way.
Trump didn’t have that luxury. If Trump didn’t have socially conservative voters, he literally didn’t have anybody. So Trump did more for the movement because he was more beholden to the movement. He would go to the March for Life; he would pick judges who were much more reliably antiabortion. He would prioritize antiabortion issues.
If Trump didn’t have socially conservative voters, he literally didn’t have anybody. So Trump did more for the antiabortion movement because he was more beholden to it.
And I think that kind of crystallized something for some people in the movement that they had actually known for a while, which was that they didn’t necessarily want a perfect candidate. They wanted power. They wanted someone they could boss around. So the fact that nobody liked Trump made him much better from their standpoint.
And so, following that, there’s again been some internal debate going into 2024 about what they want now. Is Trump still the way to go because he delivered for them in the past? Or maybe not, because the party has been rebuilt around Trump in ways that maybe make him less dependent on social conservatives. I don’t get a feeling from the people I’ve talked to that they know what the way forward in 2024 ought to be — which isn’t surprising because there are strategic fights going on about what the way forward ought to be for the movement, period.
Seth Ackerman
What is the relationship between what we might call the “Trump movement” or the Trump base and the antiabortion movement?
Mary Ziegler
Well it’s still in flux. I don’t think anyone knows how powerful Trump is going to be going forward, which means that the partnership between Trump and those conservative Christians isn’t as solid as it used to be. And, relatedly, I don’t think those groups know whether they can trust Trump anymore, which means they don’t know how much to rely on him. I don’t think Trump knows whether relying on those groups is smart politics anymore. So we don’t know how much he’s going to lean on them. And within the antiabortion movement itself, they’re fragmented about what to do going forward.
So it’s hard to generalize. I think the role of the antiabortion movement in the GOP vis-à-vis other factions is contested. And you can see this just from the randomness right now of how antiabortion groups or politicians in the GOP are reacting to the abortion issue. You have people on the one hand saying, we need to stop talking about this issue. Then you have Ron DeSantis signing a six-week bill — you don’t know what they’re doing. And I think a major reason for that is that there’s a feeling that antiabortion base conservatives are still going to be huge in primaries, but the issue may be more of a liability in general elections.
There’s also a lot more nuance now because now states actually can legislate on abortion. Before Roe fell, there were a lot of politicians who felt they could talk a big game about what they would do if they could ban abortion, but they didn’t actually have to do anything. But now that they can do it, there are a lot of divisions from state to state in terms of what Republicans are willing to do, because it’s just much more of a liability to take strong antiabortion stands in purple states than it is in others. Plus there’s a divergence between Republicans at the state and federal levels.
Seth Ackerman
Is there a sense among rank-and-file antiabortion people that the curtain has been pulled down? That politicians who presented themselves as their friends for so many years turned out not really to be their friends, and that there’s not as much support for their ideas in the political world as they thought?
Mary Ziegler
Yes and no. On the one hand, a lot of the savvier players knew that that’s what Republican politicians were doing. I mean, a lot of these people are pretty smart about strategy. So I don’t think it’s a huge surprise to them that politicians were bullshitting them because they knew that that’s just what politicians do.
I think what was more of a surprise to them was that they had been making the argument for a long time that the reason voters weren’t backing abortion bans was just because they couldn’t — because Roe v. Wade had made it impossible. And at first, I think that was just an argument they were making. But then they began to believe their own rhetoric — that if Roe were gone, American voters would come to see that abortion was wrong and would get on board. And I think they’ve been surprised by how untrue that has proved to be and are not sure what to make of it.
They began to believe their own rhetoric — that if Roe were gone, American voters would come to see that abortion was wrong and would get on board. And I think they’ve been surprised by how untrue that has proved to be.
But I think a lot of them have pivoted pretty quickly to saying, you know, we don’t really care about what voters want, which wasn’t that hard of a transition because the movement has been sort of set up that way for a while. In its own understanding, it’s a human rights movement. It sees what it’s doing as more important than majority rule.
Seth Ackerman
In their conception, they’re sort of standing up for an “unpopular minority.”
Mary Ziegler
Yes. Because if you said, “Hey, you know, what you’re doing is antidemocratic,” they, first of all, might not agree with that, but they would say, “Even if you’re right, so what? We’re stopping the Holocaust. And if the Holocaust were popular, would you be okay with it? No, you wouldn’t. So why should we be.”
Seth Ackerman
So it’s not necessarily one of those situations, like after a landslide election, where the losing side suddenly feels alienated from the rest of the country.
Mary Ziegler
I think there’s a combination. Some people genuinely think Americans just don’t get it. That they don’t know what abortion is and they’ve had the wool pulled over their eyes by the abortion lobby or the abortion industry or whatever. And then there are others who are sort of like, look, we don’t really care. We’re not here to talk about that. We’re focused on doing what we can to stop abortion and we don’t really care if voters don’t like it.
Seth Ackerman
Let’s talk about the internal disagreements within the movement about what to do now. What are the main lines of argument?
Mary Ziegler
They’re mostly strategic. There’s been a pretty broad consensus within the movement that the end goal is some form of constitutional fetal personhood. That would be available either through a US Supreme Court decision declaring a fetus to be a person or through a constitutional amendment. Now, obviously, there’s not going to be a constitutional amendment. That’s just not going to happen. So it would have to be a US Supreme Court decision, but there doesn’t appear to be any chance that’s going to happen in the near term.
So the divide is really not about what the end goal is. The divide is more about what’s a good idea in the short term, how far to push, and what matters and what doesn’t. Then there are disagreements about specific strategies. Like, do you rely on the the Comstock Act? Do you try to prevent travel? These are all strategies for getting to a national ban, whether that means interpreting existing law in a certain way or preventing travel from states that allow abortion or doing various things to prevent access to the abortion pill. They’re debating which of those strategies would work the best. And then there are questions about whether to punish women, which is another fault line.
Seth Ackerman
These attempts to use state laws to override other states’ laws sounds a lot like the kind of chaotic federalism caused by the slavery issue before the Civil War. Obviously that resulted in serious legal and constitutional problems due to the divide between free and slave states. Is the abortion issue headed in that direction, of testing the constitutional boundaries of state versus federal supremacy?
Mary Ziegler
Yes, definitely. In fact, today [April 17] there’s going to be a press conference about some lawsuits that are going to argue that the Comstock Act already bans all abortion nationwide. There’s a lawsuit trying to cut off all access to mifepristone nationwide, and the Supreme Court is going to have to decide by Wednesday how many of these lower court orders to block. Idaho has passed the first of what are likely to be several laws trying to limit interstate travel for minors for abortion. So that’s very much happening.
Seth Ackerman
What is the constitutional status of states limiting their residents’ right to travel?
Mary Ziegler
I mean, who knows? We don’t know, which is what it makes it complicated.
Seth Ackerman
What about the idea of prosecuting state residents for doing things that are illegal in their home state but legal in the state where they’re doing it?
Mary Ziegler
We haven’t seen proposals to do that yet. I think that will come, but I think there was a perception by a lot of Republicans that it was a bad idea to do that this time because it would be unpopular.
Seth Ackerman
It would be unpopular but not necessarily unconstitutional?
Mary Ziegler
Yes, we don’t know if it would be unconstitutional. There isn’t a lot of precedent for trying to do that. And it would probably depend on exactly what a state was trying to do.
The interesting question would be, say, someone from Alabama comes to California and the California doctor performs an abortion. Can Alabama prosecute the doctor? Or what if the doctor from California mails abortion pills to someone in Alabama who then takes the pills in Alabama. Can Alabama prosecute them for that? And the answer is basically, we don’t know and/or it depends. It’s pretty clear there are some constitutional protections for some of those actors, but maybe not for all. And it’s legally contested enough that there’s a lot of gray area.
But at the moment we don’t have any statutes that directly raise the question, other than maybe Idaho’s. And there’s been no challenge to that yet. So, it seems inevitable that we’re going to find out sooner or later, but not immediately, because there are no cases that have currently been brought.
Seth Ackerman
Is there a possibility that there could be a falling out between the pro-life movement and the Republican Party?
Mary Ziegler
Eventually, yes, but you don’t see it right now. I think for now the Republican Party feels it can’t win without the antiabortion movement. But I don’t know if they think they can win with the antiabortion movement either. They’re in a very difficult position and we don’t know yet how they’re going to sort all of that out really.
Seth Ackerman
What are the next steps in this fight that we’re going to see now?
Mary Ziegler
We’re seeing more on the Comstock Act. Just today, Jonathan Mitchell, the lawyer who wrote SB 8 — the Bounty Bill — filed a lawsuit essentially arguing that New Mexico’s protections for reproductive rights are illegal because they contradict the Comstock Act. The act, among other things, says it’s a federal crime to mail abortion drugs and paraphernalia. And there’s a big, complicated history about what it actually means and how courts have interpreted it.
The danger we’re seeing now that hadn’t been exposed before is that winning in popular politics only works if your democracy is functioning properly.
Seth Ackerman
So there’s a possibility that on the basis of that argument, we could see a ban on mailing abortion pills?
Mary Ziegler
You could see a ban on all abortion, depending on how the Supreme Court interprets it.
Seth Ackerman
Before Dobbs, in pro–abortion rights circles every once in a while somebody would make the argument that Roe v. Wade was, in the long run, a bad thing for the abortion rights movement because it diverted the fight away from mass politics and arguments about the substance of the issue toward all these arcane judicial machinations. Do you think events since Dobbs have borne one way or the other on that question?
Mary Ziegler
It’s hard to know because it’s a counterfactual — what would have happened had you not had Roe? Certainly it was a lot easier to talk about how much better things would have been without Roe when there was Roe and you didn’t have all these efforts to criminalize abortion at the national level.
Now we’re in a world where this is all going to be down to what voters think and who’s able to mobilize better. But the danger we’re seeing now that hadn’t been exposed before is that winning in popular politics only works if your democracy is functioning properly. If it’s not, and you have a lot of decisions being made by legislators who aren’t representing what people want, or by federal courts, or even by voters who are not prioritizing what they think about an issue, then you’re going to get distortions emerging through democratic politics, too.
So, as much as I think it’s been promising so far in terms of how voters are actually thinking about these issues, it’s also exposed these dangers that people hadn’t been thinking about when they talked about achieving abortion rights through popular politics.
The mainstream corporate media is desperate. They want to suppress independent and alternative online media, which they categorize as “fake news”. Readers on social media are warned not to go onto certain sites. Our analysis confirms that the mainstream media are routinely involved in distorting the facts and turning realities upside down.
The post Who is Behind “Fake News”? Mainstream Media Use Fake Videos and Images appeared first on Global Research.
“I refuse to spend this sacred day listening to lies and condemnations. This debate disgraces the fallen, and Israel will not take part in it.”
The United Nations Security Council convened Tuesday for an open debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict despite requests to move the meeting by Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan in order to respect the sanctity of Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen IDF soldiers and victims of terror.
In an act of protest, Ambassador Erdan read the names of the troops who fell and those murdered by Palestinian terror over the past year, lit a memorial candle, and left the chamber.
Before leaving the chamber together with the Israeli delegation, Ambassador Erdan slammed the members of the Council.
“We made numerous requests to reschedule today’s debate, describing the deep importance of the day, yet tragically, this Council refused to budge. The decision to nonetheless hold this debate on today of all days only further proves what Israelis already know and feel about this biased organization,” he said.
“Today, on this hallowed day, every Israeli remembers those courageous sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, and dear friends, who lost their lives defending Israel. Yet while Israelis mourn, this Council – as usual – will hear more blatant lies condemning the State of Israel and falsely painting it as the root of all the region’s problems. This could not be further from the truth.”
“I refuse to spend this sacred day listening to lies and condemnations. This debate disgraces the fallen, and Israel will not take part in it,” he concluded.
The post Israeli envoy blasts UN, honors fallen IDF soldiers and terror victims before walking out appeared first on World Israel News.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis gives remarks at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th Anniversary Leadership Summit at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center on April 21, 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
Last November, things momentarily looked auspicious for Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his allies in the Republican Party. Having barely eked out a win in 2018 over Democratic rival Andrew Gillum, DeSantis’s reelection bid was a double-digit blowout. As the most prominent face in the GOP, moreover, Donald Trump could be made to wear its lackluster midterm results and, perhaps, finally be cast off for good. To many apparatchiks and big donors, it looked like a perfect opportunity.
For one thing, DeSantis’s electoral track record proved that he was a winner: in just a few years, he had dyed an erstwhile purple state deep red and could pitch himself as a candidate who could replicate the same result elsewhere. His political antennae also seemed well attuned to the desires of conservative voters. As Florida’s governor, DeSantis’s strategy has been to stimulate the pleasure centers of the Republican base as much as he possibly can: by dispensing with vaccine precautions; by attacking Disney over “wokeness”; by declaring war on “woke capitalism” and “gender ideology.”
It did not seem unreasonable, therefore, to think he might be offered to the GOP primary electorate as a kind of compromise candidate — someone who could provide an ersatz simulation of Trumpism while, at the same time, severing it from the actual personality of Donald Trump. To this end, the spin doctors went into high gear and the big donors duly opened their wallets. No less than Rupert Murdoch publicly warned Donald Trump that it was time to move on.
Less than six months later, the Republican establishment doesn’t have much to show for its DeSantis efforts. As it stands, Trump leads the GOP primary field by an average of twenty-nine points and enjoyed a 15 percent lead on DeSantis in a recent survey commissioned by NBC News. While the governor’s poll numbers have plummeted, the former president has opened up a big lead in endorsements from elected Republican officials and currently enjoys a considerable edge in no less than DeSantis’s home state. Trump, in characteristic form, has gleefully taken to narrating the whole thing: “Ron’s poll numbers are dropping so fast and furious that many people are speculating he’s not going to run. . . . because I’m leading in Texas by forty-two points, in Iowa and New Hampshire by a lot — overall by close to forty.”
DeSantis has yet to even enter the race, but the rivalry already has obvious parallels with an earlier feud between Trump and another Florida governor, whose ham-fisted 2016 campaign proved that there really are limits to what money can buy.
Seven years ago, with a cavalcade of donors and a windfall of endorsements at his back, Jeb Bush secured a grand total of three delegates at a price tag of about $50 million each. Despite unprecedented opposition from the Republican establishment, meanwhile, Trump arrived at the Republican National Convention with some 1,725 pledged, his own per-delegate spending coming in at just $39,000.
That disjuncture owed much to Bush’s laughable ineptitude as a candidate. But it was also the product of a failed strategy that sought to meet Trump’s insults and bombast by taking the high road. It’s therefore difficult to watch DeSantis pitch himself to crowds of donors with bloodless statements like “Florida shows that leadership really matters. Results matter. And I think if you look at our results they are second to none” and not immediately think of Jeb Bush.
In interactions with the media and public, meanwhile, he radiates the distinctly Jeb-ish air of a diffident man easily knocked off his game by an opponent who refuses to play according to the standard rules of political etiquette.
“I’m not a candidate, so we’ll see if and when that changes,” Gov. DeSantis, who is in Japan right now, says when asked about polls that show him falling behind Trump. pic.twitter.com/nDVeyBoVHN
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 24, 2023
DeSantis, like Bush, also seems distinctly vulnerable to Trump’s heterodox rhetoric around entitlements like Medicare and Social Security. As Jamelle Bouie observed in January, the Florida governor’s “radical and unpopular views on social insurance and the welfare state” represent an obvious chink in his armor — a fact that Trump (who, if nothing else, has a talent for sensing political weakness) visibly understands. Even DeSantis’s allies and backers are beginning to sound anxious.
These developments suggest that Trump’s opponents on the Right continue to misunderstand the sources of his appeal and underestimate the firmness of his grip on the Republican base. In 2016, such myopia was at least partly understandable. Trump, after all, was an outsider with little real political experience and seemed to be violating every established rule about how to win a presidential nomination. Some seven years later, however, they appear to have learned so little that their chosen anti-Trump figure is already flailing in a race he has yet to even join. Let the Jebification commence.