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Experts say workshop violated multiple civil rights laws.
By Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon
New York University hosted a whites-only “anti-racism” workshop for public school parents in New York City, barring minorities from a five-months-long seminar that legal experts say was a brazen violation of civil rights law.
The all-white seminar, “From Integration to Anti-Racism,” cost $360 to attend and met six times between February and June, according to a description of the program that has since been scrubbed from the university’s website without explanation. Organized by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, the workshop was “designed specifically for white public school parents” committed to “becoming anti-racist” and building “multiracial parent communities.”
But to promote solidarity with all races, participants were told, it was necessary that the seminar include only one.
A few days before the first session, facilitators circulated a short handout, “Why a White Space,” to explain “why we are meeting as white folks for these six months.” The handout, produced by the nonprofit Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere, argued that white people need spaces where they can “unlearn racism” without subjecting minorities to “undue trauma or pain.”
Facilitators reiterated this argument on day one of the seminar, audio and video of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. When a parent questioned the premise of the workshop—saying it seemed “a little counterintuitive” to exclude minorities from an anti-racism seminar—Barbara Gross, the associate director of Steinhardt’s Education Justice Research group, assured her that it was for their own good.
“People of color are dealing with racism all the time,” Gross said. “Like every minute of every day. It’s a harm on top of a harm for them to hear our racist thoughts.”
Even before the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions, it was illegal for universities to practice other forms of race discrimination. The whites-only workshop, five lawyers said, almost certainly violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which applies to the recipients of federal funds, and—since NYU charged parents for the seminars—also ran afoul of laws banning discrimination in contracting, according to Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project.
“It’s quintessentially illegal,” said Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. “This episode illustrates the horseshoe theory whereby left- and right-wing radicals end up agreeing on race-based societal balkanization. It’s like that social media meme: ‘woke or KKK?’”
The program took place while NYU was under an ongoing consent agreement with the U.S. Department of Education over a string of anti-Semitic incidents on campus. As race-based programs of all stripes face added scrutiny in the wake of the High Court’s affirmative action ban, the seminar is a stark signal that “anti-racism” doesn’t just mean minority-only fellowships or workforce diversity targets; at one of the top universities in the country, it now includes programs that bear an eerie similarity to Jim Crow.
“They are literally running a ‘whites only’ program in the interest of so-called social justice,” said Samantha Harris, an attorney who litigates campus speech and civil rights issues. “I find it inconceivable that the people putting these programs together don’t see the irony.”
NYU told the Free Beacon that it would be “reviewing these matters to determine whether they conform to our standards.” Gross did not respond to a request for comment.
The seminar is a fascinating study of how one group of white liberals guilt-tripped and self-flagellated their way into segregation.
Participants seemed petrified by the possibility that they could “harm” a person of color with a misplaced comment or anecdote, a fear that made the whites-only training a kind of therapeutic refuge.
Asked when they first “learned about race,” one parent recalled how, while she was in kindergarten, a black classmate had been expelled for bringing a knife to school. Later in the session, she expressed relief that there had been no minorities around to hear such a traumatizing tale.
“I was so grateful that there weren’t, you know, people of color in this space to hear me say [that] my first experience learning about what my race was was a black boy with a knife,” she said. “That can be harming.”
The first session of the workshop, which included approximately a dozen parents and ran for two hours, encouraged that sort of hypersensitivity. As participants filed into the meeting, they were greeted by a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” performed by the “Resistance Revival Chorus,” a group of women and “non-binary singers” that “centers women in music.”
After participants shared their pronouns—most of which were “she/her”—facilitators performed a brief land acknowledgment and laid out the ground rules for the session.
“Resist the urge to intellectualize,” Gross said. “We’re not going to get through this without welcoming the feelings.”
In what seemed like an effort at self-awareness, another facilitator, Courtney Epton, told participants to avoid virtue-signaling. “Trying to compete with each other to be the ‘good white person,’” she said, is itself a “part of white supremacy.”
Epton—a “senior equity associate” at NYU Steinhardt and a board member of the nonprofit Integrated Schools—did not respond to a request for comment.
At least one parent in attendance, Jordan Feigenbaum, had direct say over the governance of local schools. Feigenbaum serves on the Community Education Council for New York City’s District 13, an elected policy body that reviews school curricula and approves district zoning lines. He touted his participation in the program when he ran for office, saying the whites-only workshop would “enhance” his ability to serve the district.
Feigenbaum—who described himself as an “ally” in his candidate statement—did not respond to a request for comment.
Gross indicated that the workshop began four years ago when she heard from white parents with kids in majority-black schools that they felt like “everyone hates me.” Since then, she said, the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd had made those parents more concerned about systemic racism—and more guilty about their assumed role in it.
She spoke of anti-black bigotry as though it were a genetic condition, passed down biologically as well as socially. “What we know intellectually is very different from what’s in our bones and in our nervous systems,” Gross said. “What we have internalized. What we have inherited.”
As a result, she added, “young African-American girls face 23 microaggressions every single day.”
Instead of just wallowing in shame, however, Gross promised participants they would learn to “love [other] white people” in spite of their collective guilt.
The seminar also included a discussion of Tema Okun’s “Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” which include “perfectionism,” “a sense of urgency,” and “worship of the written word.” Many parents struggled to reconcile these teachings with the day-to-day demands of their careers, taking the already thin line between parody and reality and smashing it altogether.
“I’ve been correcting grammar a lot and typos,” one self-identified editor said, “and reading this I was thinking, ‘Wow, I had no idea.’”
Another parent fretted that the characteristics of white supremacy culture were nearly identical with the values of her law firm. That wasn’t surprising, Gross said, given that American law “was built on racism and white supremacy.”
Even Gross admitted that she was not immune to bigotry. One time, she said, several “women of color” in her office were laughing and playing games while they were supposed to be planning an event.
“I was thinking, ‘How can they get anything done,’” Gross said. “I had to catch myself.”
At the end of the session, participants were assigned readings for their next meeting, including “Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People about Racism” by Robin DiAngelo and “Qallunology 101: A Lesson Plan for the Non-Indigenous” by Derek Rasmussen. Readings for later sessions included “Internalized White Superiority,” “Toward a Radical White Identity,” and “4 Ways White People Can Process Their Emotions Without Bringing White Tears,” according to slides from the workshop obtained by the Free Beacon.
Participants were also asked to share what they learned with someone outside the seminar. But there was a catch.
“Share what you learn today with another white person,” the slides for each session said, “not a BIPOC.”
The post ‘Woke or KKK’: NYU hosts whites-only ‘antiracism’ workshop for public school parents appeared first on World Israel News.
Islamic terrorists are getting money, manpower and territory from the White House.
By Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine
At a press conference, Biden falsely claimed that Al Qaeda was no longer operating in Afghanistan. “I said al Qaeda would not be there. I said it wouldn’t be there. I said we’d get help from the Taliban. What’s happening now? What’s going on? Read your press. I was right.”
In reality, Al Qaeda is operating training camps in six provinces, including Helmand, which hundreds of Marines had been killed and wounded trying to secure during Obama’s surge. The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment lost 25 marines, including the son of former Chief of Staff John Kelly, and suffered 34 amputations. 378 Marines were killed and 5,000 were wounded.
Al Qaeda also has safe houses across Afghanistan including in Kabul.
The Taliban have appointed Al Qaeda leaders to key positions including as governors of entire provinces. Nuristan, where 53 American soldiers held off hundreds of Jihadis during the assault on Combat Outpost Keating, resulting in the awarding of two Medals of Honor and nine Silver Stars for the second deadliest battle of the war, is now under Al Qaeda governance.
Biden’s denial of Al Qaeda’s extensive presence came just after a UN Security Council report documented the fact that “Al-Qaeda members have received appointments and advisory roles in the Taliban security and administrative structures” and that the Islamic terror group “is rebuilding operational capability.”
The Taliban, which had denied the report, immediately jumped on Biden’s denial as an endorsement. The Taliban’s Foreign Affairs Ministry claimed that Biden’s denial “refutes the recent report by UN Sanctions Monitoring Team alleging the presence and operation of over twenty armed groups in Afghanistan.”
It’s obvious why the Taliban are lying about harboring Al Qaeda. But why is Biden lying?
Biden’s chosen method of withdrawing from Afghanistan was a massive disaster. The rise of Al Qaeda makes it look even worse. But how much of that disaster was really an error? Since the withdrawal, the Biden administration has found numerous ways to move money to the Jihadists.
The Biden administration made the decision to turn over Kabul to Al Qaeda’s old allies in the Haqqani Network resulting in thousands of Americans being trapped behind enemy lines. It then spent millions paying Osama bin Laden’s old airline to fly Americans out of Afghanistan. Over $1 billion in “humanitarian aid” has been sent to Afghanistan while issuing global licenses authorizing financial transactions with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda allied Haqqani Network.
Biden seized $3.5 billion meant for 9/11 victims and diverted it to a ‘trust fund’ for Afghanistan. Last year, the Biden administration even arranged to have banknotes printed for the Taliban and photos were displayed of pallets of millions in hundred dollar bills flown into Kabul Airport.
The State Department has responded to questions about whether its aid is funding Islamic terrorists by stonewalling the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s office (SIGAR) and ordering government employees to “not engage with or speak to SIGAR without prior clearance from State legal counsel”. Congress has been similarly illegally stonewalled.
While all of this has been going on, Biden has been freeing Gitmo terrorists who were considered too dangerous to be released even under the Obama administration. They include an alternate 9/11 hijacker, Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards and a terrorist who had surveyed Camp Lemonnier, where the Marines are stationed in Djibouti, for a potential truck bomb attack.
Also freed were the 20th September 11 hijacker, an Al Qaeda ally who plotted to smuggle nukes into America and a terrorist behind the bombing of a Marriott hotel who had proposed “a plot to simultaneously explode gas tanks at multiple gas stations in the United States.” The Biden administration even tried to spare Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, the death penalty.
And it’s not just Al Qaeda terrorists in Gitmo that the Biden administration is going easy on.
The administration is also locking down drone strike rules so that the military will have to get “advance permission” from Biden before hitting Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists outside “conventional war zones” and must have “near certainty” that no civilians will be injured.
Drone strikes on terrorists will only be allowed when it appears infeasible to send in a commando team to capture the terrorist so he can be put on trial and then released.
These are similar to the disastrous rules that the Clinton administration used to keep the CIA from taking out Osama bin Laden. Under Clinton rules, the CIA was not allowed to engage in any activity that would kill Bin Laden. A “Justice Department ruling that it would be illegal for the United States to intentionally kill bin Laden” led the CIA Station Chief in Islamabad, Pakistan to warn agents that they could go to jail if they succeeded in taking out the terrorist leader.
The Trump administration had loosened drone strike rules allowing terrorists to be taken out without requiring that they be ranked as an “imminent threat”. The onerous rules of engagement from the Obama era were rolled back and the decision loop made it possible to take rapid action. The Biden administration is restoring a status quo in which terrorists have less to worry about and in which they know our rules and our restrictions and how to evade an attack.
Taken together, Biden has been the best thing to happen to Al Qaeda. Even more than Obama.
Al Qaeda now has extensive infrastructure in Afghanistan again, its terrorists are leaving Gitmo and are being protected from drone strikes. A massive flow of foreign aid into Afghanistan along with global licenses for doing business with allies of the terrorist group is likely to fill its coffers.
And Biden is even supporting the Taliban cover-up that Al Qaeda isn’t in Afghanistan.
Even while Al Qaeda and the Taliban remain tightly integrated, Biden is claiming that the Taliban are helping America against Al Qaeda, even while claiming that Al Qaeda isn’t in Afghanistan. But these aren’t even new lies. Biden has been falsely claiming that Al Qaeda had been destroyed for years. Even as he keeps repeating these lies, Al Qaeda keeps growing.
Biden didn’t just turn over Afghanistan to the Taliban, he turned it over to Al Qaeda. And he’s turning over Al Qaeda terrorists and money to the terrorist infrastructure to help it rebuild.
This isn’t a policy, this is treason.
The post Biden aids Al-Qaeda – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.
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However, a senior Israeli official said Jerusalem is unaware of Washington’s “inevitable reassessment” of U.S.-Israel relations and that despite disagreements, ties “have tightened for decades and reached an all-time high of security cooperation.”
By World Israel News Staff
In his latest article slamming the Netanyahu government, New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman claimed that a breakdown of the U.S.-Israel relationship is “inevitable.”
“The Biden team sees the far-right Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, engaged in unprecedented radical behavior — under the cloak of judicial “reform” — that is undermining our shared interests with Israel, our shared values and the vitally important shared fiction about the status of the West Bank that has kept peace hopes there just barely alive,” Friedman wrote in the column published Tuesday, titled “The US Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun.”
Is the “shared fiction” in fact Friedman’s claim about the reassessment?
A senior Israeli official who prefered to remain unnamed told The Jerusalem Post the next day that many U.S. administrations have announced “reevaluations” of relations with Israel in a number of different scenarios. He also noted that many U.S .administrations have announced “reevaluations” of relations with Israel in a number of different scenarios.
“It is no secret that we have differences of opinion with the American administration regarding the establishment of a Palestinian state, the return to the dangerous nuclear agreement with Iran, and Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s position against the ‘no surprises’ policy regarding Israel’s actions against Iran,” the Israeli official told the Post.
“Despite these periodic ‘re-evaluations’ and disagreements over the years, relations between Israel and the U.S. have tightened for decades and reached an all-time high of security cooperation under the leadership of Netanyahu. Netanyahu will ensure that this trend continues,” he added.
According to Friedman’s narrative, “There is a sense of shock today among U.S. diplomats who’ve been dealing with Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and a man of considerable smarts and political talent. They just find it hard to believe that Bibi would allow himself to be led around by the nose by people like Ben-Gvir, would be ready to risk Israel’s relations with America and with global investors and WOULD BE READY TO RISK A CIVIL WAR IN ISRAEL just to stay in power with a group of ciphers and ultranationalists.
“But it is what it is — and it’s ugly. Tens of thousands of Israeli democracy protectors blocked roads and highways and besieged the Tel Aviv airport on Tuesday to make clear to Netanyahu that if he thinks he can snuff out Israel’s democracy just like that, he’s badly mistaken.”
Netanyahu regained the premiership in a democratically held election in November, prior to which he laid out his vision for judicial reform. An estimated 650,000 Israelis demonstrated in April in Jerusalem, demanding the judicial reform for which they had voted. Meanwhile, it was prominent anti-reform activists who had threatened violence and civil war.
Several members of the Israeli coalition slammed Friedman, who was described by Likud MK Dan Illouz as “one of the most obsessed anti-Netanyahu journalists in the world.”
Friedman “has been claiming for decades that Netanyahu is destroying [our] relations with the United States, even though Netanyahu’s special relationship with the United States brought the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and [gave us] the Abraham Accords.
“Even if there is currently tension between Washington and Jerusalem, the alliance between the countries is very strong and cannot be questioned,” he concluded.
Likud MK Tali Gottlieb told Ynet that the prime minister is “a phenomenal statesman, he takes all the relevant issues into consideration. The nations of the world only understand us when we are at our strength.
“The U.S. knows that it also needs us, as is clear to anyone who understands the games between great powers.”
The post ‘Breakdown in shared values’: NY Times’ Thomas Friedman says US-Israel ties in danger, blames Netanyahu appeared first on World Israel News.
A Roseland Community Hospital nurse prepares doses of the Pfizer vaccine on December 30, 2021, during a COVID-19 vaccination event in Chatham, Illinois. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Quick: What’s the biggest debate happening right now that touches on pharmaceutical greed and the US health care system?
There’s a good chance you said vaccines, their efficacy, and whether we should be made to get them. For the past few years, the blue-red food fight that for many constitutes US politics has often been centered on vaccines and whether or not one “believes” enough in science to voluntarily get the jab — or to support mandates for others. Look at the way that Florida governor Ron DeSantis catapulted to prominence in Republican politics by rolling back the “medical authoritarianism” of pandemic mandates while surrounding himself with anti-vaccine cranks.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s stiffest primary challenge has so far come from a longtime anti-vaccine Kennedy family member who points to the past few years of immunization policy as a nefarious product of pharmaceutical greed. The past few weeks alone have been dominated, ironically, by debate about the effectiveness of debate in responding to anti-vaccine commentators who share Kennedy’s sentiments, who have grown in prominence in recent years.
The core argument of these figures can be summarized like this: the danger of the coronavirus pandemic was overblown, and the vaccines that were produced were ineffective to combat it, if not outright dangerous for the alleged secondary side effects they carry. The panic over COVID-19, the rapid development of the vaccine and massive government purchases of doses to combat it, the society-wide push to get vaccinated, the implementation of mandates to nudge those less willing into doing so — all of it was driven by Big Pharma as part of its insatiable hunger for profits, working with notoriously corrupt government institutions.
Stop and think about it for a few seconds, and you’ll marvel at just how remarkable a sleight of hand this has been. You don’t have to think back very far to recall that the worst, most greed-inflected COVID-related injustice wasn’t the fact that people got vaccinated against a deadly illness, but that billions who needed to couldn’t.
For nearly two years, wealthy Western governments, including that of the United States, dragged their feet on approving a patent waiver that would have allowed cheaper, generic versions of vaccines, therapeutics, and tests to be developed locally by countries that couldn’t afford to buy up enormous quantities of the stuff. Big Pharma companies fought fiercely against the waiver, preferring that fewer of the world’s people get immunized against or cheaply treated for the virus if it meant bigger profits for themselves. They ultimately got their way, with a substantially watered-down version of the waiver approved last year.
In this effort, pharmaceutical companies were joined by billionaire Bill Gates, cast by the Right as one of the big villains of the pandemic. Gates does deserve this label — but not, as Kennedy and others might argue, because he foisted vaccines on the rest of us, but because he did the opposite. The influential and absurdly wealthy Gates was one of the leading voices against the waiver even as the virus spread and wreaked havoc through the poorest parts of the world. Once again, it would be surprising if financial incentives didn’t play at least some role, since Gates’s wealth is partly based on rigid intellectual property (IP) protections.
But this goes beyond IP. Until recently, the federal government’s mass buy-up of COVID vaccines, tests, and treatments had been core to US efforts to combat the pandemic, guaranteeing that cost and insurance status weren’t barriers for anyone to get medical help for an infection, and ensuring that American society’s most vulnerable — and those who might be hit hardest by the virus — would be protected.
Then late last year, just as today’s right-wing vaccine skeptics demanded, the Biden administration announced that it would privatize the US pandemic response. As a result, the price of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines shot up more than fourfold, a devastating financial barrier for the millions of uninsured Americans whose ranks are set to swell by fifteen million by the end of this month, thanks to the COVID emergency declaration’s end — spelling the end of Medicaid expansion, another result of Biden bowing to COVID skeptics. (The end of that emergency also meant the end of a federal provision letting state Medicaid programs cover vaccine-related costs). We’ve already gotten a taste of the chaos that this pandemic privatization has meant for the uninsured, who have been unwittingly charged hundreds, even thousands of dollars for tests.
Though the administration put forth a $1.1 billion bridge program on vaccines, its modest size coupled with the failure to create a more permanent vaccine safety-net program for adults means that it won’t be enough to cover the shortfall. The insured, meanwhile, can look forward to higher premiums as a result, or even paying this full, exorbitant cost if they go out of network.
It’s astounding that in the face of all this, the Right — long hostile to a publicly funded and controlled health system — has somehow been able to make the idea of the corporate health care system conspiring with politicians to make it harder to get treatment for the pandemic a virtue, instead of the scandal that it is.
The pandemic should’ve provided a leg up to efforts to expand the United States’s patchy public health system. Americans were instead given a brief taste of what a sensical health care system could look like, only to have it ripped away for the sake of private profits and government penny-pinching that’s never applied to the Pentagon — and for billions of others around the world who were denied the most basic bit of COVID protection in the form of vaccines, thanks to pharmaceutical greed.
That’s the real scandal of the pandemic. And the fact that the public health debate has lurched like it has to the preferred terrain of vaccine skeptics more or less ensures for the foreseeable future that we’ll only be talking about what other forms of health care big business and neoliberal politicians can deprive you of next.
A protest in Johannes Rau Square in Duesseldorf, Germany on June 17, 2023, against German government policy providing military aid to Ukraine. (Ying Tang / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
As representatives from at least thirty-two countries met for the NATO summit in the flag-draped Lithuanian capital city, some topics were almost certain to come up. Attendees are discussing Sweden’s membership and F-16 fighter plane training regimes, nuclear threats, and even this month’s record global temperatures. Yet other topics that have lit up discussion in Germany will be studiously avoided — the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines likely among them.
The possibility that the United States was partially or fully responsible for the bombing of the pipelines has been downplayed by diplomats and leaders in both countries. Left-wing German politician Sevim Dağdelen mocked leaders in the Bundestag after the publication of an article on the bombing’s likely American origins by respected journalist Seymour Hersh. After his analysis was largely ignored by German leadership, she remarked:
Maybe we don’t need to jump to the assumption that Federal Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz and Federal Foreign Minister [Annalena] Baerbock wouldn’t even venture out to buy a loaf of bread without first getting permission to do so from the US administration.
The circumstances of the Nord Stream bombing are surely discussed mainly by the edgiest branches of Germany’s left and right, as a source of division in NATO. Yet this is also part of a larger ecosystem of real disagreements between German leaders and NATO counterparts who take a more hawkish line on the war. The number of NATO countries hitting their target of 2 percent of GDP on military spending is up from three in 2014 to seven in 2022, according to the Economist, but even after Scholz’s famous Zeitenwende (“turnaround”) speech promising a stronger military, it’s been a long road to that goal for Germany.
The reluctance by Germans and their leaders — at times including Scholz — to go after Russia comes thanks to both economic and cultural factors. From reliance on Russian oil and natural gas to a history of high-level cooperation between their governments, there are deep, decades-long ties between the countries that even the Russian invasion of Ukraine has only partially severed.
Even since Moscow launched its offensive last February, Berlin has often seemed divided over how much military aid to give Ukraine, with head of government Scholz and Foreign Minister Baerbock sometimes clashing. “The main difference [between the two] seems to regard the speed and breadth of military support,” Ulrich Kühn, who tracks NATO for the University of Hamburg, told Jacobin. “While Scholz often appeared to move rather slowly and after having secured the backing and support of the United States, Baerbock was more outspoken and seemed to push for speedy decisions. Meanwhile, [Defense Minister Boris] Pistorius seems to be willing to accelerate the military dimension of the Zeitenwende by making sure that Germany swiftly meets the 2 percent defense spending goal set by NATO.”
Bearbock’s hawkish approach has at times entered the public spotlight, with the foreign minister stating in January that “we are fighting a war against Russia.” That seeming slip of the tongue may be the most accurate assessment of “a proxy war between the United States (and NATO) against Russia,” Christopher Layne, the Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A&M University, told Jacobin. “Even before Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the United States and NATO were providing Ukraine with arms, training and military advisors. Since the Russian invasion, the United States and NATO greatly ramped their supply of ever-more sophisticated weapons to Ukraine.” Layne adds, “According to the Wall Street Journal, Washington is on the verge of greenlighting the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) for Ukraine, which would allow Ukraine to strike targets in Crimea.”
Layne says that Baerbock’s Greens have been “extremely hawkish” since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, largely aligning themselves with US interests, and that Scholz has had to accommodate the Greens’ position on the war because of his need to keep his three-party coalition intact.
Olaf Scholz has had to accommodate the Greens’ position on the war because of his need to keep his three-party coalition intact.
Layne also mentioned that recent leaks — if vague on details — show that American and NATO special forces troops are on the ground in Ukraine, and that Western countries are feeding both a steady stream of weapons and continuous intelligence to Ukraine’s government.
Layne, along with journalist and former policy analyst Benjamin Schwarz, authored a Harper’s Magazine essay in June that laid out in detail their case that the post-1989 expansion of NATO — starting with Washington’s untruthful assurance to Moscow that NATO would advance “not one inch” east of a unified Germany, and progressing through Western plans in 2014 for the “full integration [of Ukraine] into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions” — has resulted in a bloody and predictable war, which could lead all the way to regime change in Moscow.
Matching Baerbock gaffe for gaffe, US President Joe Biden has been frank about his desire to see a new leader in Russia, stating on the topic of Putin in March 2022 that “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” The White House later walked back the statement. What remains unclear is how far this war will go.
Germany provided a record amount of military aid to Ukraine in May. Yet forces on both Left and Right have pushed against involvement in both the Ukraine war and NATO as a whole.
In the eastern state of Thuringia, last month Robert Sesselmann secured the first district election win for the hard-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). This party is today on the rise throughout the eastern part of the country, with opposition to the government’s foreign policy key to its agenda. One of the parts of Sesselmann’s platform was a demand for an end to sanctions on Moscow and a call for negotiations.
The opposition to supporting Ukraine is surely not only on the hard right. At the head of a thirteen-thousand-person Berlin rally protesting NATO in February was Sahra Wagenknecht. She had come to prominence in the early 1990s, espousing a combination of Marxist thought and populist hues, and from 2015 became parliamentary cochair of left-wing party Die Linke. But today she is sending a message of her own.
The opposition to supporting Ukraine is surely not only on the hard right.
“You can clearly see that the Ukrainian leadership has a clear strategy,” Wagenknecht told German magazine Focus earlier this year. “They want to draw NATO into this war.” On this and other issues, Wagenknecht has entered into conflict with Die Linke. She was declared persona non grata by its leadership in June, and she quickly reciprocated the lack of love, calling the party a “lifestyle-left” and openly mooted creating a new party. Polling suggests that such a force could be relatively successful. Yet, many pundits worry that it would pander to right-wing sentiments on certain topics, aligning her with disaffected members of the AfD.
Accusations of the isolationist Wagenknecht being in bed with neo-Nazis have tended to be nonspecific — as in an April Washington Post piece heavy on links between the far right and Russia, but light on actual links between Russia and her followers. She has repeatedly laughed off the idea of a rightward turn, and Ed Turner, who teaches at Aston University, told Jacobin that this would be more like a “welfare chauvinist” party.
“I think it would be very comfortable with a strong state, high levels of taxation, high levels of intervention in the economy and high levels of welfare,” he added, saying that the main outlier in the platform could be hostility to immigration, possibly alongside vaccine skepticism and opposition to support for Ukraine. Wagenknecht’s office did not respond to several requests for comment.
Whether she successfully starts a new party or not, Wagenknecht — along with the AfD and others on the edges of the political spectrum — taps into deep discontent in the former East. It’s a dissatisfaction that has in recent decades moved many voters in the region from the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats and into the ranks of the AfD and Die Linke, from which Wagenknecht would be likely to pull her supporters.
Germany’s eastern federal states tend to be poorer and provide less upward mobility than their western counterparts, with many older easterners viewing the 1990 reunification as more of a takeover of the East by the West. People from the former West still hold most leadership positions in large German institutions, and many of the East’s universal social services are now lacking.
For Turner, it’s thus no surprise that the Nord Stream bombing and the debate over weapons have fueled arguments among Germans about whether their country should be stepping up military spending. The academic describes the representation of “isolationists” in public polls as significant and growing. While gas politics have played a smaller role in Germans’ approach to NATO than some predicted at the start of the war, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline has left marks on both public consciousness in Germany and life in Europe as a whole.
It was a tough winter for many. In Germany’s eastern neighbor, the Czech Republic, some citizens had already been swapping out meat for vegetables by autumn to save energy, facing electricity prices tenfold what they had been before the war. According to the Economist, expensive energy may have killed more people in Europe than COVID-19 last winter.
Likewise, a lack of Ukrainian grain exports has increased food prices from Hamburg to Nairobi, with price changes causing complex displacements of sourcing options all over Eurasia. Russian blockades are largely responsible for the ups and downs in grain supplies.
Germany’s energy-hungry industrial sector has also not been immune. The country was able to complete liquified natural gas terminals in a dizzying ten months after the pipeline bombing — blamed alternatingly on Ukraine, Russia, and the United States, depending on who’s talking. But the EU’s largest economy has nonetheless officially dipped into a recession.
Efforts have been made to take things back to normal.
China this spring offered to help settle the conflict, but Western governments — not least German foreign minister Baerbock — keep pushing to continue the war until it is “won.” Even earlier, Western leaders may have scuttled a 2022 attempt at a peace deal.
For Layne, there is a real risk of further escalation, with “complacency” over the last near-century of nuclear taboo leading Western leaders toward a “very dangerous line of thinking” in which no possible escalation is viewed as likely to cause nuclear conflict.
Even given Russia’s perceived lack of response to Western support for Ukraine, it would be wrong to be so sanguine about the risks of pushing Russia into a corner.
Repeated Russian requests for a security guarantee in 2021 and early 2022 were dismissed over and over and over by Western diplomats as a “nonstarter” — only for it to react explosively. An insistence by Germany and its allies on a “win” and a nuclear-umbrellaed Ukraine would back Russia into a dangerous position, Layne and Schwarz write. This could create a situation roughly equivalent to the quandary the United States ran into during the Cuban missile crisis — one that could have easily resulted in escalation if the USSR hadn’t stood down.
An insistence by Germany and its allies on a ‘win’ and a nuclear-umbrellaed Ukraine would back Russia into a dangerous position
This time, things may not be so lucky. The Russian government has already explicitly threatened to engage in a preemptive nuclear strike if NATO nuclear weapons are placed in Ukraine. For many older people in Berlin, who still have memories of waiting for one side or other — either side — to drop a bomb that would wipe out both parts of the divided city, this makes the need for a negotiated settlement feel especially urgent.
Kühn says that factors including the recent Wagner rebellion mean that it’s “far from clear” how the war might end. But he also insists that it would be wrong to take the mutiny as a sign that Putin is about to be ousted. So, Western leaders may still be well served by a plan for a settlement.
An agreement of any type would be likely to involve a demand by Russia for a promise of Ukrainian neutrality. That could seem like a big ask, after more than a year at war. Precedent for such an arrangement can, however, found elsewhere in Europe — in Austria, where the government has since World War II been constitutionally mandated to avoid involvement in any military alliances.
Austria adopted neutrality as part of its post-1945 reconstruction at the demand of the Soviet Union. Far from threatening the safety of the country, this constitutionally guaranteed military neutrality is viewed by many Austrians as a core part of their national identity: a 2022 poll found that just 14 percent of Austrians supported the idea of joining NATO, with 75 percent opposed. This March, legislators in Vienna from the hard-right Freedom Party walked out of a speech by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in protest at the idea that the country might lose its neutrality.
“Austrians like to pick the raisins from the [European Union] cake, but they prefer not to be involved when it comes to unpleasant topics such as joining NATO or a European alliance,” Institut für Demoskopie und Datenanalyse director Christoph Haselmayer told Austrian newspaper Der Standard last year, presaging what could be a future Ukrainian approach to avoiding military alliances if a negotiated settlement is ever reached.
Germany, for its part, has moved in the other direction since Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech in 2022. There is nothing like an EU army — and the closest thing that does exist, the militarized European border enforcement organization Frontex, is more likely to be mounting illegal migrant pushbacks than defending against foreign soldiers. Rather, Berlin’s role is much more likely to be as a junior partner in NATO. Defense Minister Pistorius has been vocal about recommitting to working with the US military establishment, which already involved significant weapons exports, augmenting American exports that are now scheduled to include cluster munitions, which are outlawed in Germany and controversial among pundits. The country recently released its first public national security strategy, which lists Russia as the country’s primary threat and urges continued military buildup.
Such pushes worry German antiwar activists like Karl-Heinz Peil, who told Jacobin that Germany’s leadership, pushed along by uncritical media coverage, is willing to allow “economic decline with dramatic social disruptions” in order to militarize. Ultimately, though, their opinions are unlikely to produce significant change, as despite being the EU’s largest economy, Germany is largely forced to follow the US lead. Analyst Schwarz says that this is US “leadership” instead of a real “partnership.”
Dağdelen is less diplomatic. For her, Germany’s role has “no democratic sovereignty in sight,” she comments by email to Jacobin. “And the United States seems not to acknowledge any allies, just vassals.”
A police officer keeps watch from an observation tower at the Gilboa Prison in northern Israel on September 6, 2021. (Jalaa Marey / AFP via Getty Images)
Wars and occupations have long been testing grounds for technology, science, and surveillance. In a domain mostly controlled by the oppressor, subject populations are sure to find ingenious ways to rise up — but their captors also find new ways to subjugate them. This is the reality in the occupied Palestinian territories, where Israel has maintained the longest occupation in modern times — fifty-six years and counting.
The Israeli state — and its closely aligned military-industrial complex — writes its own rule book. Its soldiers watch as extremist Jewish settlers launch pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank. Over one thousand Palestinians are held in indefinite detention without charge in Israeli jails.
Palestinian access to water is used as “a potent state-controlled weapon for the settler movement.” Meanwhile, Israeli arms companies promote their weapons with real footage in which Palestinian children are left injured.
But in the court of international opinion, the tide is turning against Israel. In May, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories denounced the “apartheid” system over which “colonial power” Israel rules Palestinians. Tens of millions of dollars are sent from the United States by registered charities to bankroll illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, but the New York State Assembly will soon consider a bill that would prevent the tax-deductible practice.
As journalist, author, and filmmaker Antony Loewenstein writes in his latest book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, this permanent occupation has allowed Israel to “perfect the architecture of control” through weaponry, surveillance, and other means. He told Jacobin’s Mattha Busby how Israel is exporting this technology of death to democracies and despots around the world, clad with its ethno-nationalist ideology.
Mattha Busby
In the book, you note that the occupation of the Palestinian territories has allowed Israel to perfect the architecture of control through various means, and that it is effectively exporting these methods in the form of weapons and tech sales, along with training and advice. Why is it so important to raise these issues today?
Antony Loewenstein
I’ve been visiting Palestine since 2005, reporting regularly from the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, and I lived in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020. I’ve written two books about the conflict and yet over the past five or so years I started seeing so much more evidence of Israeli surveillance tech being spread around the world. Israel’s brutal, deepening occupation is now the longest in modern times. But what Israel has done very cleverly, from its perspective, is to use the Palestinians as guinea pigs to test new methods of control and repression. So I’m talking about everything from so-called smart walls, to drones, to weapons, to spyware. The Israeli companies that are selling this equipment say that it’s been “battle-tested” on Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere.
The majority of that technology is increasingly sold around the world by Israeli companies that are very, very close to the Israeli state. The occupation is exportable, and the tools that are used to maintain it are increasingly found in many other countries. The bottom line is that countless governments, both democracies and dictatorships, use Pegasus, the most sophisticated spyware (deployed on everyone from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to the late Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi), through which people can get access to your phone, and your information can be used, saved, and stored. Your phone and camera can be turned on, and essentially your phone becomes a surveillance tool. Beyond Pegasus, there are many other Israeli spyware companies operating today: facial recognition companies, biometric firms, and repression tech.
Mattha Busby
How do you know you’re not being surveilled?
Antony Loewenstein
The sad reality is that there’s no way to know if your phone has been hacked by Pegasus or any other spyware. Only a forensics team can determine if every detail of your life, including photos and sexting messages, have been compromised and viewed by others. So, beware! In reality, there’s no way to be 100 percent safe when using a mobile phone or any form of digital communication. Everything is hackable. Some journalists joke that the safest way to communicate with a source is by meeting in a field with no communication devices nearby. For most people, though, pushing for greater encryption on our devices is one way to try and ensure safe communication.
Mattha Busby
How do Israel’s actions lead other states to feel more legitimized in their own actions against oppressed communities?
Antony Loewenstein
I don’t think, for example, that Mexico is buying Israeli hacking tools because it wants to be an ethno-nationalist state. It wants to buy these tools because they’re effective in spying on dissidents and human rights workers. But in other countries like India, there’s a much more ideological affinity. Of course, India is not acting brutally in Kashmir because of Israel. But they have an intimate relationship due to an affinity: ethno-nationalists stick together. India under Modi wants to create a Hindu fundamentalist state where Muslims are discriminated against, as they already are today; there’s mass violence against Muslims, pogroms, an attempt in Kashmir to bring in many more Hindus. As Indian officials have said: akin to what Israel is doing in the West Bank, bringing in lots of Jews to settle the land. They’re inspiring each other and it very much reminds me of how Israel was behaving during apartheid South Africa, working together and sharing an ideological bond.
Hungary’s top leadership is openly antisemitic, but Israel doesn’t care. Why? Because these leaders see an ideological alignment.
Then there’s the idea that people on the far right, who are often neo-Nazis, admire a Jewish state. On the face of it, this seems absurd. Of course, they don’t like Jews, but what they see is this proud nation that has no care for human rights and is simply promoting and deepening an unapologetic, Jewish supremacist state. They want to create the same thing in their own countries: a hard-line, Christian majority state.
It also makes perfect sense that Israel is increasingly close to far-right countries like Hungary, which is only quasi-democratic. Its top leadership is openly antisemitic, but Israel doesn’t care. Why? Because these leaders see an ideological alignment. That, to me as a Jew, is totally outrageous, dangerous, and increases genuine antisemitism, when states like Israel collude with open antisemites.
Mattha Busby
One thing that really struck me in the book is how the chief censor of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Ariella Ben-Avraham — who was responsible for the unit that vets all stories related to foreign affairs and security prepublication — went to work for the rogue cyber-surveillance company NSO Group.
Antony Loewenstein
NSO Group is nominally a private company, but it’s essentially an arm of the Israeli state. Its most infamous tool is Pegasus. This is really only the tip of the iceberg. Many other companies are now doing exactly the same thing: zero-click hacking into your smartphone. In the last few years, NSO has received a lot of bad press and been sanctioned by the Biden administration (though parts of the US security state still use Israeli spyware). For years, Israel used NSO as a diplomatic tool: Netanyahu would go to a certain, often repressive country and say, we want relations with you, or better relations, and dangle spyware or surveillance tech as a carrot.
Mattha Busby
And how does this technology relate to the occupation of the Palestinian territories?
Antony Loewenstein
The people behind NSO Group and many other weapons, spyware, or intelligence tech firms are mostly all IDF veterans. They’ve been part of something called Unit 8200, which is basically the surveillance and intelligence-gathering unit. These are people who have spent years and years surveilling Palestinians. The tools they create have been used against Palestinians in Palestine: there’s evidence from the last few years that it was used on key human rights activists in Palestine itself, and on some Israelis in Israel. The occupation always comes home eventually. Unit 8200 is like a production line; it’s basically training and encouraging individuals to surveil Palestinians. But the longer-term goal is also to create individuals who want to build the next generation of high-tech surveillance. Once they leave the military, they then develop these companies, whether it’s a weapon, drone, spyware, or hacking tools, and they remain close to the Israeli government. This means that the Israeli government can use those tools as a diplomatic weapon or threat.
Mattha Busby
You’ve ruffled feathers before. This caused you to be subjected to a “relentless vilification campaign” over your best-selling first book from 2006, My Israel Question, on the global Israel lobby and the diaspora’s complicity in the Israeli occupation. And for a question you asked in Jerusalem in 2016 to a senior Israeli minister, Yair Lapid, about how he felt about Israel potentially becoming a pariah in years to come in the footsteps of apartheid South Africa — a question that sparked calls for your deportation from Israel. Does this not all bother you?
Antony Loewenstein
Hopefully, my new book will receive a lot of interest. Some good; I’m sure some bad, which is the nature of media coverage of Palestine. In certain media circles in the West there is still an uncomfortableness, or awkwardness, about covering Palestine, regardless of how extreme Israeli politics become, how horrendous the occupation is, or how many Palestinians are killed. This is for two reasons. The Israel lobby is very powerful in these countries, and they attack media outlets for being critical of Israel. And there is still what I would call a liberal Zionist protection racket going on in the West to protect the image of Israel, despite it being labeled an apartheid state by the world’s leading human rights organizations. Many people have spent decades loving and protecting Israel; their life’s work is to support Israel. But that image is starting to crumble, because Israel itself is becoming so far right and fascistic. And public opinion is shifting toward Palestine in many Western states.
Mattha Busby
Israel is also one of the top ten exporters of arms and weaponry, which is particularly remarkable since it is about the ninety-first most populous country, with ten million people (fifteen million people under its control, if the occupied West Bank and Gaza are included). How did this happen?
Antony Loewenstein
Decades of occupation. Israel’s moral soul is deformed, because you can’t occupy a people for over half a century and not become compromised in all manners of life.
Israel’s moral soul is deformed, because you can’t occupy a people for over half a century and not become compromised in all manners of life.
9/11 really turbocharged the arms industry in Israel, because the Jewish state said to the world, “We’ve been fighting this war on terror for our whole existence, come and learn from us. This is how you do it.” You’ve had huge numbers of American police officers coming to Israel, hanging out with Israeli police, seeing what they’re doing, learning tactics; not that the American police need to learn racism from Israel, let’s be clear about that. But to choose to go to Israel, of all nations, to learn the so-called best tactics to fight a war on terror is concerning. You also had lots of Indian soldiers going to Israel in the last twenty years, including ones that are operating in Kashmir, learning from Israeli forces. A friend of mine, the writer Jeff Halper, calls this “Globalized Palestine”; what’s happening in Palestine is not staying there.
Mattha Busby
Are most of these weapons sold to countries who are allied or otherwise have some sort of affinity with Israel?
Antony Loewenstein
Gross human rights abuses aren’t an impediment to Israeli arms sales. The Jewish state has sold weapons to the junta in Myanmar and exported arms to the government in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. The hyper-militarized society that Israel has created is appalling and racist — but it’s very attractive to a lot of countries. One major example is the US-Mexico border, or on Europe’s borders monitoring refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown by EU border force Frontex. Russia’s war against Ukraine has also revealed the European desire for Israel’s missile defense shields, tested in countless Israeli wars against Gaza.
Key surveillance equipment on the US-Mexico border is Israeli. It’s made by Elbit, which is Israel’s biggest defense company. There are huge surveillance towers all along the border. That’s not the only equipment that the United States uses, but it’s vital infrastructure. And how did that contract happen? Because Elbit says: “We achieved so much in Palestine, we can do the same for you, America, on your border.” The occupation is globalized and bleeds into many other areas around the world.
Israel has perfected the art of indefinite detention for Palestinians. There are currently over one thousand behind bars without charge, constant demolitions of Palestinian houses (a tactic now used by the Indian authorities), and a range of other high-tech repression including facial recognition and biometric tools. These are all used and tested in Palestine, and many Israeli companies then sell them to nations across the globe. The occupation is highly exportable.
Mattha Busby
What’s the future of global surveillance, and how does Israeli tech fit into it?
Antony Loewenstein
We’re entering an age where there’s going to be far more refugees globally, including climate refugees. A lot of countries are thinking about how they’re going to “protect” themselves. The border-industrial complex is real and worsening. Israel is going to benefit from this fear. Smart walls, high-tech repression, spyware, drones. It’s all there. Israel is currently the tenth-biggest arms dealer in the world. Growing global instability will likely benefit its defense sector. As a Jew, this is an awful legacy for a Jewish state that was born in the ashes of the Holocaust.