How can it be? How can an obvious genocide, perpetrated by a small country, be allowed to occur?

How can a small and newly developed nation, with a slight population and few resources, artificially stitched together with foreign people from unrelated parts of the world, pulverize a large and millennium developed nation with a huge population, abundant resources, and naturally situated with native people in one unique area?

Candide searched the world and concluded, “This is the best of all possible worlds.”

Thomas More wrote of escape to Utopia, a vision that captivated many who tried to turn the vision into a practicality and always failed.

Literature, theater, and film have explored the savagery that allows violence. A simple 1961 Japanese film, When A Woman Ascends The Stairs, attempts to explain it ─ in a cruel world, we are not masters of our fate, nobody will help, and we often must accept it.

In this quiet masterpiece, a bar girl in the Tokyo Ginza district, politely serves the customers and politely refuses to compromise her moral standing. She searches for ways to escape from ascending the stairs to the bar each evening and cannot find help from anyone. Battered and bruised by betrayal, even from a mother and brother who take advantage of her, she remains resolute and struggles to find a rewarding life. After succumbing to a married man, whom she loved and who will be leaving Tokyo, and after receiving a false proposal of marriage, she returns to the bar, ascends the stairs with a firm step, and enters the bar with a smile and pronouncement, “I’m here.”

The world begs for a means to counter the oppressors and killers who have no regard for the lives of others, who lie, cheat, gain control, and use that control to elevate themselves and subdue others. A few inhabitants of the seven plus billions of the world community have spoken with their own violence.

Individual attacks on those allied with the Zionists are a clue to the feelings of ordinary people, driven to a paralyzing anguish by the continued murders of innocents from Israeli Jews and their worldwide supporters. People, who have no stairs left to climb and no lives left to live, reach out in punishing manners. There are several million who have been directly affected and been driven to madness, and several hundreds of millions who cannot comprehend the failure to prevent the genocide and have lost faith in the inhuman race. Animosity to Zionist Israel and its supporters has reached an inflection point and grows exponentially each day.

Israel’s genocidal tactics are not the sole feature that has alienated humanity from Israel and its supporting Jewish people, from all those who are identified with the genocide. There is a sense of betrayal, that Israel and the Jewish people are not constant victims who have consistently battled a hostile world composed of anti-Semites and fiendish supremacists.

People have learned that the celluloid shaped Exodus was an old and discarded tub, into which displaced Jews were unknowingly shoved and taken to a Promised Land. Many arrivals could not leave without paying the bill for the voyage and the assistance given to them. The fearless Kibbutz settler, originally a dedicated and hard-working pioneer, kept alive by public relations, became less significant after World War I. In 1920, after the Zionist population had grown to 60,000 in a Palestine composed of 585,000 Arabs, a reporter noted that earlier settlers felt uncomfortable with the later immigrants. From Zionist Aspirations in Palestine, Anstruther Mackay, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, July 1920.

It may not be generally known, but a goodly number of the Jewish dwellers in the land are not anxious to see a large immigration into the country. This is partly due to the fear that the result of such immigration would be an overcrowding of the industrial and agricultural market; but a number of the more respectable older settlers have been disgusted by the recent arrivals in Palestine of their coreligionists, unhappy individuals from Russia and Romania brought in under the auspices of the Zionist Commission from the cities of Southeastern Europe, and neither able nor willing to work at agriculture or fruit-farming.

The so-called miracle progress of Israel would not have occurred without the financial and military support from Germany and the United States, support programs that used the financial accounts of the German and American peoples. The “progress” is not unique; many nations after World War II, without outside support, have leaped far ahead of Israel. The “blooming of the desert” is nothing more than using standard irrigation techniques and wasting precious water to satisfy public relations. Technological advancements are due to Russian and American engineers who brought their knowledge, experience, and resources to a country that needed modernization.

Hidden from public scrutiny is that Israel, together with the United States, has always had close to the highest poverty rate in OECD nations. Only Costa Rica has a higher poverty rate.

Hidden from public scrutiny are the continuous atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers against innocent populations in Israel, West Bank, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon, which can be found in A history stained with innocent blood at Ahram Online. One function of the Israeli army in the West Bank ─ protect the settlers from retribution as they daily murder Palestinians.

The most disquieting revelation is that anti-Semitism is not a careless invective against Jews but an originated word that serves to turn legitimate arguments against Jewish practices into elements of hate. “Kill the Arabs,” expressed by many Israelis, is perceived as anxious rhetoric. Arguing against genocidal maniacs is termed anti-Semitic. In the Molotov cocktail throwing incident in Boulder, Colorado, Americans, who never highlighted the captivity of Americans in foreign nations, highlighted the captivity of foreign people who betrayed humanity by joining the genocidal nation of Israel. Stefanie Clarke, co‑executive director of Stop Antisemitism Colorado disguised the truth behind the happenings, and used the hostility to Zionist Jews to further Zionist interests. Ms. Clarke said, “The reason things like this are happening is because we have allowed this climate of hate to fester. And today it boiled over and this doesn’t come out of nowhere. This is part of a deeply disturbing trend of hate that has been normalized and allowed to spread.”

The attack in Boulder, Colorado came from a person driven into mental anguish by observing people lacking sympathy for the desperate Palestinians registering concern with those who contributed to the genocide. The mental anguish boiled over and arrived from a need to confront the disturbing expressions of hatred exhibited by Israel’s Zionist Jews for others. This hatred has been normalized, and those unnerved by the genocide are striking out at those who contribute to the genocide.

Reconciliation, compromise, and mutual consideration have failed. The deadly is all that is left. And with it, the realization that reconciliation, compromise, and mutual consideration never existed for the Zionists and has been made impossible by them. From the day of its recognition, Israel has been a criminal state. Too little, and maybe too late, the world realizes a misrepresentation of what is called the Middle East conflict. The misrepresentation has led to a fallacious approach for rectification, and an obstacle for obtaining peace with justice. Criminal gangs, once they achieve superiority in firepower, make no compromises. They don’t divide or share their stolen largesse with the original owners.

One word summarizes the taking of another person’s property, livelihood, and dignity – theft! In this case, we have a specific type of theft, Raubwirtschaft, German for “plunder economy.” In Raubwirtschaft, the state economy is partially based on robbery, looting and plundering conquered territories. States that engage in Raubwirtschaft are in continuous warfare with their neighbors and usurp the resources of their conquered subjects, while claiming security objectives and defensive actions against defenseless people.

Israel has gone further than Raubwirtschaft, using it as a springboard for transnational corruption and having its citizens extend the illicit activities to global networks of money laundering, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and general crime.

A Broad Brush of Israeli Involvement in Transnational Corruption in the 21st Century Blacklisted 16 years ago, Israel has gained entry to the Financial Action Task Force, yet new immigrants can bring in unreported income for 10 years and vast scams go unprosecuted. Complaints from law enforcement in France and the United States that Israel is not cooperating sufficiently on international financial crimes continue unheeded.

Ariel Marom, a Belorussian-born former banker who lives in Israel and frequently travels throughout Russia and Eastern Europe for work, told The Times of Israel he believes that hundreds of millions of dollars of dirty money from the former Soviet Union is being smuggled into Israel, including by new immigrants. There are certain branches of large Israeli banks, he said, that have developed a reputation among newcomers for looking the other way. “A small percentage of this money is used to corrupt Israeli politicians,” he charged. “Russians – and this is no secret – fund the campaigns of a number of politicians, not just one party.”

Two Israelis shot dead in Mexico City were involved in money laundering and had links to local mafia.

Fourteen Israelis are suspected by Colombian authorities of running a child sex trafficking ring, which marketed tour packages from Israel to the Latin American country aimed at businessmen and recently discharged soldiers.

New report sheds light on disturbing human trafficking phenomenon in Israel.
The Justice Ministry published a report Thursday morning revealing alarming data about human trafficking in Israel over the past five years.

In its annual report for 2012, the International Narcotics Control Board lists Brazil and Israel among the “countries that are major manufacturers, exporters, importers, and users of narcotic drugs.”

Drugs trafficking arrest leads police to Israeli underworld.

Oded Tuito was alleged to be a global pill-pusher, whose Israeli mafia group was the biggest operator in a booming international trade in the lucrative “hug drug.” The profits were ploughed into Israeli real estate, being sent there from the US or Barcelona,” a police spokesman said. Police forces in various parts of the world said Mr. Tuito’s arrest confirmed the alleged growing global influence of Israel’s loose-knit, but expanding, crime organisations.

Israel is at the center of international trade in the drug ecstasy, according to a document published last week by the U.S. State Department. A seriously embarrassing record for a nation that was created to be “a light among all nations,” and claims to represent world Jewry.

The most deceptive propaganda mechanism in history — AIPAC, ADL, CAMERA, and a multitude of acronym named Israel support organizations in western nations — extend Israel’s reach and influence western governments and peoples.

Global influencers perpetuate the myth of Israel as a responsible and peace seeking Jewish state.

In France, Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) gathers an assortment of groups dedicated to Israel. Examples of their thrust and how they operate.

French Jewish group CRIF was fined for defaming pro-Palestinian charity, April 8, 2014.

(JTA) – France’s largest Jewish organization defamed a pro-Palestinian charity by accusing it of financing Hamas, a French court ruled. CRIF staff were ordered to pay the equivalent of $4,140 to the Committee for Charity and Support for the Palestinians, or CBSP – a group that CRIF researcher Marc Knobel in 2010 wrote “collects funds for Hamas.”

Former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar (why him?) leads The Friends of Israel Initiative (FII), which defines its thrust as “countering the growing efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and its right to live in peace within safe and defensible borders.” A July 2014 working paper, Understanding the Issue of Israeli Settlements and Borders claims that

…settlements have become an exaggerated issue in the diplomatic discourse over Israel. Settlement activity, like the construction of homes and schools, does not constitute a violation of Israel’s signed agreements with the Palestinians. Indeed, as was pointed out, the Oslo Agreements were signed without a settlement freeze. Those agreements allowed Israel to build in the areas under its jurisdiction as these allowed the Palestinians to build in the areas under their jurisdiction. The assertion that settlement activity is a violation of international law is not universally accepted, though it is frequently stated in UN debates and in the declarations of the European Union.

A July 2017 FII event featured this statement:

As goes Israel – so goes the United States of America and so goes Western civilization. And so many of our adversaries and enemies know that. That’s what we’re facing all across the Middle East and, truthfully, all across the world.

United Kingdom has almost as many pro-Israel organizations as there are Israelis. Three of them are:

(1) Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a parliamentary group affiliated with the Labor Party, which promotes support for a strong bilateral relationship between Britain and Israel. They “run and promote campaigns to help create a lasting peace in the Middle East with Israel safe, secure and recognised within its borders; living alongside a democratic, independent Palestinian state.”

(2) Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), a parliamentary group affiliated with the Conservative Party and dedicated to strengthening business, cultural and political ties between the United Kingdom and Israel. CFI has given £377,994 to the Conservative party since 2004, mostly in the form of fully-funded trips to Israel for MPs, according to the Electoral Commission website. Directors of CFI have also given money directly to the Tory party.

(3) Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), which “seeks to present Israel’s case to journalists.” Their “Strategic Assessments provide expert analysis of the ever changing challenges to Israeli security. From sub-state actors and foreign states to domestic concerns, the strategic threats to Israel and the Middle East are explored in depth.”

Russia, yes Russia, has formation of a new lobby. From Jerusalem Post, Pro-Israel caucus forming in Russian parliament, By Gil Hoffman, 05/25/2013

A select group of Russian parliament members will soon be urging their colleagues to say “da” to Israel after a delegation of Israelis took steps to initiate the formation of a pro-Israel caucus in the Duma in meetings last week in Moscow.

An abundant number of pro-Israel lobbies, too numerous to describe, operate at all levels in the United States — political, social, media, economic, educational, “think tanks,” fund-raising, recruiting, and institutional. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli supporters intrude, infiltrate, and mold the minds of everyday Americans. One description can be found at The Israel Lobbies: A Survey of the Pro-Israel Community in the United States, Dov Waxman, June 2010.

Digest all of this. Why the existence of this plethora of helpful groups for one small country that has a strong military and is economically well-off? Do any equivalent assemblies of forces that promote a specific nation exist in the world?

Overlooking all of this is Mossad.

Mossad, an illegal intelligence gathering and terrorist organization, operates within a multitude of counties, gathers information on military, social, political, and economic activities, assassinates adversaries, terrorizes populations and assures the criminal activities continue unimpeded.

A paralyzed world asks how can it happen.

The answers to why a small nation can commit genocide, develop a superior military, and brutally attack a larger and more resourceful nation have been provided.

Israel is a criminal nation and not brought to justice for its criminal actions.

Raubwirtschaft, its state economy is partially based on robbery, looting and plundering conquered territories. Raubwirtschaft states are in continuous warfare with their neighbors and usurp the resources of their conquered subjects, while claiming security objectives and defensive actions against defenseless people. The U.S. and other nations assist and enable the Raubwirtschaft.

Criminal gangs, once they achieve superiority in firepower, make no compromises.

Israel would not have achieved superiority in firepower without the financial and military support from Germany and the United States, programs that used the financial accounts of the German and American peoples.

Israel has gone further than Raubwirtschaft, using it as a springboard for transnational corruption — extending illicit activities to global networks of money laundering, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and general crime. Local authorities take action but do not engage the central source in Tel Aviv.
Global influencers perpetuate the myth of Israel as a responsible and peace seeking Jewish state. No attempt is made to register these organizations as lobbies for a foreign government or investigate the legality of their operations.

Mossad, an illegal intelligence gathering and terrorist organization, operates within a multitude of counties and assures the criminal activities continue unimpeded. The U.S. refuses to include Mossad in its war on terrorism and permits the intelligence gathering and terrorism on its soil and in other lands.

Is it ignorance, is it bribery, is it graft, is it betrayal, is it lack of concern? It is all of that.

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

“Everyone now has a sense of being alert,” she told RFA over the phone in November. “People I know have been arrested for unknown reasons.”

Binh, who asked that a pseudonym be used for security reasons, has spent more than 20 years working on humanitarian aid for both local and international non-governmental organizations in Vietnam. At each one she has dodged intimidation and crackdowns meted out by Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party. But lately the problem has grown markedly worse.

While working for one international NGO, Binh explained that the entire staff would be summoned to the offices of the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organization, the agency that manages international NGOs, for an “interview” every three months.

“They would ask us where we had travelled recently and what we were doing. It was very weird. It was obvious they wanted us to know we were under supervision,” Binh said.

Other times, said Binh, police would follow her and her colleagues while they worked in the field.

(Allegra Mendelson/RFA)

Even the UN has experienced “strict surveillance” and pushback, according to Binh, who has experience partnering with several of its agencies.

“There were times where they shut down the electricity or told the venue owner not to rent to them,” Binh said. In response to RFA, the office of the UN Resident Coordinator in Vietnam, which manages the country team, said that “the UN collaborates with the Vietnamese government, civil society, and other international partners” to achieve its goals, but did not comment on any crackdowns the agencies have faced.

Binh has done everything she can to protect herself and so far it has worked, but others, including her colleagues and her close friends, have not been as fortunate.

Over the past four years, nearly a dozen NGO workers have been arrested or detained simply for doing their job, according to the Vietnam human rights organization Project 88. At least four remain behind bars today, along with more than 175 other activists.

These arrests – many of them carried out on charges of tax evasion or other allegations that legal monitors say are politically motivated – are part of a greater crackdown by the government to restrict civil society in Vietnam.

A series of oppressive rules, many of which are kept hidden, have provided the foundation for these efforts as the Communist Party seeks to tighten its grip on power.

One, and arguably the most draconian, of these is Directive 24, which was issued in July 2023 and casts all foreign cooperation as a national security threat amid the country’s increasing globalization.

The secret directive, which was obtained by Project 88 earlier this year and has never been released by the government, details opposition to free expression, international aid, unions, and even foreign travel. The impact, say experts, is an effective criminalization of activism.

In October, the government reinforced these measures with Decree 126, which added further restrictions on forming any kind of association in the country.

The crackdowns have also been rolled out alongside a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that has brought much of civil society to a standstill by fostering a climate of fear that has left politicians unwilling to approve projects and funding.

Over the last four months, RFA spoke with over a dozen activists, NGO workers, international donors, diplomats and experts to understand how government orders and subsequent crackdowns have intensified and what it has meant for those working in civil society in the country.

Fear of foreign influence

Civil society wasn’t always a target of the government in Vietnam. A decade ago, many had a much more optimistic outlook.

Nguyen Tien Trung, a pro-democracy activist now based in Germany, was arrested in 2009 for protesting against the Communist Party. He was released five years later at a time when support for civil society looked very different to how it does today.

“When I was released from prison in 2014, civil society organizations mushroomed in Vietnam. Many organizations, both registered and unregistered with the Vietnamese communist government, were operating freely,” said Trung.

(Trung Nguyen Tien)

But around 2016, circumstances started to change. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung announced his retirement and Nguyen Phu Trong, who was serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party, was re-elected for a second term. Trong died earlier this year.

Unlike Dung, who had been relatively sympathetic to civil society, Trong took a very different approach. He disagreed with the cozy relationships that Tan Dung had cultivated with the West and began rolling out a series of measures to restrict foreign influence.

Vietnam has a wide range of organizations that operate at different levels, from informal, non-registered groups at the local level to massive, international NGOs, or INGOs, like Save the Children and Oxfam.

Most INGOs are registered under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while domestic NGOs are normally registered with the Ministry of Science and Technology. But the measures introduced under Phu Trong sought to expand the government oversight over these organizations.

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Beginning in 2020, the government imposed a series of decrees and decisions to block access to foreign funding and increase restrictive oversight in what two United Nations special rapporteurs said established “unreasonably burdensome requirements” for operations.

“Communist Party leaders want to maintain their power monopoly. They are wary of foreign influence that could destabilize its control. International NGOs and foreign entities often promote democratic values and human rights, which the Communist Party views as threats to its one-party rule,” said Trung, the democracy activist.

However, he noted that the concerns are specifically centered on Western influence, while China and Russia, for example, serve as “models for the Communist Party to follow.”

The government ministries that oversee NGOs in Vietnam did not respond to RFA’s request for comment for this article.

Shrinking the space

Numerous NGOs have been forced to shut down in recent years amid this environment.

Among them are Towards Transparency, Vietnam’s branch of Transparency International, which closed its doors in late 2021 due to security concerns. Shortly before, the website’s domain had been revoked by municipal authorities, in what many considered a threatening move, after a map was published that excluded contested islands in the South China Sea.

(Vietnam Ministry of Public Security)

LIN Center for Community Development, an umbrella network of 400 nonprofits, announced it would close in November 2022 without specifying the reasons, and the Institute of Technology Research and Development, or SENA, was forcibly dissolved in July 2023, a year after its director was arrested and charged with “abusing democratic freedoms” for submitting recommendations to improve the Communist Party.

The government has also targeted individuals, notably through the use of the tax law. Laws around tax evasion are vague and can be manipulated into prosecuting anyone that the government wants stopped, said Trung.

As a result, “the fear of being arrested under the charge of ‘tax evasion’ has instilled a sense of caution, if not outright paralysis, in the sector,” he said.

One of the most high-profile of these cases in recent years was the arrest of environmental activist Hoang Thi Minh Hong in May 2023. She was sentenced to three years in prison on tax evasion charges, but was released early in September of this year.

Project 88 found that “the Vietnamese government has a history of using tax evasion charges to prosecute dissidents who cannot be persuasively charged under national security provisions of the criminal code”.

Nguyen Quang A, a prominent human rights activist in Vietnam and the former director of the now-dissolved Institute for Development Studies, told RFA that he has been arrested for tax evasion “at least four or five times” but always as a cover for dissident activity.

(Vietnam Ministry of Labour - Invalids and Social Affairs)

Other laws have also been weaponized. In April, Nguyen Van Binh, who served as director general of the Ministry of Labour’s legal department, was arrested and prosecuted for allegedly disclosing state secrets.

He had sought to help grant workers the rights to form unions, which, with the exception of the one state-affiliated union, are banned in Vietnam.

Binh was seen as an “ally” to groups such as Stitch, a Dutch nonprofit that worked on labor rights in Vietnam and his arrest was seen as “a signal that the direction he was taking was not the way to go,” according to a senior source familiar with the organization.

Following his arrest, Stitch ceased its activities in Vietnam.

“There was also fear of repercussions because of that signal for those involved in Stitch,” the source said.

The Blazing Furnace

The crackdowns are only one set of challenges that NGOs in Vietnam have been forced to navigate. A controversial anti-corruption campaign called “blazing furnace” has made it harder than ever for civil society to get government sign-off on everything from travel to funding.

(Allegra Mendelson/RFA)

Since it was launched in 2013, the government has turned itself inside out, arresting officials at all levels, including senior members of the Politburo and government ministries. As of 2023, nearly 200,000 party members have been disciplined as part of the campaign.

While the campaign successfully brought Vietnam up to 83 from 113 on the Corruption Perceptions Index, it has also created a chilling effect for legitimate work, advocates say.

“It isn’t clear to officials what kinds of activities could get someone into trouble so everyone is on high alert at all times,” said Minh, a longtime activist who asked that a pseudonym be used for security reasons.

“The biggest impact from the anti-corruption campaign is that government officers don’t want to work anymore, they don’t want to approve civil society. They keep silent because it’s easier to say no.”

Yet that means that in the last three years Vietnam has forfeited approximately $2.5 billion in foreign aid. Another $1 billion is currently being held waiting for approval.

Much of that funding was earmarked for things like development and infrastructure projects, in which UN or EU agencies sometimes partner with local organizations.

A former senior Western donor official told RFA that a lot of local organizations “no longer want to take foreign money because it causes too many risks,” which has forced them to downsize operations.

(AFP)

Finding alternatives

To operate, civil society groups have found some workarounds. One way is by registering as social enterprises – a hybrid between a charity and a for-profit enterprise – instead of an NGO. Some groups have found this easier for operating, but it means having to pay more taxes.

Another option is to develop closer relationships with the government, including by funding government advocacy initiatives, in order to “have protection.”

“They aren’t directly bribing the government, but they are putting a lot of money and investment into building up those relationships in order to avoid any issues,” Binh said.

But relief from these options is not ideal and likely temporary. Those working in Vietnam’s civil society are concerned that the environment will only keep getting worse.

After Phu Trong’s death in July, he was succeeded by To Lam, a longtime party operative who has held senior positions in government for decades.

As Minister of Public Security, he orchestrated many of the crackdowns against civil society, including the use of tax evasion as a way of silencing dissidents.

“To Lam spent all his life in the police. He views all organizations that are not under the control of the Communist Party as potential enemies,” said Trung, the pro-democracy activist.

“I have no doubt that he will continue to suppress the democratic and civil society movements,” he predicted.

Edited by Abby Seiff and Boer Deng.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Allegra Mendelson for RFA Investigative.

As Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell announces he will step down as the Senate’s Republican leader after 17 years — the longest term in Senate history — we speak with Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, who says, “McConnell’s legacy has been one of obstruction.” He describes McConnell’s “aggressive” use of the filibuster, the topic of Merkley’s new book, Filibustered!: How to Fix the Broken Senate and Save America, as having “broken the cycle in which government can function.” Merkley also discusses Republican manipulation of judicial appointments and the cloture motion in pushing the legislature further right.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Body camera footage shows undercover U.S. Forest Service police officers shooting Brooks Roberts on May 19, 2023.

Before U.S. Forest Service police repeatedly shot Brooks Roberts in May, he was already disabled and required the use of a wheelchair. Now, at 39 years old, Brooks is unlikely to ever walk again: He is paralyzed from the waist down, has limited use of his right arm, and cannot control his bowels. Such is the punishment for being unhoused in America.

In late August, Brooks and his attorneys filed a claim against numerous government agencies seeking $50 million in monetary damages for “extreme suffering” caused by the shooting. According to the claim, Forest Service officers, in conjunction with the Bureau of Land Management, shot Brooks “needlessly and recklessly” on May 19: through his arm and back shoulder, in his armpit and the bottom of his spine, through the middle of his back, and several times in his legs. The officers opened fire when they saw Brooks was carrying a gun — but they were wearing civilian clothing and had not identified themselves as police, according to the complaint.

“Because this incident involved federal law enforcement officers, the investigation was handled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It would be inappropriate for us to provide any additional comments at this time,” the Forest Service said in a statement provided to The Intercept. The FBI declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing investigation, and the Department of Justice and BLM did not respond to requests for comment.

The obscene multiagency operation began with a devious trick, designed solely to arrest the Roberts family for low-level misdemeanors related to their overstay on national forest land outside of Boise, Idaho.

Police body camera footage shows two undercover Forest Service officers approached the small trailers in which Brooks, his mother Judy, and his brother Timber had lived since they were evicted from their rental home in 2020. The officers said they needed help starting their car, so Timber promptly went out to get his truck and retrieve jumper cables. They then grabbed Timber and forced him to the ground as he screamed for help.

“They shot him in the back when he was defenseless and immobile.”

According to the claim, “Mr. Roberts, hearing his brother’s cries for help, wheeled out in his wheelchair to find what appeared to be his brother being carjacked or robbed. As he approached his brother to save him, officers saw the .22 revolver Mr. Roberts carried and opened fire on him.”

The complaint adds that Brooks did not fire his gun, and he swiftly threw it on the ground, several feet away, when he realized the men were police. “They shot him in the back when he was defenseless and immobile,” the claim states.

Another body camera video of the shooting’s aftermath shows Brooks writhing on the ground covered in blood and mud, crying that he cannot feel his legs, as police continue to pull his arms behind his back to force him into handcuffs.

“I’m sorry,” Brooks can be heard apologizing, “I didn’t know you were cops.”

Brooks Roberts recovers at Vibra Hospital in Boise, Idaho, on Aug. 7, 2023.

The shooting is as frenzied and chaotic as it is gruesome, and drenched in what seems to be a disregard for human life. The circumstances that brought dozens of law enforcement officers to ambush an unhoused family over minor misdemeanor charges are emblematic of a social order that turns financial hardship into terminal poverty, and poverty into a crime managed by deadly state violence. “Organized abandonment and organized violence,” as abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore has long put it.

“Federal police officers planned in secret to arrest this homeless family on minor misdemeanor offenses by preying on their good graces. Officers knew that the family would help two people that they thought were stranded motorists,” Craig Durham, one of Brooks’s attorneys, wrote me via email. “It’s a shame that in the wealthiest nation on earth, our federal government will expend so many resources to hassle a homeless family, botch an arrest so badly, and permanently injure someone, rather than just help them find a place to live.”

The Robertses were not staying in trailers — which lacked running water, heat in frigid winters, and air conditioning in brutal desert summers — out of choice. They had been trying to find housing since their eviction in 2020, when Judy lost her job of 13 years at a manufacturing plant after being T-boned in a serious car accident.

According to the wrongful shooting claim, the Roberts family tried to find emergency shelter as the Covid pandemic raged but were told all options were full. “For months they moved from place to place across southwest Idaho, encountering law enforcement who told them, again and again, to move on.” A criminal complaint against the three family members for violations relating to their overstay, and against Timber for a further count of disorderly conduct, notes that law enforcement officials had been informing the family of the need to move off forest land since late 2020.

In this country, the poor do not fall through the cracks, because these are not cracks but traps — from which there is no release.

In this country, the poor do not fall through the cracks, because these are not cracks but traps — from which there is no release. In the winter of 2021 to 2022, Judy suffered severe frostbite as the family stayed on BLM high desert land. “Her feet eventually froze to the floor of an old school bus. Hallucinating, she was rushed to the hospital, but doctors could not save her feet,” the claim filing noted. “After a double amputation, she spent several months in physical therapy learning how to walk with prosthetics.”

The following summer, Brooks was injured during an overnight Walmart shift, which left him requiring a wheelchair for mobility. The family was again forced to move by the BLM and set up their trailers further north on Forest Service land. That winter, 26 inches of snow left Judy, Brooks, and Timber snowed in and stuck. Nonetheless, the government continued to charge all three of them with multiple misdemeanor counts related to staying on federal lands.

In February 2023, the family appeared in court, were arraigned on “multiple misdemeanor violations” and granted pretrial release. A warrant was issued for the family’s arrests in May, however, after they “continued to violate numerous federal laws,” and after Timber allegedly shouted obscenities at federal officers and threatened members of the public, according to the government’s complaint. Forest Service and BLM agents then planned their undercover arrest operation, even though the matter was already in the courts. According to Brooks’s wrongful shooting claim, “No agent contacted the Robertses’ appointed attorneys. No agent reached out to see if they would surrender on these charges, as they had before.”

“I got social security disability, which they garnished for nonpayment of tickets for staying too long on forest land. We needed that money to get into an RV place. They should be using their resources to help people find a place to live instead of persecuting them,” said Judy, in a statement shared by Brooks’s attorneys.

“How can we get on our feet when you keep ticketing us to take away our money that we could have used for housing?” Brooks added. “It just makes the problems amplified. If the person is struggling to find a place and then they get arrested, then they really have trouble, because they don’t have the ability to find a place when they’re in jail.”

Body camera footage shows officers arriving to Payette National Forest where Brooks Roberts was living in a camper with his family following an eviction.

Like every state, Idaho lacks thousands of much-needed affordable rental homes. Last December, Boise-based organization Charitable Assistance to Community’s Homeless, or CATCH, reported the number of people experiencing homelessness in the city had doubled since 2020. Like the Robertses, a growing number of people who cannot find housing turn to staying on public lands in trailers and encampments. In a Boise State Public Radio report last year, a BLM supervisory field staff ranger said the number of people living on BLM land in Idaho had increased “tenfold, at least” in recent years.

Most national parks have a camping stay limit of two to three weeks. A crucial 2018 federal court decision, however, ruled that unhoused people cannot be punished for sleeping on public land if no shelter beds are available. “The government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit decided in Martin v. Boise, a ruling that covers the jurisdiction in which the Roberts family were continuously harassed and punished for their homelessness. 

Durham, the attorney, told me he and his team believe Martin v. Boise applies in this instance and will be using it to defend the Roberts family in the criminal case brought against them by the government.

Local, state, and federal authorities have keenly sought ambiguities and loopholes in Martin, like banning daytime camping and sanctioning certain encampment sites, so that all others can be cleared without providing the sustainable permanent housing that should be a right.

In the summer of 2022, the National Park Service cleared two unhoused encampments from federal land in Washington, D.C., citing “threats to public health and safety.” The action clarified, in no uncertain terms, who does and does not get to count as “the public” in the eyes of our federal government. Similar rhetoric was deployed to defend the brutal killing of Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man in crisis, on a New York City subway in May; officials invoked a selective view of a “public” deserving safety, from which Neely was violently excluded.

Following Brooks’s shooting, the National Homelessness Law Center called on the Biden administration “to issue an executive order eliminating all federal police activities in their response to homelessness, and instead to mandate a housing- and services-only approach that is rooted in choice, healing, and racial justice.”

In May, the Biden administration announced an initiative to partner with the country’s major cities with the aim of a 25 percent reduction in national homelessness by 2025 — an already insufficient goal that will still be hard to obtain amid soaring housing prices, slashed social services budgets, and the billions more being poured into policing by Democrats and Republicans alike.

“Data clearly show that a police approach is expensive, diverts community resources that could be used for housing, disproportionately harms Black people and other people of color and is overall ineffective at solving homelessness,” the National Homelessness Law Center said in a statement.

The Roberts family’s story is yet another reminder of the consequences of criminalizing poverty and homelessness. Timber and Judy are currently living in a hotel, where they rely on donations and support from local mutual aid networks. Three months after the shooting, Brooks remains in the hospital.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

Jackson, the state capital of Mississippi, has a population of over 150,000 people, more than 80% of whom are African American. Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. Jackson residents, already under a water boil notice for over a month, have now had no running water for days, to drink, to bathe in, or to flush toilets. The Pearl River flooded following record rainfall, overwhelming the city's water treatment plant. On Sunday, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba urged city residents, "If you are capable of getting out now, get out now." Jackson has been paralyzed by the confluence of racism, classism, and the worsening climate crisis.

Jackson suffered some of the worst racist violence as Jim Crow laws disenfranchised African Americans across the South and white supremacist terrorism waged by the Ku Klux Klan and others drove millions of Blacks north in the Great Migration.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden declared an emergency for Jackson and surrounding Hinds county, promising federal funding to pay the bulk of disaster recovery costs for at least 90 days. A rented pump was put into service at the water facility on Wednesday, and may help restore water service within a week.

But that is only a temporary fix. Jackson's water problems run far deeper. "We are seeing the intentional divestment in communities that are led by Black elected officials," Jackson resident and social justice organizer Danyelle Holmes told Reuters at a water distribution center this week. "This has been an issue for me since I came down here…in 1991. I was always told not to drink that water."

The climate-fueled polar vortex that descended on Texas in February, 2021, shutting down that state's electrical grid and subjecting millions of Texans to devastating cold, killing an estimated 700 people, also hit other Southern states. Jackson's water treatment plant froze then, shutting off residents' access to water. Mississippi's Governor Tate Reeves and Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann, both white Republicans, blamed Jackson for that crisis. "I do think it's really important that the city of Jackson start collecting their water bill payments before they start going and asking everyone else to pony up more money," Gov. Reeves told the press last year, as Jackson was in its third week without water.

"The city of Jackson was not ill-prepared based on the winter storms; we were ill-equipped," Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba responded back then, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour. "We've had resources stripped away from us."

Jackson was founded two hundred years ago, named in honor of Andrew Jackson, a wealthy plantation owner who made a fortune using enslaved labor and who later, as the seventh president of the United States, orchestrated the ethnic cleansing of much of the South's indigenous population in what became known as the Trail of Tears. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered the city burned to the ground during the Civil War.

Later, Jackson suffered some of the worst racist violence as Jim Crow laws disenfranchised African Americans across the South and white supremacist terrorism waged by the Ku Klux Klan and others drove millions of Blacks north in the Great Migration. In 1963, Medgar Evers, the NAACP's Mississippi field secretary, was assassinated outside his Jackson home. This followed the violence and arrests targeting hundreds of Freedom Riders who arrived in Jackson in the summer of 1961, challenging segregation of interstate travel. In 1964, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—were murdered in nearby Neshoba County for helping the Black community organize voter registration. Their bodies were buried in a dam being built on a farm to impound water that would have flowed into the Pearl River, upstream from Jackson. On May 15th, 1970, two students at Jackson State, the historically Black college, were killed by local police during an anti-war protest. Their deaths received little attention compared to the four white protesters killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio, eleven days earlier.

"What we are experiencing now is literally just the crumbling of the empire's infrastructure," Kali Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, which promotes worker-owned coops and a solidarity economy, said on Democracy Now! "It goes back to the 1950s and '60s with the so-called urban renewal programs and the massive subsidization of the suburbs, which facilitated white flight out of many of these major cities, Jackson being one of them. With that went major capital flight and…chronic programs of divestment and deindustrialization."

Akuno heeded Mayor Lumumba's warning to flee the flooding this week, and was in New Orleans, remotely coordinating Cooperation Jackson's water distribution efforts.

Repairing Jackson's infrastructure will take an estimated $2 billion. That's a tiny fraction of the public funds allocated by the recently enacted infrastructure and climate change bills. The resources exist to solve Jackson's current catastrophe. It will take solidarity on a national level to overcome the triple, ongoing impacts assaulting the citizens of Jackson, Mississippi: racism, classism and the spiraling disaster of climate change.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.