Illusions of safety

On a Monday morning in March 2024, Professor Susan Levine, the head of the anthropology department at the University of Cape Town (UCT), received an email from a man who claimed to be “Benjy ‘Ben’ Steingold” of Tzfat, the famous “holy city” near the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. Levine, who had never met or even heard of Steingold, was wary — the events of the previous weekend, when it came to the actions of her colleagues and fellow Jews, had shaken her badly. As she read from the top, her fears were confirmed.

“This may be the most important email you have ever received in your life,” the message began. “Please read to the end as it could give you the opportunity to change your eternal future.”

That “eternal future”, according to Steingold — or whatever the sender’s real name happened to be — would, unless Levine altered course, involve a particularly biblical form of punishment. Because she had allegedly “vilified Israel” by spreading “untruths and lies”, she was destined “in this incarnation or another reincarnation” to live under one of four enemy regimes: Hamas, Hezbollah, Isis or the Ayatollah’s Iran.

For the next 10 paragraphs, as payback for the motion that Levine had brought before the UCT senate the previous Friday, Steingold quoted a potent mix of Torah and American literature. Through it all, an undercurrent of menace flowed in a steady and self-assured stream, as exemplified in a citation from the Midrash (ancient commentaries on the Hebrew scriptures): “If you are kind to the cruel, in the end, you will be cruel to the kind.”

Two days later, on 13 March 2024, Levine would include these details in a sworn statement for the South African Police Service. At around the same time, the UCT authorities would deem the threat to her life significant enough to warrant full-time private security.

In the third paragraph of her statement, Levine would succinctly explain the motion that she had proposed to the university senate on 8 March:

“The motion was one which urged UCT to cut ties with Israeli institutions of higher education until such a time that they acknowledge the value of Palestinian lives in Gaza and [call] for an end to what the International Court of Justice calls ‘plausible’ [genocide].”

As it turned out, despite her refusal to rescind — aside from the Steingold threat, there was an attempt by UCT staff to place pressure on members of Levine’s family, with one colleague even passing on the message that her life would be “ruined” — the motion for an academic boycott did not win the requisite votes.

Still, although she could not know it at the time, Levine’s experience was fated to form a core part of one of the most significant court cases in the 195-year history of UCT.

Lodged by Professor Adam Mendelsohn on 22 August 2024, the Western Cape Division of the High Court application would attempt to overturn a pair of momentous resolutions that had been passed by the UCT council, the university’s highest decision-making body, on 22 June of that same year: first, the resolution not to adopt the international definition of anti-Semitism that encompassed anti-Zionism; and, second, the resolution to prohibit collaboration with academics or research groups affiliated to the Israel Defense Forces or the broader Israeli military establishment.

In its 150-page answering affidavit, the UCT council — represented by its chairperson, Norman Arendse — would refer to these resolutions jointly as the “Gaza resolutions,” thereby making it plain that they were a direct response to Israel’s ongoing military offensive and the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). On page 17 of the affidavit, shortly after reiterating UCT’s “zero-tolerance attitude to anti-Semitism” and acknowledging that the Jewish people had in the past been “victims of gross atrocities and genocide” themselves, Levine’s experience was mentioned for the first time.

The context, as the UCT papers explicitly stated, was that “those who expressed views in support of the Gaza resolutions” were likely to face “threats, intimidation or reprisal” if their identities were revealed. Mendelsohn, the affidavit alleged, was “probably aware” of Levine’s experience, and therefore should not have disregarded the “safety and wellbeing” of council members by going public with the case.

As examples of Mendelsohn’s alleged breach, UCT cited the publication of his founding and supplementary affidavits on Politicsweb, “with council members’ identities disclosed … regardless of the request [for anonymity]”. Also cited was reporting on the case “in pro-Israel and right-wing media in the United States”, specifically an article in Breitbart Media by its senior editor Joel Pollak, dated 15 March 2025.

What was not cited was a lengthy feature published in Haaretz, Israel’s most progressive mainstream newspaper, on 24 September 2024. Titled “‘Scary Time to Be a Zionist’: Is Africa’s Top University No Longer a Welcoming Place for Jews?”, the piece, authored by South African journalist Tali Feinberg, quoted Mendelsohn extensively.

With a link to the original founding affidavit, published on Politicsweb on 29 August 2024, Feinberg noted that the resolutions (which were — and are — yet to be implemented) “should be seen within the broader context of South Africa’s fraught relations with Israel”.

Here, while Feinberg failed to mention the exceptionally close relationship in the 1970s and 1980s between the Israeli establishment and the white supremacist apartheid regime, she did observe that “the ruling African National Congress has long backed the Palestinians”. Likewise, while she failed to acknowledge the threats directed at Levine, the fears of certain members of UCT’s Zionist student body  — most of whom would only speak to her on condition of anonymity — were the central focus of her piece.

As graduate student Esther (not her real name) told Feinberg: “If someone assaulted me for wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ [‘The people of Israel live’], it wouldn’t be seen as anti-Semitic. It would be ‘anti-Zionist.’ The overlap between the two is no longer allowed to exist.”

In these inherently contested words, by Daily Maverick’s reckoning, lay the essence of the case. Levine, who in the interests of academic freedom allowed us access to her story and her name, was for us an archetypal local representative of a deeply disturbing global phenomenon — the split in world Jewry, between Zionists and anti-Zionists, that was now violently shaking the foundations of some of the most prestigious universities on Earth.

What if Einstein was an anti-Semite? 

“I am an academic, writer and member of the organisation South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP), currently residing in Cape Town,” Jared Sacks testified. “I do not disclose my residential address because SAJFP members are often subject to harassment and threats from individuals who support Israel and the ideology of Zionism.”

As the opening paragraph of the application for the admission of the SAJFP as amicus curiae (friends of the court) in the case of Mendelsohn versus the UCT council, an affidavit that Sacks deposed on behalf of his organisation on 9 June 2025, the assertion — like Levine’s story — was far from hyperbolic. A mere six weeks before, as reported, Sacks had been physically assaulted by an attendee of the Jewish Literary Festival in Cape Town, for the apparent offence of protesting Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

The incident, it turned out, was nothing new to Sacks. As a PhD graduate in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University in New York, he had served as a teaching fellow on undergraduate courses that delved into the highly flammable terrain of Palestinian rights.

“I have first-hand knowledge of the current climate of political repression related to pro-Palestine activism at universities in the United States,” Sacks declared in his affidavit, “including at Columbia, where a number of former colleagues and former students have been subject to harassment, doxxing, assaults, institutional pressure, procedurally unfair disciplinary processes, and unjust termination of employment due to their research and speech on Palestine.”

By Daily Maverick’s understanding, this anchoring of the UCT case in the international context, a point that the affidavit would repeat from multiple angles, was one of the primary motivations for the SAJFP applying as amicus curiae — in disentangling the religion of Judaism from the ideology of Zionism, Sacks testified, his organisation aimed to “debunk the anti-Semitic notion” that there had ever been anything like a homogenous Jewish perspective, either globally or locally, on the actions of the State of Israel.

Clearly, in emphasising “the role that anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews have played in shaping discourse on [the UCT campus]”, the affidavit was not only rejecting the attempt by Mendelsohn — director of the university’s Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies — to speak on behalf of all Jewish students and staff; it was also affirming the SAJFP’s support for free speech and institutional autonomy, particularly in the form of the Gaza resolutions.

But as important, “with billionaire philanthropists and politicians running roughshod over protected speech” at universities in the United States, the SAJFP was drawing attention to the “distinct possibility” that what had been playing out “at places like Harvard and Columbia” would “become an issue at South African universities as well”.

The question for the Western Cape Division of the High Court, of course, would be whether the SAJFP was overstating its case. And here, to offset Mendelsohn’s opposition to the application, the organisation came armed with expert witnesses.

At the top end, aside from the testimonies of Professor Steven Friedman and Professor Isaac Kamola, two local academics with deep knowledge of the issues, the SAJFP submitted an expert affidavit from Professor Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey — the same institute that Albert Einstein had joined in the 1930s, after seeking refuge from Nazi Germany.

Scott, as Sacks well knew, had long been a leading global critic of the definition of anti-Semitism as laid down by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA — the very definition that the UCT council had rejected in its Gaza resolutions of June 2024, and the very definition, as articulated in his founding papers, that Mendelsohn appeared to be insisting upon.

In paragraph 14 of her supporting affidavit, somewhat remarkably, Scott invoked the spirit of Einstein himself.

“Under the IHRA definition,” she testified, “rejecting the idea of a Jewish state with borders and an army, as Einstein once did, could land even the most famous Jew of the 20th century in the position of being accused of anti-Semitism. Though he was sympathetic to Zionism, Einstein’s comparison of Menachem Begin’s Herut Party massacres during the Nakba to the Nazi Party would have fallen afoul of [the IHRA definition]. In today’s academic world, he could have been fired for making such a comparison.”

In other words, according to Scott, a celebrated Jewish scholar in her mid-80s who had witnessed — and commented upon — some of the worst anti-democratic impulses of 20th-century America, the Zionist radicals of 2025 would have burnt no less a luminary than Einstein.

It was for this reason, she continued in her affidavit, that one of the original authors of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, came to regret what he called the “weaponising” of the definition, arguing — in an opinion piece for the Guardian published in 2019 — that “its misuse undermines efforts to detect and combat real instances of anti-Semitism”.

In the same vein, Scott added, this was also why more than a hundred Israeli and international civil society organisations, in April of 2023 — as reported, again, in the Guardian — “urged the United Nations to reject this definition”.

Ultimately, for Scott — as for Friedman and Kamola — the IHRA definition had quickly become anathema to the very idea of academic freedom. Scott, however, had been watching its effects play out on US Ivy League campuses in real time. Republican politicians, she testified, “many of them anti-Semites themselves”, were now using the “expressions of discomfort” of Zionist students and faculty to foreground anti-Semitism at the expense of all other forms of racial discrimination.

“[Zionist] students express their discomfort in terms of feeling ‘unsafe’ or ‘threatened,’” she added, “when there is little or no evidence of any physical danger they have experienced.”

Was this also the reality of Zionist fears on the UCT campus, as reported by Feinberg in Haaretz? The answer, it appeared, would be for the Western Cape Division of the High Court to decide.

For the moment, what could not be disputed was how things were turning out in the US. “The IHRA definition is now a political test for enjoying rights of free speech and academic freedom,” Scott testified. “Those who support Israel have rights of free expression, those who criticise it are punished and banned.”

The money problem

On a Saturday morning in mid-March 2025, almost a year to the day after UCT had assigned full-time security to Professor Levine, the university council was asked to make a difficult decision. With the threat of US federal funding cuts looming, most likely in the form of an abrupt halt to grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the executive orders of President Donald Trump could no longer be ignored — for one thing, as the largest recipients of NIH grants outside of the US, the university’s medical researchers were now at serious risk.

For another thing, as every member of the council was keenly aware, pro-Israel donors had already withdrawn funding — and more were threatening to withdraw — on the back of the Gaza resolutions of the previous year.

Although it had not been placed on the agenda for discussion, a motion was therefore tabled that the university should rescind the resolutions and withdraw its opposition to Mendelsohn’s high court application. In a closely contested vote, the motion failed to pass.

A few short hours later, as stated in the council’s answering affidavit, Joel Pollak of the right-wing US outlet Breitbart Media ran an article under the title, “South African university votes to keep boycott of Israel despite losing two-thirds of donor funding”. Before the end of the following week, in a similarly alarmist piece in the local Jewish Report (authored, like the Haaretz feature, by Feinberg), Rolene Marks of the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) would also note her concerns.

“This self-inflicted crisis threatens vital resources and undermines UCT’s global standing,” Marks stated on behalf of the SAZF. “It exposes the ideological capture of its leadership at the direct expense of academic freedom, financial stability and student welfare. Council members have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the university, yet some are wilfully disregarding this obligation. Their hatred of Israel outweighs their responsibility for UCT’s future.”

By Daily Maverick’s reading, this was an uncanny summary of one of the principal arguments from Mendelsohn’s founding affidavit of August 2024 — the notion that, by failing to take account of “UCT’s finances, existing relationships … and reputation”, the council had acted in an “irrational” manner.

But if Mendelsohn was indeed the source of the leaks, as alleged in the UCT answering papers, he would not admit as much to us. In response to a series of questions sent on 12 June, in which Daily Maverick also sought clarification on the publication of the names of council members, he noted his “surprise” at our email — we should “surely know”, he wrote, that it would be “improper” for him to respond while legal proceedings were pending.

Given Mendelsohn’s extensive interviews with Feinberg, we noted, we too were surprised. Still, irrespective of the source, the tenor of the media campaign against the UCT council was unmistakable — the underlying message was that the university had been financially punished for taking on the Zionists.

The SAJFP, for its part, was unimpressed. Referring in a footnote to an attendant statement from Mendelsohn’s supplementary affidavit, the organisation pointed out the obvious: “The assumption that ‘Jewish connected’ donors would have a homogeneous reaction to resolutions against Israel’s actions in Palestine is not only incorrect … it also panders to historical anti-Semitic tropes of a Jewish cabal working in unison and employing financial power to promote its political agendas.”

Of course, if the SAJFP was implying that there was no such cabal, the optics weren’t working in its favour.

Further down in its application, the organisation got at the heart of the matter, noting that since 7 October 2023 the “risk to university autonomy and academic freedom” from private donor money had become extreme, “particularly at Ivy League universities” in the US.

“Wealthy donors (with the support of politicians) have drawn on the IHRA’s conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism to pressure universities like Harvard and Columbia to ban student groups like Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine,” Sacks testified. “Donor pressure has also forced the suspension and expulsion of students for peaceful protests, the militarisation of campuses by armed police and the resignation of university presidents that sought to push back on their demands.”

Unlike Harvard, the SAJFP noted, where philanthropic contributions “made up about 45 percent of all revenue in the 2024 financial year”, private donor funding made up “only ten percent” of UCT’s revenue in 2024. Still, with the overall trend in South Africa towards “increased reliance on such funding”, one of the dangers — as the SAJFP saw it — was that donors’ political views would soon play an outsized role at our universities too.

A major milestone, according to the SAJFP, had been passed in the signing of a contract between UCT and the Donald Gordon Foundation (DGF) in 2023, wherein the latter had agreed to fund the creation of a neuroscience institute (at a cost of R200-million over a 10-year period) on the proviso that UCT’s “zero-tolerance attitude to anti-Semitism” was anchored in the IHRA definition.

As the UCT council’s answering affidavit made clear, on 6 August 2024 — around six weeks after it had passed the Gaza resolutions — the DGF informed the university of its “decision to cancel … the donor agreement”. In total, the council devoted all of 24 paragraphs to the contract’s background, arguing that the IHRA clause had never been used or intended as a dealbreaker and expressing the hope that the relationship with the DGF could be restored.

But Mendelsohn, in his own papers, had left no room for doubt — not only had the UCT council sacrificed the neuroscience institute on the altar of its Gaza resolutions, he testified, it had burnt the chances of a mooted “R400- to R500-million from the DGF” for a new academic hospital too.

And likewise for the SAJFP (although from the diametrically opposed stance), there was nothing ambiguous about the DGF contract.

“If the DGF donor agreement were to be enforced,” Sacks testified, “this would mean that Zionism’s adherents on campus would be protected by the IHRA in the same way as a racial group or religion. Meanwhile, the agreement would institutionalise discrimination against those who oppose Zionism by branding them with the false label of anti-Semitism.”

The Western Cape Division of the High Court, then, was being asked to pass judgment on one of the most heated and divisive topics of the modern era — a touchpoint that was pitching students against professors, voters against politicians, Jews against Jews. For anti-Zionists like Levine and Sacks, the violence that their brethren were capable of was hardly a joke; but for Mendelsohn too, who in September 2024 had requested additional security from the university, the stakes were sky-high.

On 23 and 24 October 2025, the matter would be heard before a full Bench. Arguing for the admission of the SAJFP as amicus curiae would be Geoffrey Budlender, a graduate of UCT and one of the most respected senior counsels in South Africa. According to Sacks, Budlender had agreed to take on the case pro bono.

Given that Budlender, himself a Jew, had recently been honoured with the George Bizos Human Rights Award, it was likely to be an uncompromising show, a battle worthy of the oldest university in the country.

Would South Africa, as in the ICJ case, offer the world a lesson in moral courage?

Daily Maverick, for one, wasn’t betting against it.

• First published at Daily Maverick.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kevin Bloom.

BBC News regularly proclaims its supposed editorial principles of fearless, independent, impartial, fair and accurate journalism. In a January 2023 speech to the Whitehall & Industry Group in London, then BBC Chairman Richard Sharp boasted that BBC journalism is the ‘global gold standard’ of credible news reporting.

Two years previously, in 2021, the public broadcaster had proudly published a focused, 10-point plan to ensure the protection of the highest ‘impartiality, whistleblowing and editorial standards’. BBC director general Tim Davie asserted:

‘The BBC’s editorial values of impartiality, accuracy and trust are the foundation of our relationship with audiences in the UK and around the world. Our audiences deserve and expect programmes and content which earn their trust every day and we must meet the highest standards and hold ourselves accountable in everything we do.’

When it comes to the broadcaster’s coverage of Gaza since October 2023, and long before, BBC audiences have seen for themselves the hollowness of such BBC rhetoric.

For example, the BBC’s withdrawal of its own commissioned powerful documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, earlier this year epitomised how much the UK’s national broadcaster bends to the will of the Israel lobby. The BBC dropped the documentary from iPlayer, soon after it was broadcast on BBC Two on 17 February, when it emerged that the film’s narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazuri, is the son of Ayman al-Yazuri, a deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s government which is administered by Hamas. The film was withdrawn after a campaign by pro-Israel voices, including David Collier, a self-described ‘100 per cent Zionist’ activist, Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, and Danny Cohen, a former director of BBC television, who said that the broadcaster ‘is at risk of becoming a Hamas propaganda mouthpiece.’

Another documentary, Gaza: Medics Under Fire, made by Oscar-nominated, Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmakers, including Ben de Pear, Karim Shah and Ramita Navai, has been held back by the BBC, even though it had been signed off by BBC lawyers. The film includes the testimony of Palestinian doctors working in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. It has been ready for broadcast since February after months of editorial reviews and fact-checking.

Over 600 prominent figures from the arts and media, including British film director Mike Leigh, Oscar-winning actor Susan Sarandon and Lindsey Hilsum, the international editor of Channel 4 News, have signed an open letter criticising the BBC for withholding the documentary:

‘We stand with the medics of Gaza whose voices are being silenced. Their urgent stories are being buried by bureaucracy and political censorship. This is not editorial caution. It’s political suppression. The BBC has provided no timeline, no transparency. Such decisions reinforce the systemic devaluation of Palestinian lives in our media.’

This, of course, is all part of an endemic pattern of BBC bias towards Israel under the guise of ‘impartiality’; a façade that has now been obliterated. The corporation’s longstanding, blatant protection of Israel, considered an ‘apartheid regime’ by major human rights organisations, has been particularly glaring since Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government ordered genocidal attacks on Gaza in October 2023.

The public has been subject to repetition and amplification of the Israeli narrative above the Palestinian perspective. Moreover, the broadcaster regularly omits ‘Israel’ from headlines about its latest war crimes committed in Gaza and the West Bank. Another remarkable feature of the BBC’s performance has been the dismissive treatment by senior BBC management of serious concerns about bias raised by their own journalists. A very brief summary of the BBC’s biased reporting on Gaza, and criticism by some of their own journalists, can be found in this thread on X. The essential conclusion concerning BBC News coverage of Gaza, wrote one dissident BBC journalist, is that of:

‘a collapse in the application of basic standards and norms of journalism that seems aligned with Israel’s propaganda strategy.’ [Our emphasis]

BBC management have ignored or dismissed ‘a mass of evidence-based critique of coverage’ from members of staff. So much for the BBC’s claimed commitment to taking whistleblowers seriously.

Karishma Patel, a former BBC researcher, newsreader and journalist, wrote earlier this year about her reasons for leaving the BBC. She observed ‘a shocking level of editorial inconsistency’ in how the BBC covers Gaza. Journalists were ‘actively choosing not to follow evidence’ of Israeli war crimes ‘out of fear’.

In a follow-up article last month, she observed that:

‘many [BBC] journalists are afraid to speak their minds – to challenge editorial decisions or speak freely to powerful presenters and executives. This isn’t a newsroom environment conducive to robust journalism – a profession all about the pursuit of truth and accountability.’

She added:

‘It’s important the public understands how far editorial policy can be silently shaped by even the possibility of anger from certain groups, foreign governments, our own government, mega-corporations – any powerful actor – and how crucial it is that more junior journalists who see it can speak up.’

‘A Precious National Asset’

Last week, the BBC’s director general warned of a disinformation ‘trust crisis’ that was putting ‘the social fabric’ of the UK ‘at risk’. Tim Davie pointed the finger at social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube where, as a Guardian report on Davie’s speech put it, ‘disinformation can go unchecked’. We have previously written (for example, here and here) about how ‘mainstream’ editors and journalists love to point at social media as prime purveyors of disinformation, diverting attention from their own culpability in much larger crimes of state-approved propaganda that fuels wars, the erosion of democracy and climate catastrophe.

Davie said:

‘The future of our cohesive, democratic society feels for the first time in my life at risk.’

He called for ‘strong government backing’ for the BBC as a ‘precious national asset’ to be ‘properly funded and supported’. The fact that the BBC has itself massively contributed to a ‘trust crisis’ in disinformation and propaganda, encapsulated by its complicity in Israel’s genocide, went unmentioned, of course.

The late, great journalist John Pilger put it succinctly in an interview with Afshin Rattansi:

‘The BBC has the most brilliant production values, it produces the most extraordinary natural history and drama series. But the BBC is, and has long been, the most refined propaganda service in the world.’

Daily examples abound of why the public should regard BBC News with deep scepticism. On 12 May, BBC News at Ten reported the release of US-Israeli dual citizen Edan Alexander by Hamas. Senior BBC reporter Lucy Williamson said that Alexander had originally been ‘kidnapped as a soldier’. The terminology is deceptive: civilians are kidnapped; soldiers are captured. Why did BBC editors approve this loaded use of the wrong word, ‘kidnapped’?

Consider another example. Richard Sanders, an experienced journalist and documentary filmmaker, noted via X on 15 May that the BBC had included this line in one of its news bulletins:

‘Israel says a hospital [in Gaza] along with a university and schools … have become terrorist strongholds for Hamas’.

Sanders commented:

‘The BBC knows such statements are untrue. Yet that sentence took up more than a third of its 22 sec 7.30 am news bulletin on Gaza – with no rebuttal.’

He added:

‘8am they go to [BBC] correspondent Yolande Knell for a lengthier report. She repeats exactly the same sentence – again, with no rebuttal.

‘The listener is left with the entirely false impression it’s perfectly possible it’s true.

‘Bad, bad journalism.’

And yet this is standard BBC ‘journalism’: the ‘global gold standard’, remember.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, is supposedly an exemplar of this gold standard. But his capitulation to the Israel lobby is repeatedly apparent in his interviews and articles. Media activist Saul Staniforth captured this clip where a BBC presenter said to Bowen:

‘[Netanyahu is] looking for other countries to take in Gazans’.

Bowen responded: ‘Well, that’s called…’

He then paused momentarily and continued: ‘… that will be called, by Palestinians and by a lot of people around the world, ethnic cleansing.’

Bowen presumably stopped himself simply stating the truth: ‘that’s called ethnic cleansing.’ This is what he would have said in any context involving an Official Enemy, such as Russia, rather than the Official Friend, Israel.

Jonathan Cook dissected an even more egregious example of Bowen’s favouring the Israeli perspective when the BBC journalist interviewed Philippe Lazzarini, head of United Nations refugee agency UNRWA. Before airing the interview, Bowen introduced the Lazzarini interview with a contorted cautionary statement:

‘Israel says he is a liar, and that his organisation has been infiltrated by Hamas. But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons.

‘First off, the British government deals with him, and funds his organisation. Which is the largest dealing with Palestinian refugees. They know a lot of what is going on, so therefore I think it is important to speak to people like him.’

As Cook observed, Bowen would never preface an interview with Netanyahu in a similar way:

‘The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, accusing him of crimes against humanity. But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons.’

During the interview, Lazzarini told Bowen that he was running out of words ‘to describe the misery and the tragedy affecting the people in Gaza. They have been now more than two months without any aid’. The UNRWA chief added:

‘Starvation is spreading, people are exhausted, people are hungry… we can expect that in the coming weeks if no aid is coming in, that people will not die because of the bombardment, but they will die because of the lack of food. This is the weaponisation of humanitarian aid.’

Cook noted:

‘Lazzarini’s remarks on the catastrophe in Gaza should be seen as self-evident. But Bowen and the BBC undermined his message by framing him and his organisation as suspect – and all because Israel, a criminal state starving the people of Gaza, has made an entirely unfounded allegation against the organisation trying to stop its crimes against humanity.’

He continued:

‘This is the same pattern of smears from Israel that has claimed all 36 hospitals in Gaza are Hamas “command and control centres” – again without a shred of evidence – to justify it bombing them all, leaving Gaza’s population without any meaningful health care system as malnutrition and starvation take hold.’ [Our emphasis]

As Cook pointed out, it is quite possible that it was not Bowen’s choice ‘to attach such a disgraceful disclaimer to his interview. We all understand that he is under enormous pressure, both from within the BBC and outside.’ But just imagine the huge moral standing and public impact it would have if Bowen resigned from the BBC, citing the intolerable pressure not to speak the full truth about Israel’s genocide and war crimes.

For those with long memories, recall the exceptional courage and honesty when two senior UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in 1998 and 2000, respectively, rather than continue to administer the ‘genocidal’ (their term) UN sanctions against Iraq that had led to the deaths of up to 1.5 million people, including around half a million children under the age of five.

One of the most insidious forms of ‘bad’ BBC ‘journalism’ is propaganda by omission, as we have noted in media alerts over the years (for example, see here and here). On 13 May, the investigative news organisation, DropSite, reported that Israeli troops had shot and killed Mohammed Bardawil, a 12-year-old boy. He was one of only four surviving eyewitnesses of the Israeli military’s execution of 15 paramedics, rescue workers and UN staff in Rafah, Gaza, in March 2025.

DropSite noted:

‘Mohammed had testified that some of the paramedics were shot at point-blank range – “from one meter away.” He was also interviewed by The New York Times for their investigation into the massacre, though his most damning claims were omitted from their final report.’

DropSite added:

‘Mohammed had been scheduled for a second round of testimony with investigators, this time with pediatric psychologists present. Instead, the 12-year-old war crime witness was killed by Israeli forces.’

At the time of writing, it is unclear whether he was specifically targeted in an attack, or caught up in an Israeli raid.

This shocking news has been blanked by the BBC, as far as we can see from searching its website. Indeed, our search of the Nexis newspaper database reveals not a single mention in any UK newspaper.

Imagine if Russia had executed fifteen Red Cross medics, first responders and a UN staff member in Ukraine, burying them in a mass grave along with their vehicles, including an ambulance.

Imagine if Russia had lied about this appalling war crime, as proved by footage recovered from the telephone of one of the executed victims.

Imagine if a 12-year-old Ukrainian witness to this Russian war crime was later shot dead by Russian soldiers. His killing would have been major headline news around the world and serious questions would have been asked.

The Fiction of BBC ‘Transparency’

As mentioned, BBC editors love to proclaim their accountability to the public and transparency of their editorial processes. How, then, would they explain their secrecy in holding private meetings with one of Israel’s former top military officers during Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza?

Declassified UK is a small publicly-funded independent news organisation that runs rings around BBC News, and the rest of the ‘mainstream’ media, on UK foreign policy and the impact of British military and intelligence agencies on human rights and the environment. Declassified UK reported earlier this year that BBC, Guardian and Financial Times editors had secret meetings with Israeli General Aviv Kohavi one month after the Gaza bombardment began.

In attendance were Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Richard Burgess, director of news content at the BBC, and Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times. According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Kohavi’s itinerary also included meetings with Sky News chairman David Rhodes at the Israeli embassy, and then shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, between 7 and 9 November 2023.

Kohavi had only stepped down from running Israel’s military months earlier. According to Declassified UK’s investigation, Kohavi had subsequently been ‘tasked with cultivating support for Israel as it escalated its brutal military offensive in Gaza.’

A journalist who was working for the BBC at the time of the visit told Declassified UK:

‘I don’t recall any internal correspondence about the meeting, which the BBC would ordinarily send out if there was a high-profile visit of this kind. I also find it very difficult to believe that the organisation would hold an equivalent meeting with the Hamas government.’

The journalist, who requested anonymity, added:

‘Not only is Kohavi’s visit unprecedented but it’s also outrageous that one of the most senior editors at the BBC should court company with a foreign military figure in this way, especially one whose country stands accused of serious human rights violations.

‘It further undermines the independence and impartiality that the BBC claims to uphold, and I think it has done irreparable damage to any trust audiences had in the corporation.’

Des Freedman, a professor of media at Goldsmiths, University of London, told Declassified UK he could find no mention of General Kohavi in any BBC, Guardian or FT coverage since 2023, when searching on the Nexis database.

He added:

‘Obviously off the record briefings have a place in journalism. However, meeting secretly with a senior IDF representative in the middle of a genocidal campaign as part of an organised propaganda offensive raises serious questions about integrity and transparency.

‘You would hope that news titles would go out of their way to avoid accusations of bias by rejecting the offer to meet privately and instead to put such meetings on the record. In reality, editors at the Guardian, BBC and FT appear willing to open their doors to Israeli spokespeople – no matter how controversial and offensive – in a way which is denied to Palestinian representatives.’

Conclusion: ‘Palestine Is The Rock’

The function of the major news media, very much including BBC News, is not to fully inform or educate the public about what our governments or other elite forces in society are doing. Their primary role is to maintain structures of state and corporate control that keep the public away from the levers of power.

Jason Hickel, a professor of anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, made these cogent observations recently via X:

‘Palestine is the rock on which the West will break itself.

‘Put yourself in the shoes of people in the global South. For nearly two years they have watched how Western leaders, who love to talk about human rights and the rule of law, are happy to shred all these values in the most spectacular displays of hypocrisy in order to prop up their military proxy-state as it openly conducts genocide and ethnic cleansing against an occupied people, even in the face of *overwhelming* international condemnation.’

He continued:

‘What do you think people in the South are supposed to conclude from this?  What would *you* conclude from this in their position?  Decades of Western propaganda have been shattered, this time in full technicolour. Western governments have made it clear that they do not care about human rights and the rule of law when it comes to people of colour, the global majority.’

In fact, Western governments do not even care about human rights and the rule of law in their own countries, where these conflict with the requirements of power and control by elites. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out over many decades, ‘there is a very elaborate propaganda system’ in capitalist societies:

‘involving everything, from the public relations industry and advertising to the corporate media, which simply marginalizes a large part of the population. They technically are allowed to participate by pushing buttons every few years, but they have essentially no role in formulating policy. They can ratify decisions made by others.’

(Noam Chomsky and James Kelman, Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime: Why Ideas Matter, PM Press, 2021, p. 159)

BBC News is a crucial component of this elaborate propaganda system. No amount of self-serving managerial rhetoric about ‘trust’, ‘transparency’ and ‘impartiality’ can refute that fundamental reality.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

Operation Rolling Thunder was a sustained U.S. bombing campaign over Vietnam. The Rolling Thunder Revue was a 1975–76 madcap concert tour headed by Bob Dylan, featuring  extraordinary musicians and collaborators. Now, there’s a new “Rolling Thunder”; a maximalist anti-abortion campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration, the FDA, Congress and the courts to ban the use of mifepristone. To bolster their claims against mifepristone, abolitionists have latched on to a new non-peer-reviewed highly questionable study by a conservative think tank.

During the Presidential campaign, Trump juked and jived on his position on abortion access as seven states passed measures to enshrine abortion rights and several others, including red Kansas blocked efforts to restrict existing access. Now the Administration must balance the real-politique of the upcoming mid-term elections with the zeal of the anti-abortion coalition.

The question remains as to whether abortion abolitionists can prevail over the will of the majority of women and men who support access to abortion.

Restricting and ultimately banning access to medication abortion has been a longtime goal of the conservative movement. According to the Guttmacher Institute, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the playbook for the Trump administration, advocated “reinstating medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone that require in-person dispensing and limit who can prescribe and receive the medication.

“By effectively ending telehealth provision of the method, these restrictions would limit access to the method for anyone who faces barriers to reaching a brick-and-mortar clinic, including individuals receiving telehealth care (under the protection of shield laws) in states where abortion is banned.”

Project 2025 “also recommends revoking mifepristone’s US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, which would remove the drug from the market entirely.”

Politico’s Alice Miranda Ollstein recently reported that, “While the Trump administration paid little attention to the medication in its first months in office, and even filed a court brief to preserve access, the activists are counting on a report from the conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center to light a fire under those in power.”

Ollstein further notes that “Mifepristone, one of two drugs used in roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S., is a longtime target of conservative activists who consider it the primary driver of the increase in abortions since Roe’s fall in 2022 and the method millions of women are using to circumvent state bans”

According to the Ethics and Public Policy Center report:

• This largest-known study of the abortion pill is based on analysis of data from an all-payer insurance claims database that includes 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023.

• 10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.

• The real-world rate of serious adverse events following mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of “less than 0.5 percent” in clinical trials reported on the drug label.

• The FDA should immediately reinstate its earlier, stronger patient safety protocols to ensure physician responsibility for women who take mifepristone under their care, as well as mandate full reporting of its side effects.

• The FDA should further investigate the harm mifepristone causes to women and, based on objective safety criteria, reconsider its approval altogether.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA chief Marty Makary — have already expressed openness to re-examining the pills’ safety and efficacy. The Guardian reported that “Last month, Makary told the Semafor World Economy Summit that he had ‘no plans to take action’ on mifepristone. However, he added: ‘There is an ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone. So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.’”

While Ollstein pointed out that “Medical experts and abortion-right supporters say it exaggerates the danger of a medication that more than 100 scientific studies have found are safe and effective,”

Anti-abortion activists are treating the Ethics and Public Policy Center report as if receiving manna from heaven. “One of the things that we have the ability to do now with this data is to pressure the FDA and lawmakers to reconsider, if not suspend, their approval of this medication until they can do more research into it,” Maria Baer, a podcast host for the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, said on a private Zoom call last week where anti-abortion leaders discussed the strategy. The groups on the call included Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Americans United for Life, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Students for Life and Live Action.

Abortion-rights supporters are calling the report “junk science,” maintaining, according to Ollstein, “that the paper was released directly by the conservative think tank and not published in a medical journal where it would have been vetted by outside experts in the peer review process.” Ollstein argues that, “Medical experts and abortion-right supporters say it exaggerates the danger of a medication that more than 100 scientific studies have found are safe and effective.”

“Activists on the Zoom call pushed back on those criticisms, arguing that academia is ‘broken’ and they couldn’t trust the peer reviewers not to leak or ‘sabotage’ their effort.”

As the Guardian recently reported, “So far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.”

Abortion abolitionists will not be satisfied until all abortions are illegal, abortion pills banned, doctors punished for performing abortions, women stigmatized and criminalized for having abortions, and anyone daring to help a woman get an abortion is punished severely.

In a move that is surprising on the surface, on May 5, Trump Justice Department lawyers asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit aimed at restricting access to the abortion pill mifepristone on technical jurisdictional grounds.

Quoted in the NY Times, Mary Ziegler, a law professor and abortion law expert at the University of California, Davis, said that “the Trump administration’s action to dismiss the case is surprising, but I think the best way to read it is that they’re just buying time to figure out what to do about mifepristone.” …She said the filing “avoids saying anything on the substance at all,” and might reflect cautiousness before the mid-term elections.

Rolling Thunder is a blending of legal effort with political muscle, aiming not just to defund Planned Parenthood and close clinics, but to eliminate the most accessible form of abortion care altogether. If successful, it could further fragment reproductive rights across the U.S., deepening the divide between states that protect abortion access and those that seek to eliminate it entirely.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille.

Patrick Guarasci, chief political strategist for Judge Crawford, and Sam Roecker, senior campaign advisor and communications lead, share how they pulled off a landmark win in Wisconsin’s pivotal Supreme Court race, offering a blueprint for reclaiming power in GOP-dominated states.

In Wisconsin, the land of cheese, beer, and GOP ratf*cking, progressives scored a major victory. And they did it despite daunting odds, including opposition from none other than the world’s richest man/psychopath. When Musk is not launching cars into space or tweeting himself into SEC investigations, he has been throwing his weight, and giant checks, behind efforts to tilt the judiciary in his favor.

Judge Crawford's campaign wasn’t about crypto hype or culture war distractions; it was about qualifications, a smart strategy, and staying laser-focused on issues people actually care about: reproductive rights, fair electoral maps, and keeping the courts independent.

This wasn’t just a Wisconsin win. It was a blueprint for how to beat big money with big people power. Students, first-time voters, and folks who typically only turn out for Packers games showed up in force. The lesson? When campaigns speak to real concerns and mobilize communities, they can overcome even the deepest pockets. Senator Ron Johnson, MAGA/Russia loyalist and 2028 re-election hopeful, might want to start updating his résumé.

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:

• April 28 4pm ET – Book club discussion of Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower  

• Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon. 

• Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon. 

• Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet?

• Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community 

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

We go to Madison, Wisconsin, to speak with The Nation's John Nichols about Tuesday's pivotal state Supreme Court election, in which liberal Judge Susan Crawford convincingly defeated conservative candidate Brad Schimel. Crawford’s election is a major victory for Democrats after billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk poured about $25 million into the Wisconsin race, helping to make it the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history. “This is a huge signal from a battleground state that Americans are genuinely upset, genuinely angry, I think, with Trump and with Musk,” says Nichols. Tuesday also saw a pair of special House elections in Florida where Republicans held both seats, helping to maintain the party’s narrow majority in Congress. While Democrats were unlikely to flip the deep-red districts, Nichols notes “there was a huge shift in both of the Florida districts toward the Democratic candidates.”

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

The overturning of Roe v. Wade was the result of decades of relentless effort and strategic maneuvering by a determined religious and right wing coalition, and, the underestimation of the power of this movement by the liberal establishment. Recency bias puts Donald Trump and his appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court at the forefront of those responsible for taking down Roe v. Wade. However, reality is far more complex, with roots of the right’s organizing stretching back to the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion.

This landmark decision sparked one of the most enduring and contentious religious and political movements in American history, involving national and local anti-abortion organizations, violence-prone activists that didn’t stop at the murder of abortion providers and the bombing of health clinics, Religious Right leaders, conservative legal organizations, the Republican Party, and a coterie of deep-pocketed right-wing funders and foundations.

In their new book The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerner write:  “For more than 40 years a passionate band of conservative and mostly Christian activists tried to find ways to undermine [Roe v. Wade]. … But they had been losing.”  However, despite the losses the movement was marked by conviction and a perseverance that led to countless legal battles, demonstrations, vilification and attacks on abortion providers, political campaigns, and grassroots mobilizations, all aimed at overturning Roe.

“The Fall of Roe unfolds like a horror story,” New York magazine’s Sarah Jones recently noted. “Danger lurked outside the cabin door, but the threat was never fully perceived by those who lived within. Dias and Lerer depict a liberal Establishment that behaved as though it had permanently won. ‘Roe loomed so large in American life that it was almost impossible to imagine that it could disappear,’ they write. ‘Every election Democrats and their allies in the abortion rights movement warned voters about the potential consequences to abortion rights, should they vote Republican,’ but they didn’t really believe that Roe would one day fall.

“Yet as institutions like Planned Parenthood grew flush with cash, activists closer to the ground and who were more exposed to danger warned of trouble. A constellation of ‘smaller, largely Black and Hispanic abortion-rights organizations’ knew that restrictions had already eroded the right to abortion. Though the big abortion-rights groups considered the Affordable Care Act a major success, the law reaffirmed the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal funding for abortion care and mostly affected poor women.”

In the early years, conservative activists faced an uphill battle. The 1973 ruling was seen as a settled issue, and early attempts to challenge it in court and through legislation were met with failure. Yet, this did not deter them. They understood that to achieve their goal, they needed to play the long game, embedding their cause within the fabric of American politics and culture. Reproductive rights became one of the right’s foremost culture war issues.

Throughout the late 20th century, anti-abortion activists formed alliances with influential religious leaders, who began to preach the sanctity of life from their pulpits, galvanizing their congregations. Local and national organizations, such as the National Right to Life Committee, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and Operation Rescue, organized protests and lobbying efforts, ensuring that the issue remained in the public eye and on the political agenda.

Conservative legal organizations, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Counsel, the Thomas More Society, and the Federalist Society, played a crucial role in this effort. They worked tirelessly to promote a judicial philosophy that favored a narrow interpretation of the Constitution, which they believed could lead to the overturning of Roe. This involved meticulously vetting and supporting judicial candidates who shared their views, to ensure that when the opportunity arose, they would have allies on the bench.

The Republican Party also became a key player in this movement. Starting in the 1980s, the party increasingly adopted anti-abortion stances as part of its platform, recognizing the issue’s power to mobilize a small yet highly motivated portion of the electorate. Republican presidents, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, appointed conservative judges who were sympathetic to the anti-abortion cause, slowly shifting the balance of the judiciary.

Right-wing funders and foundations provided the financial backing necessary to sustain this long-term effort. Wealthy donors and organizations, such as the Koch brothers and the Heritage Foundation, funded advocacy groups, think tanks, and political campaigns, ensuring that the anti-abortion movement had the resources it needed to continue its fight.

For decades, these efforts seemed to be in vain. The courts upheld Roe, and public opinion largely supported – and still does — a woman’s right to choose. But then, along came Donald Trump. His promise to name “pro-life judges” during his 2016 presidential campaign was the opening the anti-abortion movement had been waiting for. With Trump in the White House, the movement saw its chance to finally achieve its goal.

Trump’s presidency marked a turning point. He appointed three Supreme Court justices—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—who were seen as likely to overturn Roe. These appointments shifted the balance of the Court, creating a solid conservative majority.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, effectively overturning Roe v. Wade. The ruling was the culmination of nearly 50 years of relentless effort by the anti-abortion movement, a testament to their persistence and strategic acumen.

The fall of Roe has awakened reproductive rights advocates and is ushering in a new era in American politics and society. As Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerner detail in their book, this victory for the anti-abortion movement is not just a legal milestone but a transformative moment that will shape the future of the country. The rise of this new America, forged through decades of struggle and sacrifice, is a story of how deeply held beliefs and determined activism can eventually reshape the landscape of a nation.

There is no question that the anti abortion movement will continue campaigning to outlaw abortion in all fifty states. And now, in the flush of victory right wing coalitions are seeking to broaden the attack on abortion to attacking the right to contraception. The upcoming presidential election will go a long way to seeing whether that scenario prevails.

Whether the American people will allow that to happen remains to be seen. According to the Pew Research Center, support for abortion access has remained steady, with 63% of the population favoring access in almost all cases.

And, women and their allies are fighting back. According to Ballotpedia, “In 2022, there were six ballot  measures addressing abortion — the most on record for a single year. Measures were approved in California, Michigan and Vermont. Measures were defeated (that would have eliminated abortions) in Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. ” In 2023, Ohio passed a constitutional amendment establishing the right to abortion. There will be a ballot initiative in Florida in 2024 election to establish abortion rights following State’s recent highly restrictive anti-abortion legislation.

The anti-abortion movement’s playing the long game has redefined America’s political landscape. Now, the question remains, whether reproductive rights advocates and activists can sustain and build upon its recent victories. If pro-choice organizations and activists have learned anything from this 50-plus year battle, it is that fundamental rights cannot be taken for granted.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

Palestinian novelist, poet and activist Susan Abulhawa recently returned from two weeks in the Gaza Strip, where she witnessed firsthand the destruction and misery wrought upon the territory and its people by Israel’s relentless assault. Abulhawa spoke with Democracy Now! last Wednesday from Cairo and said “the trauma is immeasurable” for the Palestinians in Gaza. Abulhawa describes hearing stories of abuse, humiliation and torture at the hands of Israeli soldiers as people struggle to find basic necessities to survive. “The degradation is total,” says Abulhawa. “And on top of that, they’re bombed, day in and out.”

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

We speak with Palestinian novelist, poet and activist Susan Abulhawa, who is in Cairo and just returned from two weeks in Gaza. “What’s happening to people isn’t just this death and dismemberment and hunger. It is a total denigration of their personhood, of their whole society,” says Abulhawa. “What I witnessed personally in Rafah and some of the middle areas is incomprehensible, and I will call it a holocaust — and I don’t use that word lightly. But it is absolutely that.”

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

Let’s start with the ballooning of augmented reality inside virtual reality. Facebook’s Oculus Rift escapism has flopped. Trying to improve on this bizarre quest to envelop its customers, Apple plans to release the “Vision Pro”, a “mixed-reality” headset so large that Washington Post columnist Molly Roberts described it as “clunky and creepy” and predicted failure for this $3,499 rip-off.

Do mega-corporation CEOs – who spend company profits on massive stock buybacks for no productive use (Apple plans to spend $90 billion on buybacks this year) – spend any money on the lost practice of technology assessment? Do Facebook and Apple have studies on what fantasy goggles are doing to youngsters’ minds? Are these devices producing anxieties, fears or addictions? Do these corporations have more victims than customers? Do the high-tech CEOs care? If they do, they’re not saying.

Let’s move on to the big stuff! Congress has been spending trillions of your taxpayer dollars on technologies of modern weaponry, chemicals, drugs, medical devices, transportation, the Internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology and fusion energy. Yet the general public remains clueless about the adverse impact of these expenditures. Congress doesn’t even know if many technologies or products work as advertised.

You can thank the bombastic, ignorant Newt Gingrich for hurling our 535 members of Congress into this black void. In 1994 Gingrich orchestrated the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. And, in 1995, after becoming Speaker of the House, Gingrich and the Republican-controlled Congress eliminated the funding of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). With a small $20 million annual budget, OTA produced scores of assessment reports needed by Congress. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) was one of OTA’s strongest supporters, who with other members of Congress served on its bipartisan board. When Congress was debating the creation of OTA, Kennedy said “without an OTA the role of Congress in national science policy would become more and more perfunctory and more and more dependent on administration facts and figures, with little opportunity for independent Congressional evaluation.” Kennedy was furious about the Republican defunding of OTA, but could not marshal enough of his dejected fellow Democrats to fight to restore funding even after Gingrich resigned in disgrace five years later.

The failure of Democrats to fund OTA when they controlled Congress allowed Gingrich’s demolition to continue the wreckage he launched. Technically unadvised members looked foolish for years in their questioning of Silicon Valley executives at public hearings.

Right after Obama’s victory in 2008, carrying large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, I organized an effort to refund OTA with Nobel laureates and other scientists on board. For many years, Cong. Rush Holt Jr. (D-NJ) led the effort in the House, only to be undermined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said she didn’t want to give the Republicans an opportunity to accuse her of starting another bureaucracy on Capitol Hill. Truly shocking!

Now it is 2023 and the studied ignorance of Congress fuels the strategically useless F-35 Fighter planes at a $1.5 trillion projected cost. Well over a trillion dollars will be spent upgrading the nuclear bomb arsenal – currently able to blow up the world many times over. The unavoidable ballistic missile so-called defense program soaks up billions of dollars yearly (See: “Why Missile Defense Won’t Work” by MIT Professor Ted Postol). The rave for electric vehicles badly needs a thorough technology assessment for its lifecycle costs and benefits.

An adequately funded OTA would have alerted Congress early about the looming opioid crisis and crimes that have taken a million or more American lives. A similar alert from an OTA report, before Covid-19 struck, could have alerted Congress on the lack of preparedness for coming pandemics. Being part of Congress, OTA can command the attention and credibility from members far more easily than any studies or alarms from citizen groups or civically-minded Think Tanks.

Pressing the issue of funding OTA in the 21st century’s second decade brought the Democratic Party’s excuse that either one chamber of Congress or the other half was Republican-controlled. I, with Bruce Fein, Joan Claybrook and Claire Nader, explained to Speaker Pelosi in 2020 that the House or Senate can fund OTA without the concurrence of the other simply on the grounds of its prerogative to more fully fund its own institution. No reply. (See letter).

It took 86-year-old Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) to publicly chastise his colleagues with articles titled: “Why is Congress so dumb?” (January 11, 2019, Washington Post) and “Congress Is Sabotaging Your Post Office” (April 7, 2019, Washington Monthly). Still no visible reaction from the tone-deaf congressional solons busily reducing their own significance under the Constitution and spending money unwisely.

The ongoing lack of local technology assessment capabilities leaves Congress without a grassroots infrastructure of fact-based, nonpartisan analysis.

Municipalities do not have formal little OTAs for their infrastructure projects, so the grasping, politically connected vendors take advantage of such ignorance to increase prices and delay projects and continue shoddiness. Think bridges, highways, schools and public buildings projects.

The science and engineering departments of universities are rarely interested in supplying such knowledge or even teaching the ethics of engineering to their students. In 2018 we sponsored a book titled Ethics, Politics, and Whistleblowing in Engineering by Rania Milleron and Nicholas Sakellariou (CRC Press) that delved into how disasters can occur when engineering professionals don’t take their consciences that reflect their expected responsibilities to work. (See Nicholas Ashford’s review). Three times we sent letters to about two dozen Deans and professors of Engineering around the country encouraging them to develop classes on ethics for their students. Not a single reply. (See, January 2, 2019, Letter to Engineering Professors or Department Heads).

In 1998, our community project in Winsted, Connecticut retained an engineer, Susan M. McGoey, as a “community technologist.” She proved her worth manyfold, catching over-reaches by the engineering firm hired to upgrade the town’s drinking water purification plant. She also advised the town on its municipal watershed stewardship, began a natural resources inventory and organized a successful river clean-up along with many other money-saving projects from redesigning traffic lights to improving downtown renovations. (See: Courant.).

Readers interested in collaborating with the renewed effort to fund the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in Congress can contact their members of Congress, and also connect with us at gro.redannull@ofni. It is high time to aggregate dedicated public opinion and advocacy on this inexpensive but very important restoration.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said Monday that she will not support an effort to temporarily replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the Senate Judiciary Committee, effectively sinking Democratic hopes of breaking a tie on the panel that has helped Republicans blockade President Joe Biden's federal judge nominees.

Collins (R-Maine), a self-styled moderate who has played a decisive role in the far-right takeover of the nation's federal court system, called the push to replace Feinstein (D-Calif.) as she recovers from shingles—something the senator herself requested last week—part of a "concerted campaign to force her off the Judiciary Committee."

"I will have no part in it," Collins added.

Collins was the latest Republican senator to express opposition to temporarily replacing Feinstein, a move Democrats were expected to attempt this week via the unanimous consent process—which was always a longshot given that any single senator could sink the effort.

Now it also appears highly unlikely that Democrats will be able to get the necessary 60 yes votes for a potential Feinstein replacement, with Collins joining Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), and others in opposition.

While Collins framed her objection to replacing Feinstein as a show of respect for the longtime senator—even though the obstruction goes against Feinstein's stated wishes—other Republicans made clear that they simply want to keep stonewalling Biden's judicial nominees.

"I will not go along with [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer's plan to replace Senator Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee and pack the court with activist judges," Blackburn, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote in a social media post earlier Monday. "Joe Biden wants the Senate to rubber stamp his unqualified and controversial judges to radically transform America." (Blackburn had no problem voting to confirm unqualified and highly "controversial" judges nominated by former President Donald Trump.)

Along with Feinstein's indefinite absence from the Senate Judiciary Committee—which has left the panel deadlocked at 10-10—the Democratic leadership's continued adherence to the antiquated "blue slip" tradition of giving senators veto power over nominees for federal court seats in their home states has ground the judge confirmation process to a halt.

Earlier this month, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) announced she would not return a blue slip for Scott Colom, a Biden U.S. district court nominee who had bipartisan support. Under current norms upheld by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Hyde-Smith's opposition is enough to sink Colom's nomination.

"If you want an example of how one side plays to win and the other does not, look at how Durbin refuses to get rid of blue slips—handing Republicans a unilateral veto of Biden’s judicial picks—while Republicans won't so much as let an ailing Feinstein be replaced temporarily," said Brian Fallon, executive director of the advocacy group Demand Justice.

There are currently 58 vacancies on U.S. district courts and six on circuit courts, according to Demand Justice chief counsel Christopher Kang. The American Constitution Society noted earlier this month that "the Senate has made limited progress on judicial nominations in recent weeks, with only three confirmations since March 16."

"As of April 6," the group observed, "there are still 18 Article III nominees pending on the Senate floor, waiting for cloture and confirmation votes."

A dozen Biden judges are awaiting a vote from the evenly split Senate Judiciary Committee, in which a tie means a nominee does not advance.

The consequences of failing to fill vacant lifetime federal court seats could be disastrous, given the Republican Party's willingness to abandon Senate norms to ram through extreme judges whenever they get the opportunity. During Trump's four years in office, the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed more than 230 federal judges—a recent record that appears safe given the slowing pace of Biden judicial confirmations.

With the Feinstein replacement effort all but dead, the path forward for Democrats is unclear.

Feinstein is facing growing calls to resign from the Senate entirely, which would allow California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to appoint a replacement who would serve through 2024. That replacement would still have to win Senate approval to sit on the judiciary panel.

"Whatever deal Democrats negotiate—if any—they should make no promises about keeping the 'blue slip' tradition that gives individual senators what amounts to a veto over prospective judicial nominees from their home states," columnist Jill Lawrence wrote for The Bulwark on Monday. "It's not a law. It's not in the Constitution. Biden, when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, used blue slips to assure consultation but considered them advisory, not binding."

Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of the Take Back the Court Action Fund, told Lawrence that Democrats "have a responsibility to do everything they can to rebalance the judiciary and dilute control" of Trump judges, who have worked to gut abortion rights, weaken gun regulations, and protect polluters.

"There are few things more urgent for the Senate to do than fill these open seats," said Lipton-Lubet.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The fuss began with the festival organisers’ invitation of two Palestinian authors, Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd. Abulhawa was specifically targeted for critical comments on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, notably regarding NATO membership, and for being a mouthpiece of “Russian propaganda”, while El-Kurd has been singled out for social-media commentary on the Israeli state, calling it “sadistic”, “demonic” and “a death cult”.

Righteously, the South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas showed his less than worldly view on such festivals by insisting on boycotting their talks and presentations. Ever the vote-getting politician, there were those constituents at the Association of Ukrainians in South Australia who had been making noise, notably through their president, Frank Fursenko. “We are very concerned that [the festival organisers] are giving a platform to people who are known apologists for the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” insisted Fursenko.

Malinauskas even contemplated pulling government funding from the event, something he declared at his address opening Writers’ Week. (This was also the view of the South Australian opposition leader, David Speirs.) The premier, it should be noted, is less morally troubled when it comes to funding the LIV Golf tournament, backed by the obscurantist journalist-assassinating regime of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

At the very least, he made some concession to maturity: refusing “to listen to someone’s viewpoint” also involved surrendering “the opportunity to challenge it, much less change their mind.” But for all that Abulhawa’s presence at the Writers’ Week had to be “actively” questioned.

The Advertiser was less reserved, barking in childish condemnation and demanding, via a statement from editor Gemma Jones, that the Writers’ Week director Louise Adler resign. “The views of the two writers in question are repugnant.”

Law firm MinterEllison also took up a tenancy in the land of black and white in their decision to withdraw sponsorship, citing concerns about “the potential for racist or antisemitic commentary.” It had decided “to remove our presence and involvement with this year’s Writers’ Festival program”. That’s branding for you.

Consultancies hardly known for their principled stances on intellectual debate let alone the public good took to the podium of virtue even as they withdrew their support. PwC, which provides pro bono auditing for the Adelaide Festival Foundation, openly disassociated itself from the event by requesting that its logo be removed from the festival website. “We condemn in the strongest terms any antisemitic comments and any suggestion of support for Russia’s war against Ukraine,” the company stated in a memorandum. “We stand with the Jewish and Ukrainian communities who have been understandably hurt by this issue. In this respect, we have asked the chair of the Adelaide Foundation that any association with PwC with this aspect of the festival be removed.”

In all these shallow, stubbornly ahistorical assessments, context is missing. The background, and sense of where such supposedly horrendous opinions sprung from, are dismissed. The culture of cancellation and erasure, as it has been previously, is the prerogative of the powerful and their PR offices. It is also insidious, stressing the trendy, appealing brand of the moment, the acceptable opinion which makes the acceptable person.

El-Kurd, Palestinian poet and correspondent for The Nation, enraged since the day Jewish settlers made their way into his East Jerusalem home, has made no secret in adopting a more militant stance for Palestinians. It was, he stated, “not enough that I have lost my home to Israeli settlers, it’s not enough that I grew up and lived as a refugee under military occupation.” In his protest and suffering, he had been constantly told to be “polite” and “respectable”.

Those years were behind him, times which featured a “failed strategy” that placed a heavy emphasis on humanising unacceptable tragedy: the focus on women and children (again, the branding that matters); the focus on “our inability to commit violence, our inability to feel rage”. “And we over-emphasise the victims whose qualifiers make them human.”

In her response to the storm, Abulhawa expressed gratitude to Adler and the Board of the Adelaide Festival “for bravely ensuring that we do and will have space to speak and interact with readers on a cultural landscape.” She then moved to chart the fault lines that have made contrarian views – or at least views deemed undesirable by the anointed policing agents on the Ukrainian War – a matter of vengeful reaction. To be critical of the Ukrainian Saint was to somehow be a shill for Russia’s Vladimir Putin; to be a proponent for peace was somehow akin to encouraging genocide. “These assertions are false, absurd and libellous.”

Specifically regarding Zelenskyy, his sins lay in “taking actions and provocations that would lead to foreseeable, even predictable, war, which has not only wrecked Ukraine and her people, but led to global insecurity and fuel shortages, affecting the most vulnerable among us.”

Her views are not unusual, or astonishing. They are also echoed through the Global South, where the brands of the noble Ukrainian victim and the remorseless Russian monster have lesser currency. One can understand the dynamics, and sad perversions of power, without justifying their brutal manifestations. Abulhawa references John Mearsheimer’s warnings about US provocations against Russia, using Ukraine as a base and pretext. The Ukraine conflict, to that end, is not isolated or regional. It is a “global proxy war, the outcome of which may well determine the world order for generations to come.”

Abulhawa would have also been well within her rights to cite the very figure who gave birth to the doctrine of Soviet containment at the start of the Cold War. The late diplomat and historian George Frost Kennan, eyeing the expansionist drive of NATO and US power eastwards towards the Russian border, could only issue this warning in 1997: “Such a decision may be expected to inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

To her estimable credit, Adler remained adamant and defiant in permitting the writers to attend their events. “Our business,” she told the ABC, “is to operate an open space, not a safe space, in which ideas that may be confronting, disturbing, provocative, are debated with civility, that’s the agenda.” Writers, she also explained to The Age, were not sought out “via their Twitter feeds. I do not think the social media space for a nuanced or reasoned analysis and discussion.” It never was such a place, but to the cancel culture footsoldiers, that is exactly where they feel most comfortable.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

U.S. drug policy reform advocates condemned President Joe Biden's commitment to "accelerating the crackdown on fentanyl trafficking" as part of his administration's strategy for tackling the opioid crisis, a policy the White House announced in a preview of Tuesday night's State of the Union address.

Although the SOTU preview says the administration will be "expanding access to evidence-based prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery," the document says Biden will "work with Congress to make permanent tough penalties on suppliers of fentanyl," fentanyl analogs, and fentanyl-related substances (FRS).

The outline states that Biden "looks forward to working with Congress on its comprehensive proposal to permanently schedule all illicitly produced FRS into Schedule I," the most severe Drug Enforcement Administration classification.

"The push to place all fentanyl-related substances in Schedule I is unfortunate and misguided. Schedule I is supposed to be for substances that we know to be harmful and not helpful."

"Traffickers of these deadly substances must face the penalties they deserve, no matter how they adjust their drugs," the preview asserts.

In response to the SOTU preview, Maritza Perez Medina, director of the office of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a statement that "we are glad to see President Biden continue to call for increased access to evidence-based treatment, harm reduction, and recovery services."

"But, his support for harsher penalties for fentanyl-related substances—which will result in broader application of mandatory minimum sentencing and disproportionately harm Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities—in the same breath is incredibly counterproductive and fails to recognize how we got to this place to begin with," she asserted. "Over 100,000 of our loved ones being lost to avoidable overdoses a year is not because of a lack of enforcement, it's a direct result of it."

Gregory Dudley, who chairs the chemistry department at West Virginia University, argued that "the push to place all fentanyl-related substances in Schedule I is unfortunate and misguided. Schedule I is supposed to be for substances that we know to be harmful and not helpful."

"We don't know which of these substances would be harmful or helpful, and how could we without testing them?" Dudley asked. "Some of these substances could be lifesaving opioid antagonists like naloxone, or better. This proposal prioritizes criminalization over healthcare."

Susan Ousterman, who lost her son Tyler to an accidental overdose in 2020 and subsequently founded the Vilomah Memorial Foundation, said that "it's incredibly disheartening to see the president co-opting the grief of mothers like me in an attempt to increase penalties, rather than prioritizing the health measures that are desperately needed to save lives."

"Increased penalties for people who use or sell drugs, including fentanyl-related substances, would not have kept my son alive or the countless children of other mothers I have met," Ousterman stressed. "In fact, it's policies such as these that created the increased stigma and fear that kept our children from accessing help, and it's what has led to the increasingly dangerous drug supply that resulted in their deaths."

"It's time for the president and other policymakers to prioritize the lives of all humans by embracing a health approach rather than engaging in politics that only perpetuate this disastrous war on drugs," she added. "As a person who understands the profound impact both substance use and child loss have on families, I expected more."

Biden was one of the architects of the 1980s escalation of the War on Drugs. He coined the term "drug czar" while advocating the establishment of the cabinet-level position and was a key supporter of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, legislation that accelerated U.S. mass incarceration.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.

— Aristotle, Poetics (1457b)

It all seemed familiar. Anthropomorphised Mother Nature in vengeful mood; humans wondering if they might meet a frozen demise in trapped vehicles; the planners taking stock as to how best to cope with grim circumstances. The New York State governor Kathy Hochul was happy to stick her head out in declaring the latest lethal winter storm in Buffalo to be nothing less than a “war with Mother Nature, and she has been hitting us with everything she has.”

Having found her less than imaginative metaphor, the governor ran with it, suggesting that Mother Nature had laid waste to the region around Buffalo. “It is [like] giong to a war zone, and the vehicles along the sides of the roads are shocking.”

Sappy media outlets have also taken up Hochul’s call from the parapets of battle, scouring the record for heartfelt accounts of the human spirit. The Guardian warmed to “stories of endurance, survival and rescue” – these are the sorts of things you expect when under attack from an omnipotent enemy. “Good Samaritans took stranded travellers into their homes; strangers worked together to help a snow-trapped expectant mother through some birth.”

Metaphors of war and the environment are rarely helpful. They conjure up false notions of battle, fictional platoons, ready reserves and resources marshalled against a retributive god or some sentient force of agency. Unfortunately, they are everywhere, and often conceptually shaky. “A solidified metaphor, a metaphor accepted unambiguously as truth,” writes Scarlet Marquette with accuracy, “is, in fact, a most pernicious force, inimical to truth.”

Officials have made it a habit to see war everywhere, often involving inanimate and abstract notions that do more to distort than clarify. They operate as enormous distractions in the service of not making policy. There are wars on sugar, salt, fat, poverty, homelessness and that colossally failed project known as the “War against Drugs”.

Such tendencies have seen a slew of publications, many of the specialised variety. One co-authored article in the dedicated journal Metaphor and Symbol argues that “war metaphors are omnipresent because (a) they draw on basic and widely shared schematic knowledge that efficiently structures our ability to reason and communicate about many different types of situations, and (b) they reliably express an urgent, negatively valenced emotional tone that captures attention and motivates action.”

That the action is necessarily well-directed or founded is another matter. Susan Sontag picked up on this point in examining illness and its various metaphors, writing that “military metaphors contribute to the stigmatizing of certain illnesses and, by extension, those who are ill”.

But the theme of Nature can also be taken from the other side: that humanity has brought wrath against itself for its plundering, fecund, and warring ways. Nature, in that sense, is the recipient of human bad behaviour, with humans refusing to come to the table and make peace.

The UN environment chief, Inger Andersen, sees much in that comparison. Unlike Hochul, her concern lies in the concern that human beings have been the unilateral aggressors, exploiters, and marauders. “As far as biodiversity is concerned, we are at war with nature. We need to make peace with nature. Because nature is what sustains everything on Earth … the science is unequivocal.”

Pausing to reflect on the birth of the 8 billionth human being was an occasion to celebrate, but “the more people there are, the more we put the Earth under heavy pressure.” That pressure came in the form of “the five horsemen of the biodiversity apocalypse”, namely, land-use, over-exploitation, pollution, the broader climate crisis, and the spread of invasive species.

The same sentiment is expressed by the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, who shifts the focus to humanity as the warring problem on Planet Earth. He puts his hope in the children to save us from this dilemma, hoping the young will be far more sensible in making peace. “I am continuously inspired by their commitment & leadership in tackling the war against nature.”

If one starts off with the premise that human beings are prone to such innate war making tendencies – and this premise has been challenged – alternatives have been suggested. The philosopher William James proposed a re-channelling of such desires in his address, “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Instead of killing each other, humanity might go about other pursuits.

Unfortunately, such redirections bring environmental consequences James could scant see. “To the coal mines and iron mines, to freight trains … to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youth be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.”

Another rechannelling is required, but it will not be found in the exhortations to survival suggested by Hochul. Her language is not that of humans bound to nature as collaborative ecological agents, but warriors besieged. In that analysis, nature itself is stigmatised. Like Medea, she will kill her children, and is accordingly to be feared.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Painting titled The Other Guantanamo by Susan Matthews.

Don’t tell Susan Matthews what she can and can’t paint. An artist with a mind all her own, she has ventured to remote villages in Cuba and met Black folk that few North Americans have known or cared about. And she didn’t go on a Venceremos Brigade. You remember them. Beginning in 1969, and for the next 50 or so years, thousands of North Americans joined a brigade, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In Cuba, they harvested sugar cane, basked in the sun and enjoyed Caribbean fun. Susan Matthews has traveled to Cuba nearly two-dozen times, connected to Afro-Cuban dancers, musicians and rituals far older than the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban government that has all-too often ignored. Tourists to Cuba have embraced Afro-Cuban culture and helped to keep it alive.

Matthews works in acrylic in her Oakland, California studio, where she creates large colorful paintings which have captivating titles such as “The Women of Dzodze,” “Rumba Taller Gráfica” and “La Caridad de Oriente.” Until the end of October 2022, her work is on exhibit at the Canessa Gallery, not far from City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Avenue. In homage to the members of the Beat Generation—who loved the bongos—and the beat of Afro-Cuban music the show is titled “Back to the Beat.” The largest painting, “Rumba Morena,” represents women drummers that Matthews met in Havana. It’s 72’’ x 54,’’ and priced at $5,000. The drummers seem to fly off the wall and into the gallery itself.

Matthews is neither Cuban nor Black; her ancestors didn’t arrive in the New World from Africa. She and her work embody what an academic versed in Afro-Cuban forms of expression might call “cross cultural fertilization.” During an interview shortly after the opening of her exhibit, Matthews told me, “It didn’t occur to me that I was a white person painting Black people. I was painting the people I met, and the ecstatic energy of their music, dance and culture.”

If every artist and writer today stopped creating, and instead reflected on his or her ethnicity and whether he or she had the right to depict people from cultures not their own, we might not have art and literature. That wasn’t Matthews.

When she had her first exhibit on the theme of Afro-Cuban music and dance in 2000 at Left of Center Gallery in North Las Vegas, African Americans gave her “the green light to keep working on her project.” One woman saw the paintings and told her, “I want to go to Cuba and study dance.”

The deeper she delved into her field of study, the more Matthews realized that the rhythms and songs sung in Cuba were uncannily similar to those ­transported from West Africa, across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Caribbean as “secrets under the skin.“ That phrase comes from a series of multimedia installations that Matthews co-created, and that moved from Cuba to Ghana and from Alaska to Oakland and San Francisco, from 2010-2014. She contributed a chapter in the book, Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance: Performing the Entangled Histories of Cuba and West Africa published by the University of Florida Press in 2021.

Matthews learned that in remote sugarcane towns in Matanzas Province, people knew their lineage, back to first generation Africans. “The elders who preserved the cultural expressions of their ancestors were passing away,” Matthews said. “We wanted to document their world while we had the opportunity. Our intention was to share our work with the rural people we met. My prints went up on walls in homes.

Matthews’ romance with the drum—one of the oldest instruments played by humans—and with drumming and with Black music began in 1976 when she was 22 years old. She and her boyfriend, who played the drums and happened to be Jewish, descended on the jazz and blues clubs on the “chitlin’ circuit,” as it was known, in West Oakland. “We were usually the only white people in the audience,” Matthews said. “The musicians always invited my boyfriend to sit in and play with them.”

At a tiny window, Matthews would order soul food made by local ladies, take a seat and enjoy the show. Matthews remembers that when members of the audience wanted more drumming, they would shout, “Give the drummer some.” James Brown helped to immortalize the concept in his single, “Funky Drummer.”

After she attended and graduated with a B.A. from UC Berkeley in 1979—and later with an MFA from San Francisco State University—Matthews took part in an Afro-Cuban percussion class on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley at La Peña Cultural Center, which was created by refugees from Chile who fled from the military coup engineered by General Augusto Pinochet. That bloody coup overthrew the legally elected government of Salvador Allende.  The class helped her along her journey, but she didn’t begin to play her first drum, a conga, until she was 40-years old.

“I loved the feel of it, the sound of it and the sense of rhythm,” she told me. “It was intoxicating.” So was her first trip to Cuba which took place in 1995. That year and in subsequent years, year after year, she began her education in the history of Afro-Cuban culture. Back in the USA, she delved into the culture of her own corner of Oakland, where she painted portraits of many of the people—bartenders, waiters, artists and community members—she met at the Merchants Saloon in Oakland. Matthews sat at the bar and had a drink or two. She didn’t ask anyone if she had the right to paint them. She just did it.

Titled “The 99%,” those portraits of working people—white, Black and brown—came with their names, places of birth, occupations and the locations of their current homes. “The portraits were inexpensive so people snapped them up,” Matthews said. They are as much a tribute to Oakland folks as the “Back to the Beat” paintings are a tribute to the Afro-Cubans in Matanzas Province. These days, Matthews teaches painting at College of San Mateo. “In the classroom I use the methodology I learned from Afro-Cuban drumming,“ she explained. “One concept builds on another and you don’t waste the students’ time.”

“Back to the Beat: Old and New Paintings” by Susan Matthews, through October 27, 2022. Artist’s talk and party Saturday October 22, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. To visit Canessa, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays contact Zach Stewart at 708Zach@gmail.com. For more information email Matthews at  Sue.Art.Matthews@gmail.coms

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonah Raskin.

A little over a week ago, the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs decision decisively overturned over 50 years of precedent established by Roe v. Wade, thereby delivering a death blow to the reproductive freedom of women across the country, from sea to shining sea. That this represents an assault on women's rights, and on democratic citizenship itself, is widely understood by many Americans. At the same time, for the minority of Americans who have energetically sought this result for decades, the decision, perversely, represents not a defeat but a triumph of not simply "life" but "women" and "democracy" itself.

Among these indefatigable activists one Marjorie Dannenfelser looms large, as the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, formerly known as the Susan B. Anthony List. Founded in 1993 and rebranded this year, the group relentlessly opposes abortion while claiming to promote the activism of women committed to "traditional," i.e., patriarchal, "family values." Last week's SCOTUS decision was a major victory for the group, which has feted such feminists as Joni Ernst, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, and Donald Trump. And on the very day the decision was rendered, Dannenfelser announced that her group would now undertake a campaign to ban abortion "in every state and in every legislature, including the Congress."

Claiming the banner of Susan B. Anthony, one of the most important feminists and women's suffrage activists in U.S. history, Dannenfelser indeed declared that the decision is "a restoration of what authentic feminism is."

If Susan B. Anthony heard these words, then she is no doubt rolling over in her grave. And this year, as we face a multi-pronged effort by the Republican Party to undermine democracy itself, it is especially appropriate to consider why.

One reason is straightforward: because, while "pro-life activists" have laid claim to her legacy, it has long been well understood that this claim is highly controversial and equally problematic, centering as it does on the almost certainly false attribution to Anthony of a single article, anonymously published in 1869, entitled "Marriage and Maternity" that itself emphatically denounced laws banning abortion even as it valorized maternity and described abortion as "child murder." (Harper D. Ward has published a careful and devastating critique of the claims of Dannenfelser and other anti-abortion activists entitled "Misrepresenting Susan B. Anthony on Abortion" at the website of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House.)

A second reason is equally straightforward but more profound: because the Dobbs decision represents an assault not only abortion rights but on the broader commitment to egalitarian democracy that was at the heart of Anthony's career as a women's rights activist and suffragette.

For according to the logic of the decision, it is entirely legitimate for states to outlaw abortion—and, by implication, contraception, non-heteronormative sex, non-heterosexual and perhaps even interracial marriage. And it is equally legitimate to treat women seeking abortion and the doctors who furnish them with reproductive health care—along with a wide range of other categories of people seeking to enjoy privacy in their intimate lives or to pursue their professional vocations without interference–as criminals. The idea that this is remotely consistent with equal citizenship is preposterous. In the 21st century—which is not the 18th century—to abolish a general "right to privacy" is to relegate entire categories of people to the status of second-class citizens who live under a potential or an actual cloud of suspicion, are denied the freedom to be the people that they are, and are at risk of criminal prosecution if they behave as the people that they are.

Nothing could be further from the egalitarian vision of Anthony and her 19th century colleagues.

It was on another July 4, in 1876, that the uninvited Anthony seized the platform of the Centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, and declared that "we ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever." She proceeded to read aloud and then circulate a text drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and herself for the National Woman Suffrage Association entitled "Declaration of the Rights of Woman of the United States." This Declaration, much like its more famous predecessor, the 1848 Seneca Falls "Declaration of Sentiments," offered a feminist and radically egalitarian revision of the original 1776 Declaration of Independence, well summed up in this paragraph:

Our faith is firm and unwavering in the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776, not only as abstract truths, but as the corner stones of a republic. Yet we cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement.

After enumerating a long list of degradations, all linked to the denial of the right to vote, the text concluded thus:

And now, at the close of a hundred years, as the hour-hand of the great clock that marks the centuries points to 1876, we declare our faith in the principles of self-government; our full equality with man in natural rights; that woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself—to all the opportunities and advantages life affords for her complete development; and we deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man—her best interests, in all cases, to be sacrificed to his will. We ask of our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges, no special legislation. We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.

It is impossible to reconcile these words with the mission statement and the advocacy of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

Indeed, Anthony most famous speech, "Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?" undermines not simply the right-wing "pro-life" position on abortion but the entire jurisprudence underlying the SCOTUS majority decision overturning Roe. For it challenges the very idea that fundamental rights require explicit articulation in the Constitution in order to be considered fundamental.

The circumstances surrounding the speech are now legendary. On November 1, 1872, along with a number of other women, Anthony visited a voter registration office in Rochester, New York with the intention of registering to vote. Her goal was to cast a vote for Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. President, in 1872, on the ticket of the Equality Party. The registration officials refused to allow her to register on the grounds that she was a woman, but when she threatened to sue them, they relented. She thus registered and, on election day on November 5, 1872, she voted.

Days later this "transgression" was reported, leading to her arrest for illegally voting in a federal election. Anthony refused to plead guilty or to accept bail, and spent two months in jail, hoping to have her case brought to the Supreme Court. She was tried on June 17, 1873, during which the judge precipitously ended the trial by denouncing her and directing the jury to declare a guilty verdict. At her sentencing hearing on June 18, she disregarded the judge's orders and delivered a speech against her conviction. The judge then declared her penalty to be a $10,000 fine. She refused to pay, and he allowed her to be released anyway.

It was in the Spring of 1873, while out on bail awaiting trial, that Anthony organized a speaking tour throughout upstate New York, in which she delivered "Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?" The speech was quite literally a tour de force. Drawing on a wide range of legal and political sources in the American political tradition—the Declaration, the Revolution, and the "spirit of '76"; a litany of state constitutions and legislative enactments; a long tradition of legal scholarship and constitutional argument; and especially the Constitution itself and its recently ratified13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments—Anthony insisted that it is not and should not be regarded as a crime for any citizen of the U.S. to vote, and that women, as citizens, have as much right to vote as any other citizens.

To be clear, the National Woman Suffrage Association, founded by Anthony and Stanton, was formed in 1869 in protest of the 15th Amendment's failure to explicitly repudiate the denial of voting rights to women, and it represented an important split within the long-standing coalition between abolitionists and feminists in support of egalitarian democracy (the broader dynamic of racism within sections of the suffragette movement is nicely discussed here and here). But while initially committed to the amendment of the Constitution to enshrine female suffrage, by the early 1870's, Anthony had embraced a rhetorical strategy centered on the idea that another Constitutional amendment was hardly necessary to advance the cause of women's rights.

Her argument was simple: the Constitution itself already implicitly required a woman's right to vote, in the language of its preamble; the 13th Amendment's abolition of "slavery and involuntary servitude"; the 14th Amendment's commitment to equal protection under the law; and the 15th Amendment's insistence that the right to vote shall not be denied on the basis of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." For if any "class" has long experienced servitude, Anthony argued, it was women.

In short, Anthony argued that even if the Constitution never explicitly articulated a woman's right to vote, a reading of its core provisions was impossible to reconcile with the denial of this right—an argument for "substantive due process" avant la lettre. A pretty straight line can be drawn between the logic of this argument and the "substantive due process" jurisprudence behind Roe and, before it, Griswold, centered on the idea of a generalized "right to privacy."

Anthony would surely be appalled by the Dobbs ruling and by the radical logic behind it, which repudiates a century of normative, legal, and political progress in the understanding and the codification of women's rights, human rights, and democracy.

But she might not be surprised. And while she would surely not forswear legal or jurisprudential efforts to reinstate the value of female autonomy assaulted by Dobbs, she would probably reiterate the argument she made in that infamous 1872 speech—that what the situation required was a strategy of political activism to reclaim the existing Constitution and the rights entailed by it.

The concluding words of that speech are worth quoting verbatim:

Benjamin F. Butler, in a recent letter to me, said:

"I do not believe anybody in Congress doubts that the Constitution authorizes the right of women to vote, precisely as if authorizes trial by jury and many other like rights guaranteed to citizens."

And again, General Butler said:

"It is not laws we want; there are plenty of laws-good enough, too. Administrative ability to enforce law is the great want of the age, in this country especially. Everybody talks of law, law. If everybody would insist on the enforcement of law, the government would stand on a firmer basis, and question would settle themselves."

And it is upon this just interpretation of the United States Constitution that our National Woman Suffrage Association which celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the woman's rights movement in New York on the 6th of May next, has based all its arguments and action the past five years.

We no longer petition Legislature or Congress to give us the right to vote. We appeal to the women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected "citizen's right to vote." We appeal to the inspectors of election everywhere to receive the votes of all United States citizens as it is their duty to do. We appeal to United States commissioners and marshals to arrest the inspectors who reject the names and votes of United States citizens, as it is their duty to do, and leave those alone who, like our eighth ward inspectors, perform their duties faithfully and well.

We ask the juries to fail to return verdicts of "guilty" against honest, law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizens for offering their votes at our elections. Or against intelligent, worthy young men, inspectors of elections, for receiving and counting such citizens votes.

We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law, and wherever there is room for a doubt to give its benefit on the side of liberty and equal rights to women, remembering that "the true rule of interpretation under our national constitution, especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human right unconstitutional."

And it is on this line that we propose to fight our battle for the ballot—all peaceably, but nevertheless persistently through to complete triumph, when all United States citizens shall be recognized as equals before the law.

Can Americans committed to democracy and the equal rights of all citizens summon the energy and mobilize the resources to renew this fight? Will the Democratic Party and its leadership rise to the occasion, recognizing that politics as usual is not now an option, and that it is urgently necessary to mobilize vast numbers of voters in November on the basis of a real commitment to democratic reform, social and economic justice, and the reinstatement of the ideal of civic equality?

We will see.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jeffrey C. Isaac.

Photograph Source: U.S. Congress – Public Domain

I was raised in the Bronx; Susan Collins grew up in Caribou, Maine. She graduated from Caribou schools; I graduated from Public School 95. Caribou was once a thriving potato shipping hub – her parents were successful lumber merchants – and home to Loring Air Force Base. It has a population of 7,900 according to the latest census. My old neighbourhood alone now has an estimated population of 50,000. The Bronx, one of New York City’s five boroughs, has a population of close to 1,500,000, roughly the population of the entire state of Maine.

Besides geographic and population differences between Caribou and the Bronx, there are considerable cultural differences that have had significant political consequences today. People from rural Maine, I am told, are hard-working and respectful. The state’s motto “Dirigo,” which means “I lead,” combined with the Polar Star on the state seal give an impression of stability and trust.

And the people from the Bronx? Being sceptical if not cynical is a necessity for survival on the streets in the `hood. While the era of “the Bronx is burning” has passed, The French expression “C’est le Bronx,” to describe chaos is still used. People from the Bronx have an inherent lack of confidence in others. Street smarts are not synonymous with stability and trust.

One of my favorite movie scenes is the heart to heart talk between Big Daddy (Burl Ives) and his washed up, alcoholic son, Brick (Paul Newman), in the film “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” As the cancer-stricken, soon-to-die Big Daddy tries to tell his son the facts of life and all the hypocrisy he has had to put up with, he says: “What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it, Brick? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity… You can smell it.”

Smell mendacity! What a wonderful image. Big Daddy is recounting to his son how he realized how people were lying to him. Big Daddy knew he was being lied to. He wanted his son to realize how much lying existed in the world.

Susan Collins couldn’t smell mendacity when she interviewed Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation process. She questioned him privately in her office as well as publicly during the Senate confirmation hearing. After hours of questioning the future justice, she couldn’t smell Kavanaugh’s mendacity.

In a statement issued just after the Supreme Court and Justice Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, Collins called the Supreme Court’s decision “inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon.” (A similar statement was issued by Senator Joe Manchin, but we are focusing on Collins.)

“I do not believe that Brett Kavanaugh will overturn Roe v. Wade,” Collins told CNN in 2018 during the confirmation process. “I am a don’t-rock-the-boat kind of judge,” Kavanaugh has been reported to have told Collins when she asked him about overturning Roe v. Wade.

Now she says: “This decision [overturning Roe v. Wade] is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon.”

The New York Times wrote: “’I feel misled,’” Ms. Collins said in an interview, adding that the decision was in stark contrast to the assurances she had received privately from Justice Kavanaugh, who had made similar, if less exhaustive, pronouncements at his public hearing.”

Collins feels “misled”? She couldn’t smell mendacity? While it may seem too simple to equate Collins’ background in Caribou, Maine, with her naiveté in believing Kavanaugh would respect precedent and not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, a little bit of Bronx cynicism might have gone a long way to stopping Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

While there are many reasons to enjoy the fresh smells in the Pine Tree State of Maine, a couple of whiffs of the “obnoxious odor of mendacity” in Collins’s nostrils might have saved the court and the American people the catastrophe that is taking place. Demean all you want the cynics from the Bronx like me, but a little cynicism outweighs a little naiveté any day. Just ask the millions of women who will be denied abortions.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

In this talk, novelist and human rights activist Susan Abulhawa will join with Alaa Tartir of Al-Shabaka, Aline Batarseh of Visualizing Palestine and Aimee Shalan of Makan, to discuss the history and context of the changing perceptions of the Palestinian struggle, what happens when the concept of ‘neutrality’ is disputed, why narrative shifts matter, and how - in an increasingly loveless world - they feed into the wider liberation movement.

Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian American writer and human rights activist. She is the author of the international best-selling novel, Mornings in Jenin, and the founder of the NGO, Playgrounds for Palestine. Against the Loveless World, her third novel, was released in August 2020 to critical acclaim.

Aline Batarseh joined Visualizing Palestine in July 2021 as Executive Director. She is a community organizer, activist and development professional. She has extensive experience working with Palestinian and international nonprofits whose missions are focused on advancing social justice and equality for individuals and communities that experience systemic discrimination.

Dr Alaa Tartir is a Program and Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network,a Senior Researcher and Academic Coordinator at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, Switzerland, and a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).

Aimee Shalan is Co-Director of Makan. She is also a Trustee of Friends of Birzeit University (Fobzu), a policy member of the Palestinian policy network, Al Shabaka, and Chair of the British-Palestinian Council. Her previous roles have included: Chief Executive of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), Director of Friends of Birzeit University (Fobzu) and Co-founder and Director of Pressure Cooker Arts, a not-for-profit arts and advocacy organisation. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian and other media outlets. Aimee holds a doctorate in the Politics of Palestinian Literature.

The post ‘Reclaiming Narratives in A Loveless World’ chaired by Susan Abulhawa appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Alaa Tartir.

Sen. Susan Collins summoned the cops to her house over the weekend to complain about a sidewalk chalk message urging her to vote for the Women's Health Protection Act, which would codify the abortion rights now in peril thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority—something the Maine Republican played a key role in solidifying.

Police arrived at Collins' home at 9:20 p.m. ET on Saturday, The Bangor Daily News reported Monday. The message, which Bangor police spokesperson Wade Betters described as "not overtly threatening," said: "Susie, please, Mainers want WHPA ⇒ vote yes, clean up your mess."

By Monday afternoon, the sidewalk chalk had been washed away.

"We are grateful to the Bangor police officers and the city public works employee who responded to the defacement of public property in front of our home," said Collins.

The Maine Republican was ridiculed online, with critics accusing her of being overly sensitive.

"Our thoughts are with Susan Collins, who called the police because there was chalk on the sidewalk near her house," Indivisible Guide, a progressive advocacy group, wrote Tuesday on social media. "We hope she is alright after enduring such a harrowing ordeal!"

Justice Samuel Alito's leaked draft majority opinion reveals that the high court appears poised to vote 5-4 to overturn Roe v. Wade and its companion, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Unless this ruling is significantly revised before it is officially issued, abortion could soon be prohibited in up to 26 states, and the GOP has signaled it could push to enact a federal six-week ban if it retakes Congress and the White House.

The Women's Health Protection Act (WHPA) would enshrine patients' right to receive legal and safe abortions and healthcare professionals' right to provide them. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) filed cloture on Monday for a Wednesday vote in the Senate on a modified version of the WHPA.

House Democrats—with the lone exception of right-wing Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas)—supported the passage of the WHPA last September. However, the bill died in the upper chamber in February when Collins joined every Senate Republican and conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) to filibuster the measure.

Since Alito's draft ruling striking down Roe was leaked, Collins and Manchin are among the senators who have doubled down on their defense of the anti-democratic rule, which requires 60 votes to advance most legislation.

Former President Donald Trump—who received nearly three million fewer votes than 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton—appointed three far-right justices to lifetime positions on the Supreme Court during his one term: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The trio joined Justice Clarence Thomas in supporting Alito's draft ruling overturning Roe.

In 2017, Senate Republicans bypassed Democrats' opposition to Gorsuch by lowering the threshold for advancing high court nominations from 60 votes to a simple majority—a rule change that also benefited Kavanaugh in 2018 and Barrett in 2020.

Collins had a chance to deny Gorsuch and Kavanaugh their seats on the Supreme Court. Despite the wishes of the majority of her constituents and warnings that the confirmation of more right-wing judicial nominees would spell the likely end of Roe, Collins voted to support Gorsuch and Kavanaugh—claiming that they had assured her of their respect for long-standing legal precedent, including the 7-2 decision from 1973.

After Collins said last week that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh's support for Alito's draft ruling is "completely inconsistent" with what they told her in private meetings and confirmation hearings, Mainers for Responsible Leadership—a group that has long targeted Collins over her right-wing voting record—told Common Dreams that it "looks like it's time for her to call for impeachment" of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

More than three-fifths of people in the U.S. think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a recent survey conducted before Alito's draft ruling was leaked. And a new Data for Progress poll taken after the high court's draft majority opinion was made public shows that likely voters favor the WHPA by a 32-point margin.

Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in February unveiled the Reproductive Choice Act, an opposing bill that would codify Roe while permitting states to restrict abortions after fetal viability.

But as Christina Cauterucci wrote last week in Slate:

Collins' record in the Senate is speckled with ostensibly bold moves that, upon closer examination, function more like feints. She helped save the Affordable Care Act by casting a decisive vote against the Republican Party's attempted repeal, then turned around and voted to repeal the individual mandate. She voted against Betsy DeVos for Trump's secretary of education—but only after voting to greenlight the nomination in committee and send it to a full vote. She made a strong defense of Planned Parenthood when she voted against the ACA repeal, then defamed Planned Parenthood in her support of Kavanaugh, erroneously accusing the group of mounting knee-jerk, partisan campaigns against previous justices.

She has taken some seemingly principled steps to protect the country from the worst of her own party, but only once her ineffectuality was guaranteed. Her vote to convict Trump after his second impeachment trial came with the knowledge that the Senate would not meet the two-thirds threshold required to convict. Ditto the bill she introduced in February with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, which would codify the protections of Roe in U.S. law. The Senate does not have a filibuster-proof supermajority in favor of abortion rights, so the bill is going nowhere. Collins knows that—and she only proposed the bill in response to a more progressive, comprehensive abortion rights bill introduced by Democrats.

Referring to the WHPA, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote Monday in an op-ed that "Congress has the power to make Roe the law of the entire nation."

"The House has already passed legislation to shield abortion rights, and the Senate will take up the bill this week," wrote Warren. "We should debate that bill on the floor and then vote on it—because every American should know exactly where we stand and hold us accountable. But to get that vote and protect Roe, we must end the filibuster."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a self-styled moderate who postures as a defender of reproductive rights, has said repeatedly in recent years that she would not support a Supreme Court nominee who demonstrates "hostility" to Roe v. Wade.

But late Monday, Politico reported that right-wing Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—Trump picks who Collins voted to confirm—supported a 67-page draft opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito that, if finalized, would spell the end of Roe v. Wade and imperil abortion rights across the United States.

"We demand that she lead the charge calling for their immediate impeachment."

While abortion rights advocates, citing the judges' records, vocally warned at the time of their confirmation hearings that both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh posed an existential threat to Roe, Collins brushed such warnings aside when it came time to usher them through the Senate, pointing to their private assurances to her that they would not vote to overturn the 1973 decision.

In a statement issued Tuesday morning, Collins finally conceded that, perhaps, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were not being fully honest with her in their closed-door conversations about Roe.

"If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office," Collins said. "Obviously, we won't know each justice's decision and reasoning until the Supreme Court officially announces its opinion in this case."

Asked if she believes she was misled by the judges, Collins told CNN, "My statement speaks for itself."

Marie Follayttar, executive director of Mainers for Responsible Leadership—a group that has long targeted Collins over her right-wing voting record—told Common Dreams that it "looks like it's time for her to call for impeachment" of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

"If Senator Collins believes that both Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh lied to her and to the public during the confirmation processes, we demand that she lead the charge calling for their immediate impeachment," Follayttar added. "We cannot let public trust in our judicial system—the final check and balance of our democracy—become eroded."

Indivisible, a national progressive advocacy group, quipped in response to Collins' statement, "If only there had been some warning signs about Kavanaugh's dishonesty."

After Politico published its story on Alito's far-reaching draft opinion—which the Supreme Court confirmed as authentic on Tuesday while stressing that it's not final—a video compilation resurfaced of Collins declaring on multiple occasions in 2018 her belief that Kavanaugh would not vote to overturn Roe:

The Daily Beast's Eleanor Clift argued in a column Tuesday that "the one person most responsible for the looming loss of abortion rights—aside from the president who appointed three anti-Roe justices—is Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who in October of 2018 became the 50th and deciding vote in the Senate for Brett Kavanaugh."

"He would not have been confirmed if it weren’t for Collins, who wanted women to believe as she did that he would keep his word to her," Clift wrote. "Maybe his fingers were crossed because whatever he said to Collins, it was a lie. Kavanaugh's confirmation on a bare 50 to 48 vote was the beginning of the end for Roe v. Wade, and everybody knew it except maybe Collins."

"Susan Collins told the women of America that they could trust her to protect their reproductive freedom," Clift added. "She let us down."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The post Susan Zakin and Steve Erickson appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.