The Green Planet Monitor

A Conversation With Nikhil Pal Singh From Caracas to Minnesota, from Iran and Cuba to the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, from the Persian Gulf to the waters of the eastern Pacific and Caribbean, Donald Trump and his henchmen are collapsing US foreign military and domestic policing operations into a single, unified domain of imperial impunity. A domain where anything goes; where Trump and his minions, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and US ‘Homeland Security’ chiefs, consider themselves free to carry out military/policing operations without restraint, largely immune from Congressional oversight, and beyond the reaches of international and domestic US law. Their preferred  modus: sudden, highly dramatic acts of violence and murder that can be parlayed into media spectacles, staged for instant transmission to the American public and the world on Donald Trump’s “Truth Social” platform. “Smash and grab” operations, American historian Nikhil Pal Singh calls these. In a recent article for the journal Equator, Singh unpacks the Trump regime’s core innovation: the expansion of the borders of US state power, collapsing foreign and domestic violence into a single domain of impunity. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription “Homeland empire,” US academic Nikhil Pal Singh calls this. Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU, focusing on the intersection of contemporary US history and political theory. Singh’s first book, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, was recognized as the best work of US civil rights history by the Organization of American Historians. Singh’s other works include Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, Race and America’s Long War, and Reconstructing Democracy: Black Intellectuals in the American Century. Listen to our complete conversation with Nikhil Pal Singh. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Forests are among planet Earth’s core biological systems. Covering about a quarter of its land surface, forest biomes regulate Earth’s climate, and host most of its biological diversity. Forests also provide humans with food, fiber, and energy. Their contribution to human cultural and psychic wellness, individually and collectively, is beyond calculation. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription In response to the relentless decline of terrestrial forest cover, between 1995 and 1997, an International Arrangement on Forests (IAF) was established within the United Nations, as a framework for the development of forest policy and cooperation. Out of the IAF, the UN Forum on Forests (UNFF), the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, the Forest Financing Facilitation Network, and the UN Strategic Plan for Forests 2017–2030 emerged. The Strategic Plan sets six Global Forest Goals: to reverse forest cover loss, improve forest livelihoods, support the development of sustainable forest products, promote inclusive forest governance and cooperation across sectors, and to mobilize financial resources crucial to achieving these goals. The UNFF is the international community’s core venue for discussion on all matters forest-related. The UNFF is a commission of the Economic and Social Council, one of the UN’s five principal arms. All UN members states belong to the Forest Forum. Annual sessions focus on forest protection policy, knowledge exchange, and the promotion of practical measures to conserve and expand Earth’s forested cover. Between May 11 and 15, the UNFF held its 21st session in New York City. The GPM was there. The highlight of UNFF21 — this year’s Forest Goals Report. The Global Forest Goals Report 2026 is less than optimistic. With less than five years to go till 2030 — target date for global sustainability goals established at the 1992 Rio Summit — Earth’s forests are in peril, it says. Global forest area has declined by more than 40 million hectares over the past decade, the report says. Financing for sustainable forest management remains far below estimated needs. At the same time, it says, countries are advancing reforms, expanding restoration efforts, strengthening forest governance, and scaling up cooperation. Listen to voices from this year’s session of the UN Forum on Forests. Click on the play button above, or go here. In order of appearance: UNFF21 chair, a Turkish forester, Ismail Belen. Lok Bahadur Thapa, Permanent Representative of Nepal, and President of the UN’s Economic and Social Council. Annaliena Baerbock, former German Foreign Minister, and President of the current, 80th Session of the United Nations. Bjorg Sandkjær, former Deputy Minister for International Development at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Coordination in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Sandkjær presented this year’s Forest Goals Report. On the sidelines of formal sessions, the GPM spoke with: Ana Paula Vargas, a consultant for Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples. David Flood (Zonzei Maiingun), a member of Matachewan First Nation, an Ojibway band in Treaty 9 territory, northeast Ontario, and General Manager of Wahkohtowin Development, a social enterprise jointly operated by three First Nations. Listen to our complete conversation with David here:   The GPM also spoke with Juliette Biao, Secretary General and Director of the UN Forum on Forests. As West Africa’s first female forester, Biao helped resolve forest-related conflicts in the international park separating Burkina Faso, Niger, and her home country, Benin. Since 2022, Biao has served as the Director of the Secretariat of the UN Forum on Forests. Ms. Biao is a dual national — of Benin and Canada. Listen to all these voices in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription

Battered and bloodied by US and Israeli bombs and missiles, weakened by years of economic sanction and US maritime blockade, Iran still thinks it’s come out on top. It may be right. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu seem to think so, and are clearly frustrated. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription The Israeli Prime Minister spoke with Trump at least twice this past week. Read-outs of their phone conversations (there have been dozens of calls and personal visits to the White House since the start of their war) have not been released, but we can imagine what the two discussed. Netanyahu, the subject of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in besieged, occupied Gaza, almost certainly pressed Trump, a convicted felon, for an end to their supposed cease-fire with the Islamic Republic, and a resumption of savage bombing. Israel-USA’s declared aim: preventing Iran from developing a bomb. Washington’s position has always been clear: Only Israel has the right to enrich uranium and amass a nuclear weapons arsenal — undeclared and exempt from international inspection — and to threaten to nuke its neighbors. Israel’s aim is much more expansive: annihilating the Islamic Republic; fracturing it into a patchwork of ethnic entities; pushing it into crippling chaos. Will Trump agree to start bombing Iran again? Netanyahu, a staunch advocate of permanent war against the self-declared ‘Jewish’ state’s neighbors, does have a knack for pulling Trump by the nose. ‘Bibi’ is “a very good man,” Trump insisted, a few days after their phone talks, but he, Trump, is in charge. Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do,” Trump  reassured a crowd of corporate media flacks, somewhere between Washington and his Florida golf course. None of them asked about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Judging from recent developments in the Persian Gulf, Iran will actually do what it wants to do. Within hours of Trump’s blustering claim that he, not Israeli’s indicted war criminal, is calling the shots, and that Iran will never, ever get a nuclear bomb, the Islamic Republic announced that its far more powerful nuclear option has been fine-tuned. Henceforth, Tehran declared on X (where pronouncements of this sort are made), all maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — from the waterway’s eastern portal, between Kuh-e Mobarak in Iran and Fujairah in the UAE, to its western end, across the narrow strait between Qeshm Island in Iran and Umm al-Quwain in the UAE — will be managed by a freshly minted Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA). Alternatively pegged at a dollar per barrel of transported oil, or a $2 million flat fee, PGSA transit tolls must be shelled out in advance, in crypto currency. Iran’s transit toll appears to expand on an earlier, more modest levy, two months and a bit after Israel-USA launched its war against Iran, in flagrant breach of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter . “Iran’s demands over the Strait of Hormuz demonstrate that Iranian officials believe they won the war,” says Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. They’ve certainly turned the table on the conjoined twins who’ve been assaulting them.  For his own thoughts on whether this is so, and on rapidly evolving associated events in Iran today, the GPM spoke with a distinguished scholar on all matters Iranian. Ervand Abrahamian is a Professor of History at Baruch College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Among the books he’s authored: Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982), Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (1993), Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (1999), Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth About North Korea, Iran, and Syria (2004), and A History of Modern Iran (2008). Professor Abrahamian’s latest work, Oil Crisis in Iran – From Nationalism to Coup d’Etat, explores the motivations of the US-UK-engineered overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, back in August 1953, based on an analysis of previously unreleased diplomatic communications. Continued favourable access to Iranian oil was the key driver of the CIA-MI6-engineered coup, Abrahamian argues, not fears of Soviet influence over the democratically elected Mossadeq administration, at the height of the Cold War. The GPM sat down with Professor Ervand Abrahamian at his Brooklyn home, across the East River from the United Nations. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Listen to our complete conversation here:

Iran Turns Tables on Israel-USA On May 4, Donald Trump swore that Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it didn’t immediately restore maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s genocidal fulminations have become familiar.  Late last month, he predicted that “a whole civilization will die” if Iran doesn’t do what he wants. Weeks earlier, Trump vowed to send Iran “back to the Stone Ages” (plural) if Iran didn’t lower its neck to US-Israeli imperialism. Well, Iran doesn’t seem to be listening. Indeed, according to numerous informed observers outside the Trump Administration, the Islamic Republic has actually turned the tables on Israel-USA, scoring what many see as a strategic victory over the conjoined entity. To catch up on the current situation, the GPM reached out to Arang Keshavarzian, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Keshavarzian is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (2007), Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (2021), and Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (2024). Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:   Boys will be boys. Tech Bros certainly will. While Donald Trump and his crusading Christian warrior chief, Pete Hegseth, vow to rain hellfire on Iran, Silicon Valley ‘titans’ pronounce on how they intend to rule the world, backed by AI-based surveillance and weapon systems. Over a mid-April weekend, AI wunderkind Alex Karp, founder of the surveillance giant Palantir, posted a 22-point manifesto about all this. Like most pompous pronouncements, Alex Karp’s bursts with Big Narrative. The “Technological Republic” owes a “moral debt” to America and the world, and “free email” won’t cover the bill. Civilizational decadence must be squashed, says Karp, along with “vacant and hollow pluralism,” and the “dysfunctional and regressive” belief that all cultures are equal. (They’re not, says Karp) Karp’s fixes? AI-based military deterrence, obligatory “national duty” (as if humans have something to offer in his dystopian future), reinvigorated religious faith at upper state echelons … and the remilitarization of Germany and Japan. Inevitably, Alex Karp’s manifesto has drawn fire. Among those speaking out, a group of academics at the University of Ottawa. David Murakami Wood is one of them. David Murakami Wood is Professor of Criminology in U. Ottawa’s Faculty of Social Sciences, and Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies. His research focuses on emerging AI-based “smart cities”, private surveillance companies, AI regulation, and the relationship between surveillance and the climate crisis. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

Imagine this: the incarceration of an entire people — thousands behind bars; millions more hemmed in by barbed wire, towering walls, and a seamless hi-tech surveillance system; their movements strictly monitored, mapped, controlled and restricted; millions of facial images, phone numbers, family and community networks, and past carceral history fed into the most sophisticated network of biometric, increasingly AI-based algorithms. This is the situation in Apartheid Israel. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, back in 1967, the apartheid regime has spirited over a million Palestinians into prisons, most of them inside Israel ‘proper’, in flagrant breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention; tens of thousands without charge, including children, under  routinely extended rounds of preventive detention Palestinian political prisoners and hostages are routinely subjected to what experts define as torture. In a July 2023 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Italian legal scholar Francesca Albanese laid out Israel’s carceral system in graphic detail, a system she says has turned occupied Palestine into a “carceral continuum,” and “constantly surveilled open-air panopticon.” In her most recent report,  released in February 2026, Albanese says that “torture has become integral” to Israel’s system of domination and oppression. A “continuous, territorially pervasive regime of psychological terror,” is how Albanese describes Apartheid Israel’s system, “designed to break bodies, deprive a people of their dignity, and force them from their land.” Francesca Albanese is Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in occupied Palestine. The GPM has spoken with her on a couple of occasions. Here’s a conversation we had back in 2023. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Here’s a more recent conversation with Francesca, following Israel’s assault on Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank, in early 2025, replicating its then-well advanced genocidal assault on Gaza:  Of the ten-thousand Palestinians currently held in Israeli dungeons, none are more prominent than Marwan Barghouti. Marwan Barghouti is a veteran member of Palestine’s Fatah movement and political party. In 2002, the Second Intifada just underway, Barghouti was convicted by a military court for his alleged involvement in attacks in which five Israelis dies. Barghouti denied the charges, and refused to recognize the court. The Inter-Parliamentary Union declared, at the time, that Barghouti was denied a fair trial. Barghouti, now 66 years-old, is serving a life sentence. He’s widely considered Palestine’s most popular leader – far more so than Israel-USA’s collaborative man in Ramallah, Mahmoud Abbas. Should he ever be liberated, Barghouti is considered the most likely figure to replace Abbas, uniting Palestinians across political factions, and advancing the so-called Two-State Solution. For this reason, the apartheid regime has no intention of releasing him. The Palestinian Mandela, Marwan Barghouti is commonly called. The comparison isn’t quite apt. Nelson Mandela was liberated, after 27 years in jail. A similar figure, native American leader Leonard Peltier, spent almost fifty years in jail, before Joe Biden pardoned him. Will the Israelis ever liberate Marwan Barghouti? Not unless they’re forced to — and no one is going to do that. Of late, Barghouti has been starved, beaten, denied access to health services, and set upon by dogs. Apartheid Israel’s fascist security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has gone to the bother of visiting Barghouti in jail, just to taunt him! Donate with a $15/monthly subscription For the latest news about Marwan Barghouti, the GPM reached out to his lawyer, Ben Marmorelli. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our conversation here. Ben’s audio isn’t that good. Listen closely.  

Complicity The Canadian financial sector is deeply engaged in supporting Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestine, bankrolling Jewish colonization, apartheid and genocide there, along with internationally wrongful Israeli acts in Lebanon and the illegally annexed Syrian Golan Heights. That’s the finding of a new report released on April 9 by the Canadian human rights group, Just Peace Advocates. Over a hundred Canadian financial institutions have invested half a trillion US dollars in Israeli activities deemed unlawful by the International Court of Justice and other human rights bodies, the report reveals. Among these: eleven Canadian pension funds, eight banks, seven insurance companies, and 85 fund managers. Canadian investments are tied to the development and manufacturing of lethal weapons, population surveillance and control systems, construction equipment used to demolish homes and property, and to the systematic plundering of Palestinian natural resources, the Just Peace Advocates report says. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Among the corporations benefiting from Canadian investment largesse: Israel’s notorious weapons manufacturer Elbit systems, Lockheed-Martin, the manufacturer of the F-35 jet fighter, and the population surveillance and spyware company Palantir, leader in the emerging techno-fascist sector. Disclosure gaps mean total Canadian investments in Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide are likely higher. The Carney government must oblige Canadian corporations to divest, the report says. The GPM spoke Just Peace Advocates campaigner Becca Steckle. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here: Over a hundred Canadian financial institutions have invested in Israel’s occupation of Palestine – to the tune of over a half trillion US dollars – and are therefore complicit in Israeli policies and practices judged to be unlawful by the International Court of Justice and other human rights bodies. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Of course, they’re playing with the dollars of individual Canadians. Do people have the power to control how their dollars are invested? The GPM spoke about this with Peter Larson. Peter Larson is an independent researcher and blogger based in Ottawa, Canada. He was the founding Chair of the Middle East Study Group of the Canadian International Council (National Capital Region), a board member of the National Council on Canada Arab Relations, and the first chair of its National Education Committee on Israel/Palestine. Peter is the long-time chair of OFIP – the Ottawa Forum on Israel-Palestine. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

Lawless World   In the purely notional realm of international law, nothing is more fundamentally unlawful than the war Israel-USA launched on Iran on February 28, 2026. Like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, almost four years earlier, the conjoined entity’s assault on the Islamic Republic was an act of naked aggression, pure and simple. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” for any reason other than self-defense, as provided for under Article 51, which Israel-USA cannot claim. Well, who cares? The ruination of the UN Charter, the trampling of its most sacred injunctions and canonical legal conventions, is not something most world leaders lose sleep over, certainly not in the morally enlightened West. For those like Mark Carney, an international banker now serving as Canada’s 24th Prime Minister, it’s the disruption of global supply chains, trade in fossil fuels and other lucrative commodities, and the integrity of the procedural rules governing the smooth functioning of trade and financial systems (“rules-based international order”) that matter the most. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription In search of words to capture how lawless the world Mr. Carney waxed nostalgically for in Davos actually is – a world of colossal inequality, insatiable corporate greed, apartheid, genocide, and other monstrous crimes, live-streamed on ‘social media’; a world where laws count for nothing, and no one comes to their defense; not even their supposed Western guardians – worried observers turn to Antonio Gramsci. Antonio Gramsci was a fierce critic of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. Jailed in 1926, the Italian Marxist died there in 1937. His famous words live on, summing up darker times Gramsci could never have imagined: “The old world is dying,” Gramsci wrote, “and the new world struggles to be born … Now is the time of monsters.” The GPM speaks about these dark, monstrous times with Atif Kubursi. Atif Kubursi is Professor Emeritus of Economics at McMaster University, and the President of Econometric Research Limited. Since joining the United Nations Industrial Organization as a Senior Development Officer in 1982, Kubursi led missions to Indonesia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Sudan, and Egypt. In 2006 he was appointed Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. Professor Kubursi has published extensively on macroeconomics, economic development strategies, international trade, and regional planning centering on the environment. He joined McMaster University as an Assistant Professor of Economics in 1969, and became a full professor in 1981. He is currently a Professor Emeritus. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Alternatively, give this a listen:

Critical Education in the Age of Genocide Earlier this month, in the Canadian House of Commons, a private member’s bill aimed at halting the flow of lethal weapons, munitions and their hi-tech components to Israel, via the US, was defeated. Although the ‘No More Loopholes Act’ did not mention Israel, or any other state, Israel-USA’s genocidal assault on Gaza was clearly on the mind of the Parliamentarian who tabled it, last September, New Democratic Party member Jenny Kwan. Bill 233, An Act to Amend the Export and Import Permits Act, also known as the No More Loopholes Act, failed by a vote of 295 to 22. Fifteen members of Mark Carney’s pro-genocide/apartheid Liberal government voted in favour of closing the loophole. Another fifteen abstained. Canadian anti-war activists see that as a victory. Back in September 2024, US-Israeli genocide well underway in Gaza, and Justin Trudeau still Prime Minister, Trudeau’s Foreign Minister, Melanie Jolie, announced that new arms shipments to Israel would cease to be permitted, regardless of their route. Old export permits would be honored. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription As it turns out (reported by Canada’s independent journal The Maple), bombs, ammunition, and spare parts for the F-35 fighter bomber and other murderous hi-tech systems continued to flow to Israel via its conjoined twin, the US. In the lead-up to the March 11 vote on the No More Loopholes Act, a handful of Canadian antiwar and human rights organizations lobbied Parliamentarians to close the Israel loophole. Rachel Small is Canada Organizer for one of those groups, World Beyond War. Listen to our conversation with Rachel Small. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch out complete conversation here: Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Are you worried about the direction the world is heading today? Does the relentless rise of fascism, anti-immigrant hatred, and authoritarian tyranny scare you? Perhaps it’s the ceaseless enrichment of a handful of already obscenely rich men, peddling climate-destroying AI technologies, or the perfidious silence of corporate media, or the sterilization of public education systems that bum you out the most. If so, you may wish to resist. Before you get up/stand up, sit down and give Henry Giroux a read. No one captures the contours of fascist culture and aesthetics, the role of critical education in resisting “fascist plague,” and the imperative to resist more sharply and colourfully than Henry Giroux. Henry Giroux is Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Among his latest books: The Violence of Organized Forgetting, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle, America at War with Itself, and Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (together with Brad Evans). Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here:  

Unsafe Operating Space In response to expanding climate system breakdown, in September 2023, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres warned that humanity has “opened the gates of Hell” and is “hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open.” Since then, a team of scientists have spelled out humanity’s predicament in drier fashion. Six out of sixteen planetary ‘tipping’ points may have been transgressed, points of no-return beyond which the Earth system could slip into an entirely new state, something it hasn’t experienced in 15 million years, a recent report states. “The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory” was published last Fall in a journal called One Earth. The GPM spoke with one of its authors. Katherine Richardson is principal investigator at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate and Professor of Biological Oceanography at the University of Copenhagen. She co-authored the groundbreaking 2009 study that introduced the Planetary Boundaries/Safe Operating Space concepts. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here: Earth’ surface is a little over one degree warmer today, on average, than it was at the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago. Doesn’t seem like much. Under the Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. That target seems to have been exceeded. In a series of landmark reports published in 2009, 2015 and 2023, researchers warned that a two degree rise in global surface temperature may actually exceed a critical planetary threshold, pushing Earth down a cascade of tipping points into “hothouse” mode, unlike anything this third rock from the sun has experienced since the mid-Miocene epoch, fifteen million years ago. Stability landscape for Earth system departing the Holocene (PNAS, used with permission) The GPM spoke with one of the leading proponents of hothouse Earth science, Will Steffen. A native of Norfolk, Nebraska, Steffen emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, where he took up a position at the Australian National University in Canberra. Steffen served as the Executive Director of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme, a ground-breaking initiative aimed at studying the chemical, physical and biological processes governing Earth as system. His name came to be associated with a host of ideas about our planet, and humanity’s fate, and the associated ideas of Planetary Boundaries and Safe Operating Space. Will Steffen’s Great Acceleration curves helped corroborate the idea, first proposed by Paul Crützen, that Earth has entered a new Epoch, the Anthropocene. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Will Steffen passed away in January 2023. The GPM spoke with him in 2018. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here:

Genocide Excused, Justice Condemned UN Rights Expert Francesca Albanese Under Attack “Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness. You got to speak your mind, if you dare.” David Crosby’s rallying cry for peace and justice back in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, rings loud and clear today. If US-backed Israeli genocide, ethnic cleaning and apartheid are what you’re speaking out against, better watch your back. No one knows this better than Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Occupied Palestine. Since assuming the unpaid position in 2022, the Italian legal scholar and human rights advocate has submitted a host of excoriating reports to the UN, detailing Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. In response to her filings, in July 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, slapped crushing sanctions on Albanese. Albanese’s reports amount to “lawfare,” Rubio declared, and a “gross infringement” of Israel-USA’s right to commit internationally unlawful acts with impunity. Albanese family has now launched a lawsuit against the Trump Administration. “Francesca’s expression of her views about the facts as she has found them in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and about the work of the ICC is core First Amendment activity,” the legal filing says. Francesca Albanese isn’t the only one in Little Marco’s crosshairs. Following the issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then War Minister Yoav Gallant, eleven prosecutors and judges at the International Criminal Court have had their bank accounts frozen, credit cards cut off, and online services terminated. Of course, they’re all banned from entering the US. Smelling blood, pro-Israeli Apartheid lobby group UN Watch has called on the UN to dismiss Albanese from her post as Special Rapporteur. Based on a doctored video from UN Watch, France, Germany, Italy, Austria and Czechia seconded the group’s call. The Human Rights Council has yet to act on the call. Annual meetings of the Council, in Geneva, Switzerland, have now closed. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription The GPM reached out to Francesca Albanese’s predecessor in the Special Rapporteur position, Canadian legal scholar Michael Lynk. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Listen to our conversation here:   Watch our complete conversation here: Speaking of ‘lawfare’ (in the positive sense), a handful of human rights groups have just filed a complaint to the International Criminal Court, calling on it to prosecute top international football chiefs for aiding and abetting Israeli crimes in Palestine. Gianni Infantino is the President of the International Football Federation, FIFA. Aleksander Ceferin is the President of UEFA, the European Football Federation. According to the 120-page filing, submitted to the world’s only permanent criminal court on February 16, Infantino and Ceferin have provided extensive organizational and financial aid to Israeli football clubs based in illegal Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, at the expense of Palestinian teams and players. FIFA and UEFA have allowed settlement clubs to compete in European and international matches, all the while ignoring Israel’s systematic persecution of Palestinian footballers. Settlements are illegal under international law – a war crime under the court’s founding instrument, the Rome Statute. By allowing settlement football clubs to compete in league play, Infantino and Ceferin have aided and abetted Israel’s apartheid regime, a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute, for which they bear personal responsibility, the filing states. To learn more about the ICC filing, the GPM reached out Rebecca O’Keeffe, a spokesperson for one of the filings sponsors, Irish Sport for Palestine. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Listen to our complete conversation here:   Watch our complete conversation here:

Critical Pedagogy in the Age of Fascist Plague Independent Jewish Voices Are you worried about the direction the world is heading today? Does the relentless rise of fascism, anti-immigrant hatred, and authoritarian tyranny trouble you? Perhaps it’s the ceaseless enrichment of a handful of already obscenely rich men peddling climate-destroying AI technologies, or the perfidious silence of corporate media, or the sterilization of public education systems that collaborate with, rather than oppose authoritarianism, that bums you out the most. If so, you may wish to resist. Before you get up/stand up, sit down and give Henry Giroux a read. No one captures the contours of fascist culture and aesthetics, and the role of critical pedagogy in resisting “fascist plague,” more sharply and colourfully. Henry Giroux is Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Among Giroux’s latest works: The Violence of Organized Forgetting, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle, America at War with Itself, and Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (together with Brad Evans). Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Listen to our conversation with Henry Giroux in today’s GPM edition. Click on the play button above, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here:   US-Israeli genocide continues to be waged in Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank (notwithstanding the October 10 “ceasefire,” reportedly violated by Israel over 1600 times, killing over 600 Palestinians), but Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney won’t talk about, much less condemn US-Israeli perfidy. British, German and French leaders Keir Starmer, Frederick Merz, and Emanuelle Macron won’t either. Israel’s largest trading partner, the EU, continues to extend generous aid and assistance to a regime declared unlawful by the international community’s supreme judicial body, the International Court of Justice. Western leaders want to help Israel out — militarily, economically, diplomatically – not hold it accountable under international law. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the Munich Security Conference, Carney and other leaders commented dispassionately on the collapse of the euphemistically phrased  “international rules-based order,” all the while ignoring Israel-USA’s relentless assault on the UN Charter. Rather than standing up for the canonical instruments of 20th century international law — the UN Charter, the four Geneva Conventions, the Genocide and Apartheid Conventions, and the International Covenants on civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights — Carney seems to believe Canada should get smart and adapt to the rules of the jungle. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription In startling contrast, those who do name Israeli crimes, and call for justice – like Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Occupied Palestine – get mercilessly condemned. The US government has slapped crushing sanctions on Albanese, and on the prosecutors and judges of the International Criminal Court. Out on the street, Canadians of conscience do their best to shift the needle, but it ain’t easy. Getting the government to stop funneling weapons and ammunition to Apartheid Israel, via the US, will take lots of organization, and vast amounts of energy. In contrast, the simplest acts may be the most rewarding. To learn more about the size and shape of simple acts of justice, the GPM reached out to David Mivasair. Originally from Baltimore, Rabbi David Mivasair has lived in Canada for years. He’s a member of a group called Independent Jewish Voices Canada, and a tireless Palestine solidarity activist in Hamilton, Ontario. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here:

Ecotoxicology / Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine Anyone who’s flown across Canada, coast to coast, knows the country is blanketed in lakes and rivers. To a greater or lesser extent, like everywhere else on planet Earth, Canadian surface waters contain chemically pollutants. Industrial effluents are the major source, right? Think again. The largest source of surface water pollution in Canada are domestic sinks and toilet bowls, and storm waters draining across urban streets and green spaces, all flushing into municipal wastewater plants. Those treatment plants do their best to remove organic pollutants, but others remain. Among these, thousands of compounds contained in household detergents, cleansers, and personal care products, partially metabolized pharmaceutical products, and vast quantities of microplastics from washing machines and dryers. More exotic toxins are there too, including polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) — those ‘forever chemicals’, virtually impossible to break down, biologically — and mercury, naturally present in soils, and generated through the burning of fossil fuels. Dr. Karen Kidd has spent her career studying the effects toxic contaminants have on fish and tiny invertebrates living in Canadian lakes and rivers. Kidd is a Professor in the Department of Biology at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Orb-weaving spiders inhabiting the riparian edge of those rivers are a powerful research tool in the Kidd lab. Riparian arachnids dine on insects emerging from surface waters, and on their larvae. Chemical contaminants inside those aquatic insects appear to alter the composition of microbial communities living inside their terrestrial spider predators — a complex microbial mix that can be monitored. Like the human microbiome, spider endosymbionts like Wohlbachia know no other home, and help spiders out. They also help ecotoxicologists monitor the presence and impact of freshwater contaminants. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription The GPM paid a visit to the Kidd lab, to learn more about how the microbiomes of tetragnathid (‘four-jawed’) spiders are being used to monitor river pollution. Karen Kidd has been Jarislowsky Chair of Environment and Health at McMaster University since 2017. Before that, she was a Canada Research Chair on the Chemical Contamination of Food Webs at the University of New Brunswick, and a Research Scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Dr. Milena Esser is a postdoctoral fellow in Karen Kidd’s lab, and Colleen Wardlaw is a Ph.D. candidate. Listen to our conversation in today’s edition of the GPM. Click on the play button above, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here:   With all eyes fixed on the genocidal war Israel-USA has been waging in Gaza since October 2023, the self-proclaimed ‘Jewish State’ has also been consolidating its unlawful colonization and de facto annexation of the Palestinian West Bank. Since the Gaza genocide began, Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers have been prosecuting a parallel campaign of terrorism and ethnic cleansing up and down the Palestinian West Bank. Ten thousand indigenous Bedouins have been displaced from their communities in the fertile Jordan Valley. Another 30,000 have been forcibly driven from their homes in the so-called ‘refugee camps’ of Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams. With the full support of Israeli soldiers and police, in and out of uniform, Jewish settlers have forcibly displaced the entire Bedouin population between Ramallah and the Jordan Valley. Over sixty communities have been erased. A clear war crime – arguably a crime against humanity — that the most powerful Western and Gulf/Arab states fully support. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription The GPM spoke about the ethnic cleansing of West Bank Palestinians with Fathi Nimer. Nimer is Palestine Policy Fellow of the Palestinian Policy Network, Al-Shabaka. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM edition. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

Israel-USA & Palestine — Free Speech Chilled GPM # 110 Donald Trump wants Greenland, he repeatedly declares, and will seize control of the largely frozen island “one way or the other.”  Military force is a clear option. “We won’t get anything unless I use excessive strength and force,” Trump told a packed room at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week. Trump’s rationale for such a move, in blatant odds with the UN Charter, not to mention the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, founding instrument of NATO: protecting the western hemisphere from the rapacious Chinese and Russians. No one in a position to know such things believes Russia or China actually threaten the self-governing, autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. Everyone’s military aircraft and ships go wherever they’re able, first and foremost the US’s, with a constellation of 800 military bases encircling the planet. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription The real origin of Donald Trump’s Greenland lust is as clear as his and his War Minister’s willingness to militarily seize it. Borrowing a phrase from Bill Clinton — it’s the precious minerals, stupid. Trump didn’t abduct Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro, effectively taking over the South American nation, because Maduro is a drug trafficker. Just a flimsy ruse. Trump wanted Venezuelan oil. Likewise, it’s the wildly valuable rare-earth metals embedded in Greenland rock that Trump thirsts for. If the US does invade Greenland, Canada could be next. So says Robert Huish, Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University. He’s not the only one. “Perhaps not immediately as the 51st state,” Huish writes, in a recent article for The Conversation, “but quite possibly as a U.S. territory that would deny Canadians any voting rights for Congress or the Presidency.” The GPM reached out to Robert Huish, an Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University, in Halifax. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here: Wanna get fired from the job you love? Just condemn Israel for the hideous crimes it’s been committing against the Palestinian people, in occupied Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank. Call Israel a settler-colonial state, or an apartheid regime. Accuse it of committing genocide. Post your comments on Facebook, X, Instagram or TikTok. Then, wait a bit. More likely than not, pro-Israeli/Zionist forces will complain to your boss or the school or university where you teach, and you’ll be out the door. If you’re a person of colour, or a Palestinian, or Muslim, you’ll be out the door real fast. Dozens of American academics, teachers and civil servants have been investigated, suspended or fired for their peaceful, pro-Palestine discourse or activism. Those who’ve held on to their jobs – those who’ve never said anything at all — feel the chill. Here in Canada, the situation is less extreme, but worrisome, nonetheless. Especially for those who speak out on social media – in the most measured of ways. Read their stories here and here and here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription One Canadian academic who’s experienced the chill is Mohammad Zubairi. Zubairi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. In late 2024, Zubairi was appointed Post-Graduate Medical Education Director for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion — a well-established policy rubric in Canada, unlike Trump’s US, where it’s been all but stamped out. Complaints about Zubairi’s appointment soon rolled in, from Zionist forces in both Ontario and the U.S. Judging from the way it handled complaints, McMaster University appears to be an enlightened institution. Zubairi has held onto his job – a job he greatly enjoys. The GPM sat down with Mohammad Zubairi in the studios of 93.3 CFMU-FM, McMaster University Radio. Zubairi is a developmental and behavioural pediatrician. Since late 2024, Zubairi has served as the Post-Graduate Medical Education Director for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 109 Development is a human right. So are clean air and water, and a stable climate. No one is more engaged in advancing these ideas than McMaster University professor Bonny Ibhawoh. For the past year, Ibhawoh and his colleagues have been formulating a policy document exploring the connections between sustainable development as a human right, and climate justice – bringing a justice dimension to discussions about how to mitigate and adapt to climate breakdown. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Last November, Ibhawoh presented the document at the 30th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention, in Belem, Brazil, COP-30. Ibhawoh teaches Global Human Rights in the Department of History, and the Centre for Global Peace, Justice and Health at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the founding Director of the McMaster Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and current Chair of the United Nations’ Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development. The GPM sat down with Bonny Ibhawoh in his McMaster University office. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here. The Chagos Islands — not a place many people have heard of, much less visited. You can barely find them on a map, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Long before Europeans arrived, the Chagos Islands were culturally tied to the island of Mauritius, as it’s known today, 900 km east of Madagascar. The Dutch occupied the island between 1638 and 1710. The French seized it in 1715, naming it Île de France. In 1810, the British seized it from the French, consolidating their colonial possession in the 1814 Treaty of Paris. Mauritius, they called it — declaring it part of Britain’s far-flung “Indian Ocean Territory.” At the height of the decolonization movement, in March 1968, Mauritius gained its independence – with one small cut-out: the Chagos islands, 2200 km northwest of Mauritius. The Chagos Archipelago consists of a number of islands and atolls, the largest of which is Diego Garcia. Due south of the oil-rich Persian Gulf, about 27 square kilometers in size, Diego Garcia would be the perfect place to set up a military base, the British thought. In cahoots with their fast friends in Washington, that’s exactly what they did. In late 1966, Diego Garcia became a shining star in the expanding constellation of US military bases all around the planet (now 800 in total). Also, a great ‘Black Site’ where official enemies could be detained and tortured in secret, without due process. The Chagossians were forcibly displaced, in the cruelest of ways. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Between 1967 and 1973, the Chagos Archipelago’s entire population was either blocked from returning or forcibly removed by the UK. The forcible expulsion of Diego Garcia’s population took place between July and September 1971. Britain declared the entire archipelago a “Marine Protected Area.” In 2010, Mauritius undertook proceedings against the UK. They dragged on for years. In 2017, the UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice, the international community’s supreme judicial body, to render an Advisory Opinion on the matter. The ICJ issued its Advisory Opinion in February 2019: The decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed when that country acceded to independence, the Chagossian people’s inalienable right to self-determination has been violated, the UK’s administration of their island home is an internationally wrongful act, and the UK must end its administration of the archipelago “as rapidly as possible,” the ICJ declared. The UN General Assembly endorsed the ICJ ruling shortly thereafter, calling on all UN member states to secure Chagossian independence by November 2025. Colonialists to the core (and the tightest of US allies), Britain said sure, then hedged its bets. In May 2025, the UK struck a deal with Mauritius. Under that deal — ostensibly aimed at implementing the ICJ ruling — Mauritius would lease Diego Garcia to the UK for 99 years, with a 40-year extension option. This past December, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) called on the UK to suspend that deal. In addition to denying the Chagossian people’s right to return to Diego Garcia Island, CERD said, the UK-Mauritius deals prevents Chagossians “from exercising their cultural rights and preserving their cultural heritage,” and perpetuates longstanding violations of the Chagossian people’s right to self-determination. Under international law, the right to self-determination is jus cogens (obligatory;  no questions, no exceptions) and erga omnes (owed to all; all states are obliged to enforce it).  A very long story that David Vine has been following for years. David Vine is a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C. He’s the author of a trilogy of books about the US penchant for permanent war, and about America’s network of 800 military bases around the world. Island of Shame, the Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia, was published in 2011. All royalties go to the Chagossian people. The latest of David Vine’s books, published in 2020 by University of California Press, is entitled The United States of War – a Global History of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State. Listen to our conversation with David Vine. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Watch our complete conversation with David Vine here:

GPM # 108 One in four Canadians live in households experiencing food insecurity. That’s the finding of a report from Statistics Canada, released in December 2025. Over the last five years, the rate of “severe food insecurity,” situations in which Canadians skip meals, has doubled. Food insecurity is highest in Nunavut – 60-70% of households experience it there — and the lowest in Quebec. For insight into the nature and drivers of food insecurity in Canada, the GPM reached out to Valerie Tarasuk, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto. Tarasuk is the lead investigator for PROOF, a research program that explores policy interventions to reduce food insecurity in Canada. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Watch our complete conversation here: Zohran Mamdani … Prior to his historic victory in the New York City mayoralty election, last November, his name was barely known. Zohran Mamdani is the first South Asian, and first Muslim to be elected mayor of the U.S.’s most populous city. He’s also the first Democratic Socialist mayor of a major American city.  In the very first line of his acceptance speech, Mamdani tipped his hat to America’s most illustrious, trailblazing democratic socialist – Eugene Debs. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription “The sun may have set over our city this evening,” Mamdani declared last November 4, to huge applause, “but as Eugene Debs once said: “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”” How many of Zohran Mamdani’s supporters actually knew who Eugene Debs was? Few, for sure. Eugene Debs was one of America’s great trade union leaders and political radicals. In contrast to late 19th/early 20th century labour leaders like Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labour, Debs was a man of the left, with a distinctive class-based analysis. Debs was an anti-capitalist, a socialist, and a fierce political radical. He marched with Susan B. Anthony, America’s trailblazing women’s rights activist. Emma Goldman was his friend. Perennial socialist candidate, Eugene Debs ran for president three times in the early 20th century, under the banner of the Democratic Socialist Party. The most radical, personally hazardous of Debs’ positions — his opposition to and active promotion of resistance against American involvement in the First World War.  On September 14, 1918, U.S. District Judge David C. Westenhaver sentenced Eugene Debs to ten years imprisonment for an anti-war speech he’d delivered to a Socialist Party gathering in Canton, Ohio, three months earlier, in alleged violation of the Espionage Act of 1917.  In response to the jail sentence, Debs famously declared: “Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.” To learn more about Eugene Debs, the GPM reached out to Shawn Gude. Gude is the author of a new biography of Eugene Debs, due to be published on the 100th anniversary of Debs’ death, this coming October. Gude is a senior editor for Jacobin Magazine. His book — American Socialist: The Life & Times of Eugene Debs – will be released by Simon & Schuster in October 2026. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Listen to our conversation with Shawn Gude. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 107 Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on, with no end in sight. Over 63,000 Palestinians have been killed by US bombs and missiles, almost twenty thousand of them children. Tens of thousands more lie dead and rotting beneath the rubble. Over 80% of the Gazans Israel has killed were civilians, its own data reveals. Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic ailments that can no longer be treated, and forced starvation — may bring that number to 200,000. Last week, Israel launched a full-scale assault on northern Gaza, home to an estimated million Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu’s aim — to drive them and the remainder of the estimated 2.1 million Gazans who’ve managed to survive Israel’s biblical onslaught into a vast concentration camp on the southern end of the enclave, there to be bombed, to perish from starvation and disease, or to pack up and get out. Israel is reportedly in negotiations with South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Libya, and Indonesia to accept Palestinian deportees. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Meanwhile, a slew of Western leaders have vowed to recognize Palestinian statehood at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, scheduled to convene on September 8, in NYC (or Geneva, if that’s where the UNGA moves its proceedings, following US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s refusal to grant visas to Palestinian delegates). Recognizing Palestinian statehood is their best way to secure what they call ‘peace’. Palestinian statehood — with conditions. Only Western-approved Palestinian parties and candidates will be allowed to run (Hamas excluded, of course), and Palestine will need to be demilitarized, therefore defenseless in the face of certain Israeli assault. Hardly a day goes by when Israel doesn’t violate the territorial integrity of Lebanon and Syria, both of them UN member states. Of course, Palestinians will be obliged to guarantee Israeli security. The GPM spoke about Israel-USA’s war on Gaza, and the future of the Palestinian people, with American-Palestinian journalist and author, Ramzy Baroud. Baroud is the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, former Managing Editor of London-based Middle East Eye, and former Deputy Managing Editor of Al Jazeera Online. Baroud is also the author of six books, and a contributor to many others. His latest volume, co-edited with British-Israeli author Ilan Pappé — Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out — has just been published by Clarity Press. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 106 Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on. Sixty-one thousand have been killed by US bombs and missiles. Some German and British ordnance in there. Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic disorders that can no longer be treated (due to Israel-USA’s blockade), and malnutrition — may bring that number to 200,000. Over 150,000 have been injured. Israel-USA’s wanton destruction of Gaza’s health care system — infrastructure and personnel — has given rise to a new term: ‘medicide’. The most recent figures from the World Health Organization tell the story: Half of the 36 hospitals operating in Gaza before October 7, 2023 have been destroyed. The other half are partially functional, overwhelmed with the injured and refugees. Two-thirds of little Gaza’s primary health care facilities have been demolished. In North Gaza, home to an estimated million souls at this moment (people Israel-USA wants to forcible expel), one partially functional hospital remains. As if the situation in Gaza weren’t sufficiently appalling – two years into a war widely described as genocidal, by people who know what genocide is and have the honesty to use the word (too many to cite here) — Gaza is now swept by infectious pathogens few if any drugs can treat. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription In a recent report in the British medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a half-dozen strains of multidrug-resistant bacteria have been described, isolated from 1300 tissue specimens gathered at one of Gaza’s sole surviving microbiology units, at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, in Gaza City, between November 2023 and the end of August, 2024. Among the strains of drug-resistant bacteria the researchers identified, notorious wound pathogens Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella, and E. coli. Two-thirds of all isolates were resistant to multiple antibiotics, from different drug classes (a benchmark for establishing ‘multidrug resistance’), indicating “sustained selection pressure.” In other words, prevailing conditions in Gaza are ‘selecting for’, and therefore driving the emergence of resistant strains of virulent bacteria few if any drugs will treat. Conditions are also ripe for the spread of these diseases. Crowded field hospital wards, squalid tent encampments, and the almost complete destruction of Gaza’s sewage and freshwater systems are a perfect storm for the spread of diseases no drug will treat. To make the situation even more acute, antibiotics are in short supply in Gaza. So are wound irrigation fluids and sterile dressings, and the materials needed to culture bacteria, in order to establish the best antibiotics to treat them. Sixteen percent of Pseudomonas samples examined by the Lancet study’s authors were resistant to the drug colistin, the drug of last resort when all others fail. The last remaining bullet. “The international medical community has a duty to act and respond to this crisis,” the authors of the Lancet piece write. “First and foremost, healthcare workers and governments worldwide must advocate for the cessation of the Israeli military invasion that has resulted in a surge of trauma injuries and the widespread deliberate targeting of hospitals, laboratories, and water desalination plants; without this ceasefire, the infection burden will escalate further.” The GPM spoke with one of the authors of the Lancet report. Bilal Irfan is a bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, and a researcher at the medical school’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital, specializing in conflict health. Irfan has been collaborating with Palestinian medical students and physicians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in the documentation of Israeli medicide. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription And here’s another Lancet piece, released on August 18, 2025, lead author Bilal Irfan, entitled “Is Gaza still a place for newborn life?”

GPM #105 Twenty-two months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, the official death toll now topping 60,000 (possibly approaching 200,000), famine has now been formally declared by the UN agency that declares such things – the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC. It’s a “worst case scenario,” the IPC declared at the end of July. No news for those who follow the media. Skeletal toddlers and non-lactating Gazan mothers crowd TV screens and online news platforms day after day. All “blood lies,” says criminal fugitive Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, under arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court. Still, Israel’s fast friends seem moved, and are now declaring the horror show has to stop. “Dangerous,” a couple of dozen Western officials recently declared. “Inhumane,” “unacceptable,” “egregious.” Outrageously unlawful? No. No Western state has gone that far. No mention of the G-word, nor the A-word. But a sea change seems to be underway, in places you’d least expect – the UK, the Netherlands … Germany. And Canada — rock-solid Israeli Bro when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister. Justin Trudeau vowed a more nuanced, Palestine-friendly policy. Displaying true Liberal colours, however, Trudeau’s Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, vowed Canada would be Israel’s “asset” at the UN Security Council — should it win a seat. It didn’t. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Now, in the Red Chamber of the Canadian Parliament, the Senate, sturdier voices are calling for justice and action. In late June, then again in late July, Canadian Senators called on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to uphold international law, urging the Canadian government to implement a half dozen punitive measures against Israel. The GPM spoke with one of them, Canadian Senator from the Province of Manitoba, the Honorable Marilou McPhedran. Marilou McPhedran is a Canadian lawyer and human rights advocate. She was the Dean of the University of Winnipeg’s Global College, in Manitoba, between 2008 and 2012, and has been a member of the Senate of Canada since October 2016. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here: War and police repression — land and climate destruction: flip sides of the same coin. Twenty-two months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, US bombs and missiles have reportedly generated about 40 million tonnes of concrete rubble, liberally seasoned with the toxic residues of US, British and German munitions. Cleaning up Israel-USA’s mountain of poisonous detritus, reducing it to a finer grade of carcinogenic rubble, trucking it all off (underlying terrain to be replaced by Trump/Witkoff real estate?), will generate an estimated 90,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases. By some estimates, rebuilding Gaza (if this can be imagined) will generate thirty million tonnes of Earth-warming gases — and a shit-load of cash. Meanwhile, in Israel-USA — intellectual co-author/perpetrator of Israeli mass murder and destruction — Donald Trump’s “Big Ugly Billionaire Bailout Bill” pulverizes America’s fledgling renewable energy industry. Wind turbines and solar panel farms have been slashed. They kill birds and mar the landscape, the NYC/Florida-based sociopath says. Buried in his ten-thousand-word pile of vicious legislative rubble, a $150 billion allocation to ICE – US Immigration Control & Enforcement. Trump’s Brown Shirts are now terrorizing black, brown and Latino communities coast to coast. The GPM talked about all this with Aaron Kirshenbaum, War is Not Green organizer for the US antiwar and justice organization CODEPINK. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 104 You have to laugh to keep from crying sometimes. Two years into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza — bloody slaughter and mass starvation live streamed on TV screens — the old blues lyric rings true. For tears of joy, not rage, friends of Palestine should consider visiting Bethlehem. Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the loveliest of holy towns, hemmed in by concrete walls, watchtowers, checkpoints, and a string of mega-Jewish settler-colonies, a biologist named Mazin Qumsiyeh, his partner Jessie and friends are planting native Palestinian seeds, raising chickens, rabbits and fish, and offering up habitat for insects, birds, bats, and other small mammals. Rescuing their beloved landscape from Euro-North American land thieves and eco-vandals. The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity & Sustainability, their oasis is called. Perched above the Palestine Institute’s splendid gardens, a 1200-square meter museum is now nearing completion. For an update on the Palestine Institute’s new museum, and gardens beneath, we reached out to Mazin Qumsiyeh. Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian scientist, scholar, author, and environmental justice advocate. Together with his partner Jessie Chang, Mazin founded the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, and the Palestine Museum of Natural History. Mazin has published over 150 scientific papers and books on topics ranging from cultural heritage to biodiversity. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Learn how to volunteer here. Watch a complete conversation of ours here, recorded in the Palestine Institute garden back in April 2024. Thanks to Paul Tekenbroek for video production.  Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on, with no end in sight. Mainstream commentators with some degree of sympathy for the Palestinian people argue that Israel needs to be ‘pressured’ to end the war. Others say Israel will have to be forced to withdraw from Gaza. Indeed, to terminate its unlawful occupation of all Palestinian territories. Unlawful is how the International Court of Justice described Israel’s 58-year-old occupation, in a UN-solicited Advisory Opinion issued over a year ago. In the wake of the ICJ’s ruling, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on Israel to end its occupation within a year. That would be this coming September. Israel will certainly not do so. The US won’t pressure it, let alone force it. The US and Israel are blood-brothers; conjoined twins. So, hope turns to European capitals. Last week, French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron announced that France would formally recognize the State of Palestine. The UK may follow, but British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is much more weak-kneed that Macron, and anxious to please Donald Trump, who thinks Gaza should be completely bulldozed, then turned into a real estate paradise for people like himself and his wealthy friends. Last May, speaking to a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide in Sarajevo, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé offered his own thoughts on the troubling situation. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter’s College of Social Sciences and International Studies, where he directs the European Centre for Palestine Studies. He’s also the author of various foundational works on Palestine. Among these, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and Ten Myths About Israel. His most recent work — Lobbying For Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic — was released last year. Listen to Ilan Pappé in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Trump’s War on Diversity, Equity & Inclusiveness  GPM # 103 It’s been seven months since the start of Donald Trump’s second administration. A hundred and eighty days. Feels like years. With lightning speed, razor-sharp precision, and the ferocity of junkyard dogs, Trump and his minions have slashed thousands of federal jobs, gutted departments responsible for health, education, environmental protection; for international development assistance; for the funding of medical and climate research. War has been declared on free speech, transgender people, and the media — corporate and public. “Fake News,” Trump calls them. “Enemies of the People.” Central mission of Trump’s second regime: driving millions of undocumented migrants out of the country; pursuing them with militarized savagery; spiriting them off to gulag jails stretching from Florida, Louisiana and Texas down to El Salvador; shipping them off to remote African locations; people who’ve lived and worked in America for years; who’ve never committed a crime; who’ve paid taxes; raised kids – kids born in America. Strip them of their citizenship,  Trump and his ‘Homeland Security’ capos cry. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Aside from migrant black, brown and Hispanic folks who just want to earn a living in a country they believe is great, nothing fills Donald Trump’s craw with more bile than those three normative nouns – diversity, equity and inclusiveness. Trump and his White-America-First czars are now rooting out DEI programs with the zealousness of medieval crusaders. Dorothy Roberts American scholar and writer Dorothy Roberts spoke with the GPM about Trump’s first 180 days, examining Trump’s policies through the lens of race, class and gender. Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society – and a prolific writer. Among Dorothy Roberts’ works: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century; Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty; and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. Roberts’ latest book — The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family — will be available in February 2026. Listen to our conversation with Dorothy Roberts in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 102 Criminal kingpins defend themselves. Cross them at your own risk. White Rose activists resisting the Nazis; Italian journalists and prosecutors pursuing the mafia; dissident Russian politicians challenging Vladimir Putin – and getting too popular … they all paid the price: guillotined, gunned down, poisoned, or starved to death in gulag dungeons. White Rose activist Sophie Scholl Now, condemning the US government and its foreign policies, or pursuing its beloved partner in crime in court, probably won’t get you killed. Donald Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, will just ruin your life. Ask Andrew Cayley. Together with American lawyer Brenda Hollis, Cayley, a British barrister, steered the International Criminal Court investigation leading to arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his war minister, Yoav Gallant, back in November 2024. “It was the worst few months of my life,” Cayley told the Observer. US Senator Lindsey Graham screamed and yelled at Cayley and his colleagues, vowing sanctions against them and the court, in his cranky redneck drawl. Scary phone threats followed. Then, the kicker: Watch your back, Dutch police warned Cayley. “They said we need to look at your flat and we need to put alarms on all the French windows, bars across the skylights and you need a reinforced bulletproof door,” Cayley recounted to the Observer. Terrorized, Cayley quit last fall. Others have too. ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, flanked by prosecutors Brenda Hollis and Andrew Cayley Meanwhile, ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan and four judges now face crushing US sanctions; bank accounts have been frozen; email accounts blocked. The entire court’s IT system – its very existence – is under threat. (in flagrant breach of Article 70 of the ICC’s Rome Statute.) In the midst of it all, Benjamin Netanyahu travels back and forth between Tel Aviv and Washington, through European airspace, fearing nothing from Greek, Italian, French, or British authorities. The GPM spoke with British barrister Toby Cadman about ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, where they stand, anticipated warrants against other Israeli leaders, and crippling US sanctions against the ICC. Toby Cadman is an international human rights lawyer, and the co-founder and joint head of Guernica 37 Chambers, a London-based law firm specializing in international criminal and humanitarian law. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here: Then, there’s Italian human rights lawyer Francesca Albanese. In her role as Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Occupied Palestine, Albanese has submitted a host of damning reports to the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council. Israel and its conjoined twin have not been amused. Albanese’s latest report has really pissed off the Americans.  “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide,” it’s called. Albanese’s report lists dozens of mega-corporations that have been aiding, abetting, and profiting from Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide. Among these, US-based Lockheed-Martin, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, Palantir, Microsoft, Google, Caterpillar … the list goes on and on. Infuriated, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has struck back. “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West,” Rubio wrote in a statement released on July 9, slapping sanctions on Albanese. Little Marco was just warming up. Albanese, Donald Trump’s poker-faced Secretary of State declared, has written “threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives. We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.” The GPM spoke to Albanese last January. At the time, Israeli Occupation Forces were in the midst of demolishing Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank. Since then, some 70,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps. Since October 7, 2023, about a thousand Palestinians have been killed up and down the West Bank by Jewish settler-terrorists and their soldier friends. Since May, almost 800 starving Gazans have been gunned down by Israeli military snipers and US mercenaries, while seeking out food at US/Israeli “humanitarian aid” centers. Most recently, Israeli war minister Israel Katz has floated the idea of building a concentration camp on the ruins of southern Rafah, into which Gaza’s surviving two million woe begotten residents would be forced — presumably by a fleet of weaponized, heavily armoured Caterpillar D9 bulldozers, provided by Israel-USA. Listen to our conversation with Francesca Albanese. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 101 We’ve been sharing extracts from a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza Genocide, that took place in Sarajevo at the end of May. Inspired by the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US war on Iraq, the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024. Faced with a “total failure of the organised international community to implement international law in the most severe, visible case of genocide in real time,” the Gaza Tribunal “aims to legitimize an alternative paradigm of international law, one that derives its authority from people and their sense of justice rather than relying solely on governments and their institutions.” The Gaza Tribunal is governed by an eight-member Steering Committee headed by Richard Falk, Emeritus Professor of International Law and former UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, assisted by a 29-member Advisory Policy Council of civil society leaders and public intellectuals from Palestine, Europe and North America. The Tribunal’s final judgement will be rendered by a ‘Jury of Conscience’, following closing hearings in Istanbul in late October. That judgement, together with personal testimony, civil society submissions, and closing reports from each of the Tribunal’s three Chambers, will be incorporated into a set of public archives that will remain open for continuing submissions. In today’s GPM podcast — voices from a tribunal session about corporate media reporting on the Gaza genocide, chaired by Turkish attorney Mehmet Karli. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Participants include: Lubna Masarwa, Palestine/Israel bureau chief for the Middle East Eye; British journalist Victoria Brittain; Ezgi Basaran, Oxford University scholar on Turkish and Middle East politics; Assal Rad, Middle East history scholar and non-resident Fellow at DAWN, a group founded by murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and British broadcaster and journalist, Lauren Booth. Listen to the panel in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 100 “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which includes mass killing, arbitrary detention, torture, and the imposition of a legal regime that provides far less due process than that provided to Israelis living in the same territory, meets the legal definition of apartheid.” So say four American human rights lawyers and scholars in a report released on May 15, entitled “An Analysis of Israel’s Laws and Policies and the Responsibilities of US Academic and Other Institutions.” Sandra Babcock is director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School. Thomas Becker is the legal and policy director at the University Network for Human Rights, and teaches human rights at Columbia Law School. James Cavallaro is the executive director of the University Network for Human Rights, and a visiting professor at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Susan M Akram is director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law. The GPM spoke about the report with Susan Akram. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Flag Woman in Rotterdam, October 2023 (David Kattenburg) We’ve been playing extracts from a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza Genocide, that took place in Sarajevo at the end of May. Inspired by the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US war on Iraq, the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024. Faced with a “total failure of the organized international community to implement international law in the most severe, visible case of genocide in real time,” the Gaza Tribunal’s website states, it “aims to legitimize “an alternative paradigm of international law, one that derives its authority from people and their sense of justice rather than relying solely on governments and their institutions.” The Gaza Tribunal is governed by an eight-member Steering Committee headed by Richard Falk, Emeritus Professor of International Law, and former UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, assisted by a 29-member Advisory Policy Council of civil society leaders and public intellectuals from Palestine, Europe, and North America. Among these: Diana Buttu, Susan Abulhawa, Mouin Rabbani, Raja Shehadeh, Ghassan Abu Sittah, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Yanis Varoufakis, Tariq Ali, Mary Kaldor, Naomi Klein, and Jeremy Corbyn. The Tribunal’s final judgement will be rendered by a ‘Jury of Conscience’ composed of a half dozen judges, following closing hearings in Istanbul in late October. That judgement, together with personal testimony, civil society submissions, and closing reports from each of the Tribunal’s three Chambers, will be incorporated into a set of public archives that will remain open for continuing submissions. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Here’s a presentation from the third day of the Gaza Tribunal, in Sarajevo. Saree Makdisi is an American literary critic and professor, of Palestinian and Lebanese descent. He also writes on contemporary Arab politics and culture. Makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Listen to Saree Makdisi in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 99 The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 55,000. According to a pair of reports in the British medical journal The Lancet, the number may be much higher. Before the war, Gaza’s population was pegged at 2.3 million. These days, mainstream media talk about 2.1 million Gazans. What happened to the remaining 200,000? Fifty to seventy-five thousand have likely been blown to bits by US bombs and missiles, many of them now buried under vast piles of rubble. Another 150,000 would have died from profound injuries that couldn’t be treated, or from wound infection, infectious disease, chronic diseases that can no longer be treated — because Israel has blocked entry of medicines and vital equipment — and from starvation. As awful as these figures are, worse is surely in store for little Gaza. Nearly half of its population are children. Those who physically survive, deeply traumatized, will carry scars for the rest of their lives, both physical and psychological. Many now face a life of disability, under permanent military occupation and siege the international community has shown no interest in ending. If they bear children, their children will too. A “pandemic of disabilities,” the Commissioner General of UNRWA, the UN Relief & Works Agency, called this. In late May, a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide, featuring scores of witness accounts and testimony, was held in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Tribunal’s final judgement will be rendered by a ‘Jury of Conscience’ composed of a half dozen judges, following closing hearings in Istanbul in late October. That judgement, together with personal testimony, civil society submissions, and closing reports from each of the Tribunal’s three Chambers, will be incorporated into a set of public archives that will remain open for continuing submissions. Last week, the GPM featured a presentation to the Gaza Tribunal by British scholar Penny Green, speaking about the “disabling” tactics Israeli Occupation Forces have deployed over the course of the last 21 months in Gaza. We reached out to Penny Green, for a more in-depth conversation. Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, and the acting chair of the Gaza Tribunal. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click play above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 98 Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza has just entered its 21st month. According to Gaza health officials, almost 55,000 have been killed since the war began (the actual number may be two or three times higher), and 125,000 have been injured, with fewer and fewer places to seek care. Gaza’s health system — among the region’s most functional, before the war — has been laid to waste. Hospitals, clinics, emergency rescue vehicles and health care personnel are perfectly legitimate targets, Israel says, insisting that it’s operating squarely within the bounds of international law. Of the 36 hospitals operating in Gaza before October 2023, seventeen are now in partial operation. Seven out of fifteen field hospitals, 61 out of 160 primary health centres, and 127 out of 353 mobile clinics are partially functional. Gaza’s kids are suffering the most. The tiny enclave, under comprehensive Israeli siege since 2007, is now reportedly home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said, at the end of October 2023. In late May, UNICEF reported that fifteen thousand Gazan kids have been killed, over 34,000 injured, and nearly a million deprived of their right to basic services. Last week, the GPM reported on a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide, held in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The three-day hearing featured scores of witness accounts and testimony. Among the most gripping, accounts from two physicians who’ve worked in Gaza hospitals. Dr. Mimi Syed is an American board-certified emergency medicine physician. She served in Gaza from August to September 2024, and in December 2024, at both Al-Aqsa and Nasser Hospitals. Dr. Thaer Ahmad is an emergency medicine physician at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Chicago, and an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Illinois.  He spent time at Nasser Hospital, in Khan Younis, just north of Rafah, the last remaining referral hospital in south Gaza. Listen to Mimi Syed and Thaer Ahmad in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 55,000. According to a pair of reports last year in the British medical journal The Lancet, the number may be much higher. Before the war, Gaza’s population was pegged at 2.3 million. These days, mainstream media talk about 2.1 million Gazans. What happened to the remaining 200,000? Fifty to seventy-five thousand have likely been blown to bits by US bombs and missiles, many of them now buried under vast piles of rubble. Another 150,000 have presumably died from grave injuries, or from wound infection, infectious disease in fetid refugee encampments (that Israel incessantly bombs), chronic ailments that can no longer be treated, due to Israel’s blockade on drugs and vital equipment, and from starvation. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription As awful as these figures are, worse is surely in store for little Gaza. Nearly half of Gaza’s population are children. Those who survive, deeply traumatized, will carry both physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. Many now face a life of disability, without social or economic supports, under permanent military occupation and siege the international community has shown no interest in ending. If they bear children, their children will too, and their children’s children.  A “pandemic of disabilities,” the Commissioner General of UNRWA, the UN Relief & Works Agency, called this. Late last month, at the Gaza Tribunal, in Sarajevo, British scholar Penny Green spoke about the “disabling” tactics Israeli Occupation Forces have deployed over the course of the last 21 months in Gaza. Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, and the acting chair of the Gaza Tribunal. Listen to Penny Green in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 97 Israel’s war on Gaza is about to enter its twentieth month. Widely described as genocidal by legal scholars and human rights experts, Israel and its conjoined twin (‘Israel-USA’) say it’s nothing of the sort. One would hardly expect genocide perpetrators to acknowledge committing the crime of crimes.  Israel’s ability to commit the highest of crimes with impunity — aided, assisted, and shielded by Israel-USA — makes the world a more dangerous place, Norway’s international development minister said the other day. “Genocide is the worst crime a country can do and the worst crime that politicians can do and this should not be polarised,” Åsmund Aukrust said, according to The Guardian, without indicating when or where. Western politicians shouldn’t be aiding and abetting Israeli genocide, Aukrust might have said.  Alongside Israel-USA, the UK and Germany are Israel’s most generous arms suppliers. The Netherlands sends Israel spare parts for the F-35 bombers it’s been using to lay Gaza to waste. Turkey – not really a Western power, but a member of NATO – happily funnels jet fuel to Israel, all the while condemning Israel for its crimes. Back on May 19, the UK, France and Canada suggested they may hold Israel to account — at some point. No sign of that yet. “The Israeli government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population [of Gaza] is unacceptable, and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law,” the British, French and Canadians said in their joint press release [emphasis added]. The Brits, French and Canadians are hedging their bets. So are the most powerful Arab states, who’ve yet to lift a finger to halt the mass murder of their Palestinian confreres. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription For his views on this sorry international affair, the GPM reached out to Christopher Gunness, former UN director for Strategic Communications & Advocacy in the Middle East, and chief spokesperson for UNRWA. These days, Gunness is the executive director of the Myanmar Accountability Project. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born,” Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously wrote, from a fascist prison, back in the 1930s. “Now is the time of monsters, Gramsci said. Almost a century later, the monsters are back again, committing unspeakable crimes with absolute impunity; laying waste to the 20th century’s most fundamental international laws, set forth in the wake of European fascist horror; turning the 21st century into a lawless, dangerous place. “The world is approaching a dangerous precipice, the front edge of which is in Palestine,” a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide declared last week in Sarajevo, and “dangerous forces” are “pushing us toward the abyss.” The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal culminated three days of public hearings at the International University of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Inspired by past People’s Tribunals — most notably the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US’s war on Iraq – the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024. Listen to an abbreviated version of the Sarajevo Declaration in today’s podcast, read by Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, and the Gaza Tribunal’s acting chair, at the close of last week’s hearings. Here’s the complete Gaza Declaration. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription

GPM # 96 A Conversation With Michael Lynk Nineteen months into Israel-USA’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza, the official death toll now over 53,000, likely much higher and climbing fast (approaching 200,000, some say), two questions beg to be asked – how and why did it start, and why has it been so hard to stop? According to The Guardian, the Gaza war was “triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted another 250.” As for why the war drags on, with no end in sight, informed observers say the two ‘sides’ in the ‘conflict’ can’t agree to a ceasefire. A circular argument, if ever there was one. Hamas’ audacious assault on southern Israeli communities, back in October 2023, was certainly the most proximal cause of Israel’s war — waged in partnership with the US (Israel-USA) – and the supposedly tireless efforts of staunch US allies Egypt and Qatar to broker a ceasefire have definitely been vexed. But, in search of deeper reasons for the apocalypse Gazans now face, alongside their brethren across the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and the apparent incapacity of the world’s most powerful players to bring it to an end, entrenched political philosophy and doctrine may be more instructive than recent incidents and scenarios. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Key among these: the categorical imperative among the Western world’s most powerful states that, at the end of the day, international law must be sidelined; slipped into the lowest of bottom drawers. That efforts to end Israel’s savage assault on Gaza, and parallel soldier-settler-terrorist attacks on Palestinians up and down the effectively annexed West Bank, must not be informed — much less constrained — by international legal considerations. That international law must not be the basis upon which ‘peace’ and ‘security’ are achieved — the North Star for Great Powers anxious to resolve the ‘conflict’. That scrupulous enforcement of the 20th century’s most canonical legal instruments (promulgated in the wake of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Sobibor) doesn’t suit their interests, and might even undermine them. David Lloyd George Such was the view of James Balfour, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and other British leaders, back in the 1920s, when they decided to hand over historic Palestine to European Zionists, in clear breach of their obligation under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, instructing them to advance “the well-being and development” of Palestine’s “peoples,” as “a sacred trust of civilization.” At the start of Britain’s Palestine Mandate, in 1922, the British carried out a census. Seventy-nine percent of Palestine’s people were Arab Muslims, ten percent were Christian, and eleven percent were Jewish, half of the latter of indigenous Arab origin, the remainder recent immigrants from Europe, the census determined. Out the window these figures were flung, along with Britain’s solemn duty to uphold the freshly minted legal norms of the post-WWI international community. The rest is history – the history of canonical laws and treaties discarded, on behalf of this ‘Jewish State’ Britain had resolved to create, in partnership with European Zionists, thereby enabling Eastern European Jews to go anywhere, except to Britain. The UN plan to partition Palestine, following the collapse of Britain’s duplicitous Mandate — set forth in General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), promulgated in November 1947 — assigned 55 percent of historic Palestine to its Jewish people (a third of the population), and the remainder of the tiny slice of territory to Arab Palestinians. Jerusalem would be held as an internationalized corpus separatum. Israel supported the resolution, then, upon its passage, proceeded to violate it. Scene from 1947-49 Nakba Between December 1947 and early 1949, Israel forcibly expelled almost a million Palestinians from their lands, or terrorized them into fleeing, including from territories slated for the future Arab state. They also seized western Jerusalem. Western leaders wrung their hands, but did nothing. UN General Assembly Resolution 194, promulgated on December 11, 1948, stated that “[Palestinian] refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” On 17 December 1948, Israel’s second application for UN membership was rejected by the Security Council (the first had been ignored). Three months later, in Resolution 69, Israel’s third application was approved by a vote of 9 to 1 (Egypt voting against), conditioned on the new ‘Jewish’ state’s implementation of the Partition Plan, and the Palestinian Right of Return, set forth in Resolution 194. On this basis, on 11 May 1949, the UNGA approved Israeli membership by two-thirds majority. Israel proceeded to renege on its legally binding commitment to the UN, and the Western powers did nothing.   In October 1956, in connivance with Britain and France, and in flagrant breach of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, obliging member states to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” Israel set out to overthrow Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and seize the Suez Canal. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser US President Dwight Eisenhower put his foot down, and the unlawful, tripartite assault was thwarted. Eleven years later, claiming self-defense, Israel launched another war, this time against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Modern legal scholarship argues Israel’s June 1967 war had no basis under Article 51 of the UN Charter, the right to self-defense. In any case, under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, Israel was now an occupying power, legally bound to preserve the well-being of people living under its occupation — referred to under Geneva IV as “protected people.” Overruling one of its most senior legal advisors (Theodor Meron, now an advisor to the ICC), the Israeli government publicly declared that the Palestinian territories were actually “disputed,” not occupied, that it would uphold Geneva IV as it pleased, although it wasn’t obliged to do so. The UN Security Council disagreed. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription UNSC resolution 242, passed on November 22, 1967, affirmed the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” (among the most canonical statements of modern international law), and the “commitment [of UN member states] to act in accordance with Article 2 of the Charter.”   UNSC 242 also called on Israel to withdraw its armed forces from “territories occupied in the recent conflict.” It didn’t. Fifty-eight years later, Israel continues to occupy the West Bank, including East Jerusalem (which it annexed in 1980, along with the Syrian Golan Heights, in flagrant violation of the UN Charter), and Gaza. As for its obligations under Geneva IV — obligations it continues to deny — Israel has violated virtually all of them. Instructions to Bethlehem Palestinians (David Kattenburg) And, notwithstanding common Article 1 of all four Geneva Conventions, obligating their “High Contracting Parties” to “respect and to ensure respect” for them “in all circumstances,” Israel has violated its Geneva IV obligations with absolute impunity, a situation Israel-USA, Canada, and Europe’s most powerful states accept, defend and actively support, diplomatically and economically. At no point have any of Geneva IV’s most powerful and influential High Contracting Parties undertaken to “ensure” Israeli “respect” for the convention. To the contrary, they have aided and abetted Israeli violations as an occupying power, helping Israel to profit from its occupation (declared unlawful last July, by the International Court of Justice). They themselves have profited from the technologies Israel has developed, in the course of its century-long dispossession, subjugation and oppression of the Palestinian people, all the while ignoring UN Security Council resolutions calling on Israel to abide by its legal obligations. Article 25 of the UN Charter obliges member states “to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council.” They do not. Back in December 2016, for the umpteenth time, the UNSC declared that Israel’s West Bank settlements have “no legal validity,” and constitute “a flagrant violation under international law.” UNSC 2334 called on UN member states “to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.”  In other words, to refrain from treating Israel’s occupation as if it were legal, which, according to the July 19 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, it is not. Protesting in the Netherlands (David Kattenburg) By refusing to order Israel out of Gaza — fully occupied territory since June 1967 and under genocidal assault for the past nineteen months — this is precisely what the most powerful UN members states are doing. They are treating Israel as if it were Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank’s lawful sovereign, free to do as it pleases, regardless of what the UN Charter, Geneva IV, the 1948 Genocide Convention, and 1973 Apartheid Convention say. This is why Israel’s war on Gaza began, and why it will not end, any time in the foreseeable future. In search of the how’s and why’s of Israel-USA’s savage assault on Gaza, dispatching the tiny concentration camp/ghetto to a hell lower than anything Dante could have imagined, and why the war seems impossible to stop, no clearer bottom line than the debasement of international law in Western halls of power. For his own thoughts on the non-role of international law in halting the gathering genocide in Gaza, the GPM spoke with Michael Lynk. Michael Lynk is Emeritus Professor of law at Western University, in London, Ontario, Canada. Between 2016 and 2022, Lynk served as the seventh UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. Listen to our complete conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Watch our complete conversation with Michael Lynk here:

GPM # 95 Earth is in trouble. Alongside the collapse of its climate system, the unraveling of the planet’s living fabric poses a threat the human species may not survive — certainly not human ‘civilization’, such as it is. Earth’s biosphere is now in the throes of a mass extinction event rivaling anything the planet has experienced since life emerged, 3.8 billion years ago. An estimated million species are believed to be on the brink of extinction. Most will vanish into oblivion before they’ve even been identified. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription In the Netherlands, a groundbreaking project aims to reverse this trend. ARISE-Biodiversity is a joint project of the University of Amsterdam, the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute, the University of Twente, and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, in the Dutch city of Leiden. Its aim: to identify all species of multicellular life in the Netherlands, as a basis for protecting them, and as a model for conservationists around the world. Among ARISE’s techniques and tools: DNA barcoding of air, water, and other environmental samples gathered by researchers and citizen scientists, advanced audio, video, photographic, and radar monitoring, and AI-driven meta analysis of resulting data sets, incomprehensibly huge in size. This past March hundreds gathered in Leiden for the fourth in a series of ARISE days. Elaine van Ommen Kloeke is ARISE’s program manager. Listen to her in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Cootes Paradise (David Kattenburg) Since the dawn of civilization, nothing has fascinated humans more than the dizzying variety of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Pliny’s Naturalis Historia is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work. The collection, description and preservation of living things has come a long way since then. Today, biologists use hi-tech tools to collect creatures, and DNA barcoding technology to identify them. Listen to a story about this in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader at Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden (David Kattenburg) Donate with a $15/monthly subscription It’s a living web beneath our feet – a tangled network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, tying the roots of trees and other plants into vast networks. Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely. But, mycorrhizal fungi do more than just feed plants. They cycle carbon from atmosphere to soil, regulating Earth’s climate – and they face a host of threats. Soil scientists and mycologists have come together to protect fungal networks, and are calling on citizens to help out. Researchers Toby Kiers and Vincent Merckx have devoted their careers to studying these astonishing underground networks. Listen to them in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Special thanks to Bart Braun and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, in Leiden, the Netherlands, for the audio track of Toby Kiers’ presentation. Toby Kiers (Credit: David Meulenbeld)

GPM # 94 Sex is complex (whether you’re XY or XX). So sang a Manitoba trio called the Welfare Starlets. This past week, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the distinction between XY and XX isn’t that complex at all. Under Britain’s 2010 Equality Act, the court declared, in a unanimous, landmark decision, the terms “woman” and “sex” refer exclusively to a biological woman and to biological sex – not to transgender women, even those with so-called Gender Recognition Certificates. The April 16 ruling delivers “clarity and confidence” to those who run hospitals, sports clubs, women’s refuges, and other spaces reserved exclusively to people with two X chromosomes, the UK government responded (without referring directly to the 23rd pair of chromosomes in the human genome). Others slammed it as a setback for transgender people. Alongside gays, lesbians, bisexuals and other non-binary folks, trans women and men are among the most marginalized and threatened members of society today. Nowhere more so than in places like Uganda, Iran, and the United States, where being trans can get you killed. For thoughts on the UK Supreme Court’s ruling, and the complex, politically fraught connection between women’s rights and transgender rights, the GPM reached out to Robert Wintemute, Canadian Professor of Human Rights Law at King’s College London, specializing in discrimination and sexual orientation law, and human rights conflicts. Wintemute’s new book, “Transgender Rights vs. Women’s Rights: From Conflicts to Coexistence,” will be published by Polity at the end of May. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Listen to our conversation with Robert Wintemute in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 94 “The world as we know it is gone.” So wrote British Prime Minister Keir Starmer a few days ago, in a Sunday Telegraph opinion piece. Sound frightful? Take a close look. Sir Keir was contemplating the consequences of Donald Trump’s global on-again, off-again, on-again tariff war, now savaging financial markets from Wall Street to Taipei. The financial world, in Keir Starmer’s mind. The world of Big Business, powerful corporations, and several thousand fabulously rich men, some of them British; the world of trade balances, exchange rates, and ceaseless, unrelenting economic growth — a fraudulent fiction in our closed planetary system. Starmer, a lawyer, was not thinking about the unspeakable crimes Israel and the US, his dearest friends, have been allowed, indeed enabled and encouraged to commit in Gaza for the last eighteen months, laying waste to the global community’s most cherished legal canon — the UN Charter, the 1948 Genocide Convention, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. Shells cracked open, emptied of all meaning. Starmer was not bemoaning the UN Security Council’s inability or refusal to take action in the face of the most egregious human rights crimes since the outrages of World War Two — in occupied Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo — aided, abetted or simply ignored by the world’s most powerful states and state institutions, including his own. Rotterdam protest (David Kattenburg) The end of law in today’s permanent global war — war on humanity; war on the planet — is not something Keir Starmer is likely to grieve over in the editorial section of the Sunday Telegraph. Global commerce, yes. A healthy trade balance for Britain and its wealthiest entrepreneurs, for sure. A bit of trickle-down for ordinary British women and men, you bet. The fate of the planet and its human inhabitants — not yet. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription For thoughts about Sir Keir, his public hand wringing about the global economy, and related legal matters, the GPM reached out to an old friend, Dimitri Lascaris.  Dimitri Lascaris is an activist, journalist, polemicist, and a lawyer – now fully independent, after quitting his law firm. We reached Dimitri, in Kalamata, Greece. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Or watch here:

GPM # 92 Among the many theories about how planet Earth works, none are more fascinating than the role of complexity – the idea that, as human societies develop, they get increasingly complicated; tied together and dependent on connections and systems that defy comprehension, that endlessly proliferate and are liable to come undone, in self-amplifying cascades. Thomas Homer-Dixon has devoted his academic career to studying complex systems, and how they break bad. Pernicious and virtuous cascades interest him greatly. Homer-Dixon is the founder and Executive Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. Through the complexity lens, Homer-Dixon studies social, economic and ecological instability, and how people and societies can thwart threats and promote virtuous cascades. He’s written various books: The Upside of Down, Environment, Scarcity and Violence and The Ingenuity Gap, and, his most recent — Commanding Hope; The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril. Listen to our conversation in today’ podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Human emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases has warmed Earth’s surface temperature by about 1.1 degrees, relative to the late 19th century, at a rate of about three tenths of a degree per decade since 1980. That rate is steadily rising. As Earth’s surface warms, thermal expansion and melting ice sheets have raised sea levels by two tenths of a meter. That rate is rising too. Slow and steady for years to come? Think again. In a 2023 report, a team of scientists warned about tipping points — inflection points where Earth warming and the destruction of Earth’s living fabric become non-linear and unstoppable, and where Earth systems start shifting to new, potentially dangerous states. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Twenty-five tipping points were identified. Five major ones may already have been transgressed. More could soon be tripped, the report’s authors warned, triggering a cascade of amplifying feedbacks across Earth’s interlocked climate system and biosphere. Globalized human economies and societies will inevitably suffer. As if all this weren’t scary enough, “there is no adequate global governance at the scale of the threats posed by negative tipping points,” the report’s authors warned. Manjana Milkoreit was one of them. Milkoreit is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, and lead author of a chapter of the report about tipping point governance. Listen to our conversation in today’ podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 91 The Israeli military has directly targeted the women and girls of Gaza, committing acts that constitute the crime against humanity of murder, and the war crime of wilful killing, a UN human rights report says. “More than a human can bear: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023,” the report is entitled. Released on March 13 by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory — chaired by South African jurist Navi Pillay — the report also concludes that sexual and reproductive health care facilities in Gaza, including maternity hospitals and wards, have been systematically targeted. The Pillay Commission’s most graphic conclusion arises from the December 2023 shelling of Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, reportedly destroying around 4,000 embryos, as well as 1,000 sperm samples and unfertilized eggs. Prior to Israel’s assault — plausibly genocidal, the International Court of Justice ruled, in January 2024 — the al-Basma in vitro fertilization clinic had been serving thousands of patients, carrying out approximately 70 to 100 in vitro fertilization procedures a month. Its destruction was intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza, a genocidal act under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Pillay Commission report concludes. Fifteen months after the clinic’s destruction, Gaza almost entirely in ruins, the death toll considerably higher than the official 50,000 (perhaps three or four times higher), Israel’s war of annihilation may soon resume in full force, with the blessing of the Trump Administration. Talks aimed at advancing the current ceasefire, that Israel has violated on multiple occasions, drag on.  The first phase of the ceasefire ended on March 2. Attempts to move to phase 2 — in which all Israeli hostages and hundreds of Palestinian political prisoners would be released, followed by full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza — have so far failed. In early March, countering Donald Trump’s plan to empty the besieged ghetto entirely, then turn it into the Riviera of the Middle East, the Arab League put forward a proposal to reconstruct Gaza, with Gazans in place. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription For thoughts on all this, the GPM reached out to Mouin Rabbani. Rabbani is a researcher, analyst, and commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and contemporary Middle East issues, a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, and co-editor of the journal Jadaliyya. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here: As Israel shreds the laws of war and fundamental human rights standards in Gaza, on the other side of the planet, its conjoined twin (Israel-USA) is waging war on both domestic human rights and the UN-based international legal order. “The new US administration must recommit to human rights at home and abroad,” a large group of human rights experts declared in a report issued on February 27. Among the Trump Administration acts red-flagged by the experts: its threats to reclaim the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, and “own” Gaza (no mention of its insistence on turning Canada into the 51st state); its “extortionate demands on Ukraine for its critical minerals”; its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, the UN Human Rights Council and World Health Organization, and its sanctions against the International Criminal Court. The report also expresses concern about the Trump Administration’s firing of US justice officials; its failure to comply with federal court orders; its elimination of diversity, equity and inclusiveness (DEI) programs; its “demonisation of transgender people,” “persecution and forced deportation of migrants,” “threats to journalists, students and freedom of expression,” and “censoring and removal of public information.” And (as if this hasn’t been going on forever), the “corporate capture of the US government.” Donate with a $15/monthly subscription The GPM reached out to one of the report’s authors, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to development, Surya Deva, Director of the Centre for Environmental Law at Macquarie University, Australia. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 90 It’s every stuffy conservative Canadian politician or Zionist cheerleader’s most disagreeable moment – getting accosted by Yves Engler. Yves Engler is a prolific political commentator and writer, the author of thirteen books and countless articles about Canadian foreign policy and international affairs, through an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist lens. He’s also a master of guerilla-style political disruption, with an uncanny ability to find out which Canadian political figures are speaking where, penetrating that crowded room, camera rolling, then berating the politician – politely, in English or French, as the case may be; addressing them as ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ — or pursuing his unfortunate target down a hallway or a crowded street, peppering them with questions they rarely answer. Late last month, Engler spent five days and four nights in Montreal’s notorious Bordeaux prison, charged with “harassing” a pro-Israel ‘influencer’ by the name of Dahlia Kurtz on chainsaw-wielding political arsonist Elon Musk’s X platform (calling Kurtz a “fascist” and “genocide” supporter), and with refusing the police demand that he not talk about the incident. Engler’s refusal to shut up is what landed him in the hoosegow. Now released, Yves is talking about the incident, to everyone who will listen, including the GPM. Yves Engler is a Montreal-based writer and human rights activist. Among his thirteen published works: Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy (together with Owen Schalk); Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People’s History of the Canadian Military; House of Mirrors — Justin Trudeau’s Foreign Policy; Left, Right — Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada, and, A Propaganda System — How Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation. Listen to our conversation with Yves Engler in today’s podcast, click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our conversation too. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Imagine a squadron of US F-35 jets roaring over a football stadium in Calgary or Winnipeg or Toronto, packed with maple leaf-waving fans at Canada’s fall classic, the annual championship game of the Canadian Football League, the Grey Cup. Or over the funeral of a venerated Canadian politician, who had had the temerity to champion Canadian cultural and economic sovereignty in the face of US imperialism. In both, not so fanciful instances, Donald Trump’s message would be clear: Don’t boo our national anthem. Give us your oil, gas, and minerals; become our 51st state — or else. A couple of weekends ago, a handful of Israeli F-35 fighter bombers delivered a message of just this sort, flying low over a stadium in Beirut, Lebanon, packed with mourners at the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, charismatic Shia leader and Secretary General of the Party of God, Hezbollah, brutally murdered five months earlier in a rain of US bunker buster bombs. For an eyewitness account of the February 23 funeral of Hassan Nasrallah and Israel’s low-altitude flyovers (more than one), the GPM turned to Dimitri Lascaris. Lascaris is a Canadian lawyer, human rights advocate, and journalist. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here: Donate with a $15/monthly subscription

GPM # 89 Disciplinary Purgatory By David Kattenburg “A university is definitely not a democratic institution.” So said Columbia University’s Vice Dean of Graduate Faculties, Herbert Deane, back in April 1967, at the height of campus protests against America’s war on Vietnam. “Student or faculty opinion should not in itself have any influence on the formation of administrative policy,” Deane declared, in an interview with the university’s student newspaper, the Daily Spectator. “When decisions begin to be made democratically around here,” Deane warned, darkly, “I will not be here any longer.” Then, Dean Deane’s famous throwaway line: “Whether students vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a given issue means as much to me as if they were to tell me they like strawberries.” Sixty years later, Herbert Deane’s infamous ‘Strawberry Statement’ continues to sum up Columbia University’s indifference to and contempt for free speech. Last spring – amid rising campus protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, university investment in the Zionist war machine, and sweetheart study deals for Israeli soldiers with blood on their hands — the Columbia University administration suspended four protest leaders, banned them from campus, forcibly evicted them from precious, off-campus housing, and cancelled their scholarships. Now, three of those students have struck back. In a February 3 filing to the Supreme Court of the State of New York [hereafter referred to as ‘The Complaint’], counsel for Catherine Curran-Groome, Brandon Murphy and Aidan Parisi charged Columbia University with breach of NY State landlord-tenant and human rights statutes, breach of contract, negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and willful misuse of its student conduct system to discriminate against, harass, endanger, and deny their “Tedeschi Rights.” “Tedeschi Rights,” set forth in the 1980 NY State Appeals Court ruling Tedeschi v. Wagner College, 1980), stated: “[A] private university must strictly observe and grant the procedural and substantive rights it promises its students in its manuals and codes; implied obligation of good faith and fair dealing; due process, equal protection, and academic freedom set forth in its Student Manual and Charters and Statutes, as well as the confidentiality of their records, including disciplinary files.” Columbia University has until February 24 to reply to The Complaint. At the time of her two-year suspension, in early May 2024, Catherine Curran-Groome was pursuing a Master’s degree in International Affairs at Columbia’s Morningside campus, in Harlem, Manhattan. Her full-scholarship was revoked, and she was evicted from her university-leased off-campus flat. Suspended for a year, Brandon Murphy and Aidan Parisi were both first-year Master’s of Social Work students. Due to graduate in May 2025, the academic and personal lives of Curran-Groome, Murphy and Parisi have now been upended. So has their health. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Three months prior to their university suspension, in the course of a peaceful, January 2024 demonstration, Curran-Groome and Parisi were allegedly sprayed with a noxious chemical substance by a pair of former Israeli soldiers enrolled in Columbia’s School of General Studies. The Complaint identifies the two former soldiers as Menachem Mendel Perez and Yuval Hadari. Mendel Perez and Hadari had reportedly been the subject of prior complaints, for spitting on, physically threatening, and doxxing Arab, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian students. Following the alleged ‘skunk spray’ assault (which campus security personnel had reportedly witnessed, but done nothing), Curran-Groome came down with a host of symptoms Columbia University’s health clinic associated with “toxic chemical inhalation.” According to The Complaint, the clinic declared itself “shocked that a chemical weapon had been used on students on campus and that they had not been notified in order to prepare the necessary services.” Unable to get her breathing problems addressed at the campus clinic, Curran-Groome transferred herself to Mt. Sinai Hospital, for nebulizer treatment, returning days later after almost eight hours of “unrelenting vomiting.” In the course of these hospital visits, health workers spotted a heart murmur – something Curran-Groome never knew she had. Most distressingly, persistent bleeding forced her to seek treatment at an off-campus gynecology – bleeding that continued for five months following the skunk spray attack. For their part, soldiers Mendel Perez and Hadari were suspended, then, following a lawsuit against Columbia brought by Mendel Perez, reinstated in good standing. Israeli soldier At the heart of Catherine Curran-Groome, Brandon Murphy and Aidan Parisi’s February 3 complaint against Columbia University at the NY State Supreme Court – the 2021 supplanting of Columbia’s University Judicial Board (UJB) by the Orwellianly-named Center for Student Success and Intervention (“CSSI”). Empowered to pursue disciplinary action in response to numerous acts of “behavioral” and “academic” misconduct, CSSI procedures eliminated protections offered by the UJB – the right to an attorney, time to prepare a defense, to call witnesses, to a prompt hearing, adequate notice, and to make opening and closing statements. And, in contrast to the UJB — constituted by and accountable to the Columbia University Senate — CSSI proceedings would be overseen by the office of the President, and by extension, the Board of Trustees, populated by corporate figures beholden to powerful interests, including the pro-Israel lobby. Subjected to chemical attack in January 2024, Curran-Groome and her comrades’ woes would grow. On March 24, they held an off-campus “Resistance 101” event, featuring Palestinian activist Khaled Barakat. Their choice of Barakat as a speaker couldn’t have been more daring. Outspoken proponent of Palestinian resistance, in all forms, with ‘alleged’ ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — a designated “terrorist” organization in the US, Canada and EU (a connection he wisely denies) — Khaled Barakat is a popular bête-noir among pro-Israeli lobbyists. The session was publicly advertised, and proceeded without immediate incident. Nine days later, on April 3, 2024, CSSI slapped Curran-Groome and Parisi with “interim suspensions” for organizing an event “at which non-affiliates were granted access to a campus residence, and which enabled members of the University community to directly communicate with individuals and/or organizations known to advocate for violence,” thereby compromising the “well-being and safety of the University community.” Curran-Groome and Parisi were also banned from campus, and denied access to campus health clinic and psychological services. Desperate for health care, Curran-Groome’s only source of income, a campus research assistant post, was also cancelled. But Curran-Groome and her comrades remained obdurate. Catherine Curran-Groome rallies crowd on Columbia campus On April 17, 2024, they and other pro-Palestine students set up a Gaza Solidarity tent encampment on Columbia University’s East Lawn, one of two spaces formerly designated “Free Speech Zones.” That same day, campus protests heating up across the US, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was hauled before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce. For the seemingly hapless Shafik, it was a harrowing encounter. Committee Chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) had “watched in horror” as Columbia and other elite campuses “erupted into hotbeds of antisemitism and hate,” Foxx snapped at Shafik. “Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence at best, and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people,” Foxx sniffed. Citing ‘From the River to the Sea,” “Viva, Viva Intifada!” and other outrageous chants, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) wanted to know if calls “for the genocide of Jews” violated Columbia University’s code of conduct. Yes, they do, Shafik and two other Columbia administration staff replied. What did “by any means necessary,” or “intifada” mean to Shafik, Bonamici asked, smelling blood? “Incredibly distressing,” Shafik replied – both to her and Columbia’s Jewish students. Jews Against Genocide (David Kattenburg) Thoroughly chastened, Minouche Shafik hastened to set things right. The day after her House grilling, overriding a decision by the Columbia Senate, Shafik called in the cops. Curran-Groome and over 100 other protestors were arrested, and their tent encampment torn down. Fifteen students were suspended, and another six placed on disciplinary probation. “They are getting the message,” Shafik said. Shafik’s move was swiftly condemned by the Columbia and Barnard chapters of the American Association of University Professors, and by the Columbia Senate. In an April 26 resolution, the Senate “unreservedly” condemned “external interference in the internal affairs of Columbia University that undermines the traditions of academic freedom and shared governance.” But Columbia students remained undeterred. On April 21, they formed a “human chain” (to “forcibly exclude others from the South lawn of Columbia University’s Morningside campus,” pro-Israel forces alleged). Curran-Groome watched from the sidelines, engaging in “textbook de-escalation,” The Complaint states. Then, outraged by seventh months of genocide in Gaza and feeling their oats, in an action harkening back to 1967 anti-Vietnam protests, on April 29, fifty students stormed Hamilton Hall. “Hind’s Hall,” they renamed it, after 6-year-old Hind Rajab, brutally murdered by Israeli soldiers in January 2024. Hundreds of other students rallied outside. The following day, Shafik declared Columbia’s Morningside campus a restricted zone, accessible to students and essential employees, and no one else. The NYPD on quick dial, Shafik also called the cops — again. On the evening of April 30, armed with batons and flash grenades, drones and a helicopter hovering overhead, police stormed Hind’s Hall. Read a detailed description of the raid here. Catherine Curran-Groome Catherine Curran-Groome was “severely injured” (according to The Complaint). Police escorted her, handcuffed, to the Harlem Hospital for Children and Families, where she was X-rayed, treated for a leg wound and other injuries, issued pain medication, and released, then taken to the local precinct for booking, along with fifty other protesters. Curran-Groome would be the only student protester not to have her charges immediately dismissed. According to The Complaint, she was “singled out by the DA at the request of [Columbia] University.” Minouche Shafik thanked the NYPD police for their “incredible professionalism.” The following day, May 1, 2024, Catherine Curran-Groome, Aidan Parisi, and Brendon Murphy received the word: They were now under investigation for committing “egregious violations” of the “Standards & Discipline guidelines,” and “immediately suspended and banned from Columbia University with the expectation of [permanent expulsion] after an expedited hearing.” Due process, CSSI-style. Reaffirming the highest academic principles, that same day, Minouche Shafik issued a public statement: “This drastic escalation of many months of protest activity pushed the University to the brink, creating a disruptive environment for everyone and raising safety risks to an intolerable level,” Shafik wrote. Continuing: “Columbia has a long and proud tradition of protest and activism on many important issues such as the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Today’s protesters are also fighting for an important cause, for the rights of Palestinians and against the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. They have many supporters in our community and have a right to express their views and engage in peaceful protest. But students and outside activists breaking Hamilton Hall doors, mistreating our Public Safety officers and maintenance staff, and damaging property are acts of destruction, not political speech. Many students have also felt uncomfortable and unwelcome because of the disruption and antisemitic comments made by some individuals, especially in the protests that have persistently mobilized outside our gates.” Once again, President Shafik was roundly condemned by her peers. “There has been a disregard for the students the University exists to educate, a disregard for the University’s Rules and Statutes, and a continued flaunting of the practices of shared governance, to say the least,” Rules Committee member Candice Kail stated at a May 8, 2024 meeting of the University Senate. “The administration has not only not course corrected but has doubled down in their bulldozing over any possibility of due process and in their refusal to acknowledge the harm they are doing and have done to this institution and this campus,” Kail said in her statement. “We need the CSSI to be disbanded. And we must remove the NYPD and private security from campus and return our campus to students, faculty, staff, and researchers,”. On May 8, 2024, by unanimous vote, the Columbia Senate called for a halt to CSSI disciplinary proceedings. “President Shafik’s violation of the fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance, and her unprecedented assault on students’ rights, warrants unequivocal and emphatic condemnation,” the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors declared. “President Shafik,” the declaration continued, “violated the fundamental obligations of shared governance when she ignored the opinions of the faculty and students on the Senate Executive Committee who unanimously rejected her request to summon armed New York City police onto our campus.” Minouche Shafik also missed an opportunity to connect with three highly principled Columbia University students; to speak with them, personally – something she may not have imagined doing. Instead, on September 10, 2024, Columbia University’s “Rules Administrator” sent notices to Catherine Curran-Groome and Brandon Murphy, informing them that four charges continued to be laid against them from their involvement in the April 17 encampment: “unauthorized access” to the lawn, “refusal to self-identify,” and “failure to disperse.” “Not responsible,” Curran-Groome and Murphy responded. Since December 20th, 2024, Curran-Groome, Murphy and Aidan Parisi sit in “disciplinary purgatory,” The Complaint states. Notwithstanding the case’s transfer to the University Judicial Board (something that happened late last year), CSSI interim suspensions against the three students remain active. On that day, the UJB informed Curran-Groome and Murphy that disciplinary hearings would be held the following week (right after Christmas). Murphy requested a delay, to consult with counsel in the new year. The “Rules Clerk” rejected his request. Curran-Groome told the UJB that she’d already been effectively expelled by the CSSI, and asked the UJB if its involvement in her case meant that the expulsion was now rescinded. The Rules Clerk did not answer her question. Curran-Groome’s effective expulsion has not been rescinded. Rescinding it, on protest, would have suggested that Columbia University is a democratic institution – something it wasn’t back in 1967, and certainly isn’t today. Listen to our conversation with Catherine Curran-Groome in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Watch our conversation here:

GPM # 88 Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the city of Bethlehem, a half dozen kilometers south of Jerusalem, hemmed in by concrete walls, watchtowers, checkpoints, and a string of mega-colonial settlements, a biologist named Mazin Qumsiyeh, his partner Jessie and their friends are planting native Palestinian seeds, raising chickens, rabbits, fish, and hyenas, and offering up habitat for birds, insects and other wildlife. Rescuing their beloved landscape from the depredation of Euro-North American settler-colonial land thieves and eco-vandals. The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity & Sustainability, their oasis is called. Occasionally, Mazin, Jessie and their friends venture out, traveling up, down and across occupied Palestine, studying its flora and fauna. No ecosystem richer than the Jordan Valley, rich in wetlands where wildlife and unusual plants flourish. But, those wetlands are under increasing threat from relentless Israeli water exploitation, and apartheid water theft. And, since October 7, 2023, these travels have become increasingly difficult, if not impossible. More and more Israeli checkpoints block their way, and settler-colonial violence makes the Institute’s natural history work hazardous. The GPM spoke about native Palestinian biodiversity, and the work of the Palestine Institute, with the Palestine Institute’s co-founder and director, Mazin Qumsiyeh. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here: It was a dreadful way for a little girl to die – huddled in the back seat of a crushed, bullet-ridden car, stranded at a Gaza City intersection, an Israeli Merkava tank looming meters away; her aunt and uncle dead in the front seat; four cousins dead beside her, seeping blood onto her skirt; sobbing to a Palestinian emergency dispatcher on the other end of a cell phone line, pleading to be rescued, crying that she was scared. Then, in a torrent of machine gun fire, ripped to bits. Hind Rajab was brutally murdered by an Israeli tank crew a year and a few days ago today. So were a pair of medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent, who’d come to her rescue – with Israeli military permission. Little Hind was six years-old. The murder of Hind Rajab, and the Palestinian emergency workers who came to her rescue, is documented here. Now, a foundation established in Hind Rajab’s name is seeking justice. In an October 8 submission to the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, the Brussels-based Hind Rajab Foundation has provided the names of a thousand Israeli soldiers it thinks the world’s top criminal court should prosecute. Among 8000 pieces of accompanying evidence, the soldiers’ own social media posts, boasting about blowing up buildings, destroying neighborhoods, looting wrecked Palestinian homes, and gunning down unarmed civilians. The Foundation is also seeking the arrest of Israeli soldiers and officers in the countries they routinely travel to. Many of them are US, Canadian, UK, and EU citizens, subject to arrest in countries that exercise universal criminal jurisdiction. Listen to a conversation with the Foundation’s lead counsel, Haroon Raza. Click on the play button above, or go here. And listen to this. Under immense pressure from slavishly loyal Israel supporters in the US Congress (future US Ambassador to the UN, Elise Stefanik, in the lead), Columbia University crushed student protesters who had the temerity to name a campus building after the little girl an Israeli tank gunner ripped to bits — with US-supplied tank rounds. This interview and story were originally published in Mondoweiss. Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 87 Each year, fossil fuel burning sends 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere. A little over a tenth of those emissions – 4 billion tons – are associated with heating air and water in homes and buildings. So, clean ways to generate heat are in … hot demand. Low power pumps transfer heat from air to water, and air to air. Then there’s geothermal energy – piping hot water from beneath Earth’s surface, using it to heat buildings. At the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands, two pipes are now being bored two and a half kilometers down. A ‘doublet’, this is called. Seventy-five-degree water filled with natural gas will be pumped up, the gas tapped, and the hot water used to heat campus buildings. Slightly cooler now — 50 degrees – that water will be sent through a grid to surrounding homes, then pumped back down again. Total output, once the system is up and running: eight megawatts of thermal energy. There are about twenty geothermal doublets around the Netherlands today. That could expand to seventy-five by the end of this year, and up to 700 by 2050, at which point the Netherlands aims to be CO2 emissions-free. The GPM spoke about the Delft Geothermal Project with Hemmo Abels. Abels is a geologist at the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Hemmo Abels at TU Delft geothermal site (David Kattenburg) On the other side of the ocean, in Canada’s largest city, Canada’s largest university is exploring another way to harvest the heat beneath our feet. Geoexchange, it’s called. From a cavernous room beneath historic King’s College Circle, at the St. George campus of the University of Toronto, surface water is piped through a network of 370 boreholes, 250 meters down into warm limestone rock, then back up again. In the winter, that subsurface water is used to heat campus buildings. In the summer, heat exchangers send surface heat back into the pipes, dispatching warmed water back down again, turning subsurface rock into a thermal battery, while cooling campus buildings. But Canada’s largest urban geoexchange facility is more than just a low-emission heating and cooling system. It’s an educational display, and a bit of an art installation – an astounding maze of multi-coloured pipes for students, faculty and campus visitors to marvel at through glass windows, on their way to the campus’ underground parking garage (equipped with electric car chargers). University of Toronto’s geoexchange facility (David Kattenburg) It’s also a subterranean classroom — a “mechanical engineering dream” students can study and be inspired by. The GPM visited the U. of T.’s geoexchange facility, last November, buried beneath King’s College Circle, accompanied by Scott Hendershot, Senior Manager of the Sustainability Office at the University of Toronto, and Catherine Thorn, the U. of T.’s Director of Sustainability and Energy Management. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. REDstack electrodialysis membrane stack (David Kattenburg) Now, a totally different way to cut greenhouse gas emissions using water – fresh and salty water, to be specific. Salinity gradient power, it’s called. Wherever fresh river water flows into salty seas, control that flow. Force fresh and salty water across ion selective membranes, cations one way, anions another. Set up electrodes on either end, you generate electricity. That’s precisely what’s happening in the Netherlands. In the middle of the long dike separating North Holland from Friesland – the Afsluitdijk, it’s called — fresh water from the inland Ijselmeer is combined with salt water from the North Sea. Afsluitdijk REDstack is the first operating facility of this sort in the world. RED stands for ‘reverse electrodialysis’. Now paused, REDstack’s pilot plant has the capacity to produce one kilowatt of electricity. Not much. But, scaling up will be easy. Having proved it works, under all conditions, the next step will be to build larger membrane stacks. A two megawatt demonstration facility could be up and running in a couple of years. The GPM spoke about salinity gradient power with REDStack co-founder and co-chair Pieter Hack. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription

GPM # 86 The first phase of a ceasefire is now underway in war-ravaged Gaza. The tiny enclave’s woe begotten people, now free to return home under the terms of the US/Qatari/Egyptian-brokered deal, are overjoyed. That joy is tempered by the enormous death toll they’ve suffered, and the horrific devastation before their eyes. Numbers speak volumes. When Israel’s assault began, following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 breakout from what informed commentators refer to as a ghetto, an open-air prison, and a concentration camp — under comprehensive Israeli siege for seventeen years — Gaza’s population stood at 2.3 million. That number is now smaller. The official death toll stands at 47,000, including 13,000 children, but an estimated 12,000 lie, unidentified and rotting, beneath the rubble left behind by US (and German) bombs and missiles. Over a thousand were health care workers. An estimated 1400 Gazan extended families have been wiped out entirely, some numbering in the hundreds. Horrific as they are, these numbers low-ball the casualties in a war the world’s top court ruled plausibly genocidal. A recent study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimates that, between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024, over 64,000 died from traumatic injuries inflicted by US bombs and missiles. Another Lancet study, published last summer, pegged deaths from both direct and indirect causes (war-related hunger and illness), at 186,000. Meanwhile, an estimated 110,000 Gazans have been injured, and 1.9 million displaced — 90% of Gaza’s population. Where Gaza’s internally displaced people will go, with the first phase of a ceasefire now apparently underway, is anyone’s guess. Over 400,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed in Israel’s US-armed war of annihilation — 92% of Gaza’s pre-war housing stock. ‘Domicide’, experts call it. The GPM spoke about all this with Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special UN Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons. Late last year, Betancur and ten other independent human rights experts published a statement entitled “Israel’s assault on the foundations of international law must have consequences.” Listen to our conversation with UN Special Rapporteur Paula Gaviria Betancur in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here: With a ceasefire now underway in Gaza, after 15 months of unimaginable bloodshed and destruction, here are a few more figures in the Gaza numbers game: Since the start of the war, last October, thirteen resolutions aimed at ending or pausing the bloodshed have come before the UN body responsible for ensuring international peace and security – the Security Council. Of these, four passed, three of them because the US abstained. US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and her deputies — self-professed devotees of peace, human rights, and the rule of law — voted in favour of three watered-down resolutions (one of which ended up passing), and either voted against or vetoed seven. They did so, having listened closely to testimony of the most gut-wrenching sort. In this genre, on the eve of the Gaza ceasefire, a January 3 presentation to the UN Security Council by a pediatric intensive care physician named Tanya Haj-Hassan, with extensive experience tending to Gaza’s injured. Last July, Haj-Hassan and several dozen other physicians wrote to Joe Biden, sharing their experiences tending to Gaza’s wounded and maimed, and calling for an end to the genocide. The Biden Administration ignored their pleas. A month later, having been denied a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, a group of physicians and human rights experts held their own panel on the margins of the Convention. Tanya Haj-Hassan was among them. Listen to Tanya Haj-Hassan’s January 3 presentation to the UN Security Council. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription

GPM # 85 The issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former War Minister, Yoav Gallant, last November 21, descended like a lightning bolt on the two men, neither of whom figured they’d ever face justice for crimes they vehemently deny. Equally shaken up – some ready and willing to fulfill their duty to the world’s top criminal court; others reportedly hedging their bets – were the 125 State Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), now tasked with executing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, should either of them land in their territories. Among the crimes Netanyahu and Gallant have been charged with, in warrants classified as secret: “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts,” all “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.” Early last December, at the World Forum Convention Center, in The Hague, states parties gathered for the 23rd Session of the ICC’s Assembly of State Parties (ASP), the representative body that governs the implementation of the ICC’s founding treaty, the 2002 Rome Statute. The GPM sat down with Vusi Madonsela, South Africa’s Ambassador to the Netherlands, and delegate to the ICC’s Assembly of State Parties. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan addresses 23rd session of Rome Statute’s Assembly of State Parties (David Kattenburg) Israel’s assault on Gaza, now into its 15th month, shows no sign of ending. Widely described as genocidal, Israel’s campaign has been condemned as such by numerous human rights and international legal authorities — none more authoritative than the International Court of Justice. Last month, yet another UN body weighed in — the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. CERD was formed under the aegis of the 1966 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), one of nine human rights treaties under the UN system. Among the crimes prohibited under ICERD — apartheid, seven years prior to the 1976 Apartheid Convention. To date, 182 UN member states have ratified ICERD. The CERD Committee is made up of 18 members, independent human rights experts drawn from around the world. ICERD is unique among UN rights treaties. It’s the only one that allows one state to lodge complaints against another — “Inter-State Communications,” is the anodyne term for these — and for these complaints to be ‘conciliated’ by an ad hoc, arms-length conciliation committee. Back in 2019, Palestine lodged one of these against Israel, accusing it of apartheid. It took years for the CERD committee to deal with Palestine’s Inter-State Communication. Having challenged CERD’s jurisdiction over Palestine’s complaint, and its admissibility (challenges Israel lost), Israel refused to participate in the conciliation process. Earlier this year, CERD’s conciliation committee released its conclusions. Notwithstanding the mountain of evidence presented to it by Palestine, the conciliation committee did not arrive at an explicit finding of apartheid. Another unusual mechanisms at CERD’s disposal: “Early Warning and Urgent Action” statements. This past December 13, CERD issued one of these, in response to the ongoing situation in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon. The Committee declared itself “appalled” by the brutal indiscriminate attacks on innocent women, children, and men, mainly in Gaza, the killing of more than 44,500 Palestinians, the injuries of more than 105,000; the near total and deliberate destruction of the homes, hospitals and schools; the displacement of about 1.9 million Gazans; the unprecedented levels of starvation in Gaza; the killing of at least 343 aid workers, including 253 UN staff, 1,047 health workers, and 183 journalists, raising “serious concerns regarding the obligations of Israel and other State parties to prevent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.” For thoughts on CERD’s conciliation of Palestine’s complaint, and its Early Warning and Urgent Action statement, the GPM reached out to Irish legal scholar and ICERD expert David Keane . Keane is an Assistant Professor in Law at Dublin City University, Ireland. He has published a number of works on the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the CERD Committee and its various unusual mechanisms. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast, or go here … Or watch the accompanying video. And link to David’s writings here. The GPM reached out to CERD for its comments on all of the above. An interview request was declined. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription

GPM # 84 Some are cheering. It may be premature. On December 8, after almost 25 years of rule, and against all odds, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was deposed by a small army of Islamist rebels. Assad, a reportedly soft-spoken ophthalmologist, has taken refuge in Moscow. Assad’s ouster brings to an end 54 years of dynastic, authoritarian, and exceptionally brutal rule. Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in 1971. Memories of his crackdown on grassroots opponents affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, back in February 1982, still linger on. As many as forty thousand people were massacred by Assad’s military in the central Syrian town of Hama. Bashar-the-son may have been more easy-going than dad, but Syrians are reportedly very happy to see him go. As Assad’s tyranny fades (and the bodies of his opponents start to be dug up, reportedly in large numbers), far more powerful, arguably more brutal actors move in like wolves. The Turks, Russians, Saudis, French, British and, of course, the US and its conjoined twin, Israel, are now turning Assad’s downfall to maximum advantage. Israel-USA and the Turks have been violating Syrian territory and airspace for years. In the wake of Assad’s ouster, Israel has launched airstrikes up and down Syria, all the while expanding its unlawful seizure of Syrian Golan Heights land and announcing an expansion of Jewish-only colonies, in flagrant breach of international law. The nation with the most at stake as Syria’s ‘liberation’ is undermined — Israeli-colonized Palestine — has no leaders to stand up for its interests. All but annihilated in Gaza, and wherever else its leaders now shelter themselves, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas — no friend of Bashir al-Assad — has applauded the dictator’s downfall. The ultimate outcome of Bashar al-Assad’s downfall is anyone’s guess. Everyone’s got an informed hunch. One of them is Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs is an economist and public policy analyst, and the Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development. He’s the author of numerous books and articles about COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, and the unconscionable and incompetent state of US public policy. Read here and here and here. Jeffrey Sachs’ most recent writing focuses on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grand strategy to depose regimes across the Middle East, North Africa and wider Southwest Asia — a strategy well received in the halls of neoliberal, permanently war-fighting power, over in Washington. The GPM reached Jeffrey Sachs in NYC. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch or complete conversation here: In the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, and the decimation of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Benjamin Netanyahu sets his sights on the last and biggest enemy state on this hit-list Jeffrey Sachs and others speak about – Iran. Pressured by Netanyahu and deep-pocketed Zionists in Washington, the incoming Trump administration may well green-light a full scale assault on the Islamic Republic, perhaps even with nuclear weapons. Israel, of course, is the only nuclear-armed state in the region. A small player, by global standards. There are over 12,000 nuclear warheads on the planet, poised to be fired off at a moment’s notice, most of them in the possession of the Americans and the Russians. Once upon a time, back in the eighties, this was a subject of intense public and media debate. It isn’t anymore. The global nuclear arsenal is a matter of huge concern for Ivana Nikolic Hughes. Hughes is the Director of Frontiers of Science and Senior Lecturer in Discipline in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University, in NYC. She’s also the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and has carried out research on the long-term radiological contamination of the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific, where the US carried out 67 atomic and H-bomb tests between 1946 and 1958. The GPM sat down with Ivana Nikolic Hughes in her office at Columbia University – a challenging campus to get into if you’re not a student or faculty member, in the wake of protests against Israeli genocide in Gaza. Our conversation went on for about an hour and a half. The first part will be posted in an upcoming GPM podcast. Here’s the last half hour of our conversation with Ivana Nikolic Hughes, focusing on the long proposed but likely never-to-be-achieved Middle East Nuclear Free Zone, the Frontiers in Science program that Dr. Hughes teaches, the state of science awareness among her students, and the future of science-based policy under a Trump administration. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 83 The issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former War Minister, Yoav Gallant, on November 21, descended like a lightning bolt on the two men, neither of whom figured they’d ever face justice for crimes they vehemently deny. Equally shaken up – some ready and willing to fulfill their duty to the world’s top criminal court; others hedging their bets – were the 125 State Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), soon to be tasked with executing warrants against the two Israeli leaders, and other criminal targets surely in ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s sights, once warrants have been certified and communicated to ICC member states by the Court Registry. This past week, at the sprawling World Forum Convention Center, in The Hague, delegates of those countries gathered for the 23rd Session of the ICC’s Assembly of State Parties (ASP), the representative body that governs and supervises the implementation of the ICC’s founding treaty, the 2002 Rome Statute, ultimately ensuring that the perpetrators of the most serious international crimes are arrested, tried and jailed. Among the crimes Netanyahu and Gallant have been charged with, in warrants classified ‘secret’: “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts,” all “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.” Suggesting the crime of genocide – without specifying this crime of international crimes — ICC Pre-Trial Chamber judges cited “reasonable grounds to believe [Netanyahu and Gallant] intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival.” On the sidelines of last week’s ASP, dozens of side panels featured presentations by international legal scholars, human rights advocates and citizen observers with stories to tell. One of those sessions focused on the destruction of Gaza’s health care system, relentlessly pounded into finer and finer grades of rubble by US bombs and missiles dropped by Israeli jet fighters. One of the panelists in that session was a physician named Junaid Sultan, a Hull, UK-based cardiovascular surgeon. Listen to Junaid Sultan’s presentation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Dr. Junaid Sultan The core of last week’s 23rd session of the Assembly of State Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in the Dutch administrative capital, The Hague, consisted of brief presentations by State Party delegates. The only one to speak about Israel’s war on Gaza was the Minister of Justice for the southwest African nation of Namibia — Yvonne Dausab. Listen to Yvonne Dausab’s presentation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Raji Sourani At another, standing room-only panel session, Palestinian human rights activist Raji Sourani pounded his fist on the table, calling on the international community to hold Israel accountable for its brutal crimes against the Palestinian people. Sourani is the Director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Listen to Raji Sourani’s presentation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 82 Eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the real reasons for America’s hideous assault have been unearthed by a small army of scholars. Among these – a guy named Glenn Alcalay, Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at City University of New York. Back in the mid-1970s, Glenn Alcalay spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the Central Pacific, site of 67 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958. The biggest of those nuke tests was Bravo, the Pentagon’s first deliverable hydrogen bomb, detonated at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls, on March 1, 1954. Glenn Alcalay’s Marshall Islands sojourn was spent on Utirik, a small atoll downwind from Bikini. Inspired by that experience, Alcalay began researching the impacts of US weapons testing on the Marshallese people — and the true history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stuff you won’t learn about from the blockbuster film, Oppenheimer. Fifty years after his Peace Corps stint in Utirik, Glenn Alcalay is in the midst of writing a book about the Marshallese people. The GPM sat down with Glenn in his home office, in uptown Manhattan, to talk about all this — and Donald Trump’s arguably unsurprising election back in early November. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Bikini Island, on Bikini Atoll (David Kattenburg)

GPM # 81 Of all the staunchly pro-Israel Western powers who mouth support for a ‘two-state’ solution to Israel’s ‘conflict’ with the Palestinian people, no one puts its money where its mouth isn’t more than Canada. Ottawa’s formal position appears straightforward, even just-minded. Canada “recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination,” Foreign Affairs Canada declares at its website, and is “committed to the goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, including the creation of a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel.” Canada doesn’t recognize “permanent Israeli control” over the Palestinian territories, territories Israel has occupied for the past 57 years, colonizing them with its own citizens, and effectively annexing them. Israel is indeed an occupying power, Canada has consistently maintained since 1967, therefore subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel insists the Palestinian territories are “disputed,” not occupied, and that Geneva IV doesn’t apply to its presence there, but its steadfast ally, Canada, begs to differ. Geneva IV has been embedded in Canadian domestic legislation, as the Geneva Conventions Act, so Canada is strictly bound to abide by it, beginning with common Article 1 of all four of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. “The High Contracting Parties [e.g. Canada] undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.” As for those 300-plus Jewish-only settlements and outposts up and down the West Bank and encircling Jerusalem, now home to 750,000 Israeli Jews (“Les colonies,” Canada calls them at its French-language website), these are illegal under Geneva IV, Canada maintains, and “constitute a serious obstacle to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace.” To be precise, Israel’s colonies breach Article 49(6) of Geneva IV — a “grave breach” under Geneva’s 1977 Protocol Additional, and a war crime under Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Palestinian youth detained at a Hebron checkpoint. Lest there be any doubt about its commitment to the rules-based international order, Canada’s official position is that Israel “must fully respect international human rights and humanitarian law” — the sina qua non for creating a “climate conducive to achieving a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement.” Thus goes Trudeau government lip service to a just, durable peace in occupied Palestine/Israel. In the first two months of Israel’s plausibly genocidal war on Gaza, however, Ottawa green-lit $28.5 million worth of military exports to Israel. Among these, bombs, torpedoes, rockets, missiles, other explosive devices, and a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles and aviation hardware. With the death toll rising, in mid-September, Canada suspended 30 active permits for weapon transfers to Israel, and declared its opposition to the transfer of 50,000 “highly explosive” mortars from Quebec to Israel, via the US. Still, notwithstanding the July 19 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice that Israel’s occupation and associated settlement enterprise are unlawful, and that UN member states must refrain from extending aid and assistance, the Canadian government continues to allow settlement products to be sold in Canada, tariff-free under the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement — labeled ‘Product of Israel,’ no less. And, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) grants charitable status to a host of Canadian organizations that funnel funds to Israeli settlement groups and ‘lone soldiers’ of the Israeli Occupation Forces, some of them Canadian. Palestine advocates Ahed Tamimi & Miko Peled confront Israeli cop in Nabi Saleh (David Kattenburg) In 2022, over 200 registered Canadian charities funneled $362 million to Israeli organizations linked to the Israeli army and air force, Israeli government agencies, Jewish supremacist groups, and West Bank colonies, in breach of CRA statutes. Now, a group of Canadian organizations are calling on the CRA to cut these groups off. They have reason to be optimistic about their prospects. On August 8, Canada’s most venerable Zionist charity and benefactor of the Jewish colonization project, the Jewish National Fund of Canada, had its status revoked. JNF appealed the decision, seeking judicial review at the Federal Court of Canada, and requesting the court to expunge the publication of the revocation in the Canada Gazette. The court hasn’t the jurisdiction to do so, Federal Court of Canada Justice Whyte Nowak ruled on November 8, dismissing the request. The Court will now proceed to consider the remainder of JNF’s judicial review application. Meanwhile, in a report released this past Friday, Just Peace Advocates and Independent Jewish Voices Canada document millions of dollars in charitable donations funneled by ostensibly charitable Canadian groups to a handful of other Israeli organizations engaged in colonizing the West Bank, and soldier-settler violence against Palestinians. Just Peace Advocates and IJV are calling on the Canadian government to suspend the charitable status of these organizations, and to carry out audits and criminal investigations of their activities. Among these groups — Mizrachi Organization of Canada, Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, and the Heseg Foundation. “Under the Guise of Charity: Canadian Funding for War Crimes in Occupied Palestine” was publicly released at a press conference in Toronto on November 8. Listen to the proceedings in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. In order of appearance: Alice Klein, member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada; Anver Emon, Professor of Law and History at University of Toronto; Khaled Mouammar, founder of the Canadian Arab Federation, and, the report’s co-author, Miles Howe, Assistant Professor of Critical Criminology at Brock University. The press conference also featured a presentation by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Since the release of her most recent report to the UN Human Rights Council, “Genocide as Colonial Erasure,” Albanese has been the target of attacks by Israel and its surrogates across Europe and North America. Listen to Friday’s press conference in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 80 Wanna destroy a people in whole or in part? In other words, commit genocide – as genocide is defined under international law? You don’t need gas chambers, firing squads, and deep ditches. Just destroy their schools and universities. Bomb their libraries, archives and cultural institutions; seize their historical records. Make it as hard as possible to go to their kids to go to school. According to a late August report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 10,600 children and 400 teachers had been killed in Israeli military operations by August 2024, and more than 15,300 students and 2,400 teachers injured. “With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed,” a group of UN experts declared in April, “it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” the experts wrote. The GPM spoke with the statement’s lead author. First, listen to this: two attorneys for the government of South Africa, in January, arguing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi is a South African lawyer and legal scholar, and a member of South Africa’s Judicial Services Commission. Blinne Ni Grahleigh is an Irish human rights and international law expert at Matrix Chambers, in London. Listen to Ngcukaitobi and Ni Grahleigh in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Little kids go to school in Hebron, occupied Palestine (David Kattenburg) Numbers speak louder than words. Since Israel’s assault on Gaza began, back on October 7, at least two thirds of the besieged enclave’s educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Israa University, the last remaining higher educational institution in Gaza, was demolished on January 17. Today, over 600 thousand Gazan students have no access to education. Or books. Thirteen Gaza public libraries are now in ruins. Some 200 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed. Among these, Gaza 7th century Omari Mosque, a center of Islamic faith and learning, demolished in an Israeli airstrike back in December. A Hamas stronghold, the Israeli military said. Gaza’s Central Archives, repository of 150 years of Palestinian history, is reportedly in ruins. Over the past year, Israeli military forces have killed at least 5500 students, 260 teachers and 95 university professors. The GPM reached out to Farida Shaheed, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Palestinian astrophysicist Imad Barghouthi – jailed by Israel on multiple occasions Getting an elementary, secondary or university education in Palestine these days is one thing. Doing top-drawer scientific research is another. That’s what Yousef Najajreh has been doing for quite a number of years, under Israel military occupation and apartheid. Najajreh is a molecular pharmacologist in the faculties of Bethlehem and Al-Quds Universities, in occupied Palestine. I’ve spoken and hung out with Yousef on a host of occasions, most recently this past May. Here’s a conversation of ours from back in 2022 – in the midst of Covid – in the wake of Israeli government legislation clamping down on visits by foreign academics to Palestinian campuses. From Yousef, we’ll segue to Palestine’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, speaking to the International Court of Justice back in February, on the opening day of hearings on the legal consequences of Israel’s ‘prolonged’ occupation of Palestine. Listen to all this in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Yousef Najajreh in his lab, Al-Quds University (David Kattenburg)

Annihilation Doctrine Over a year has passed since October 7, 2023 — the Palestinian/Israeli equivalent of 9-11. In the course of its vengeful response to the invasion of southern Israel by Gaza-based Palestinian resistance fighters, itself precipitated by 17 years of brutal Israeli siege, Israel occupation forces have killed at least 42,000 Gazans, 16,000 of them children. Palestinian casualties, direct and indirect, are surely higher. Some conflict epidemiologists peg the number at 180,000 — ripped to bits by US bombs, missiles, tank rounds and sniper bullets dropped and fired by Israel occupation forces, or snuffed out by forced starvation and thirst. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, since October 8, Israeli-delivered American bombs and missiles have killed 2300 Lebanese, three quarters of those in the last month alone. Over a million Lebanese people are now internal refugees (two million in Gaza). Recently returned from his latest trip to Lebanon, Canadian lawyer, activist and journalist Dimitri Lascaris speaks with the GPM about all this. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our conversation here:

GPM # 78 Bacteria are Earth’s most ancient creatures. And there are lots of them, with a total mass a thousand times more than all humans. Microbes — both prokaryotic and eukaryotic — make planet Earth go round. Some of them are dangerous pathogens. Most of them aren’t. Indeed, some bacteria are great kitchen companions. Anna Sigrithur has been harnessing microbial magic, fermenting food and drinks for years. She’s also a writer and artist, focusing on food cultures, food preservation, fermentation, microbiology, sensory perception and human/non-human relationships. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Ferments in process Since the dawn of civilization, nothing has fascinated humans more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis Historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work. The collection, description and preservation of living things has come a long way since then. Today, biologists use fancy tools to collect creatures, and DNA barcoding technology to identify them. Here’s a story about DNA barcoding. Click on the play button above, or go here. Dutch barcoder Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader (David Kattenburg) Earth’ surface is a little over one degree warmer today, on average, than it was at the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago. That doesn’t seem like much. Under the Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit temperature rise to two degrees. At present emission rates, that target will likely be exceeded. In a landmark report published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, back in 2018, researchers warned that a two degree rise in global surface temperature may actually exceed a critical planetary threshold, pushing Earth down a cascade of tipping points into “hothouse” mode, unlike anything this third rock from the sun has experienced since the mid-Miocene epoch, fifteen million years ago. The GPM spoke about the report with its lead author, Will Steffen. A native of Norfolk, Nebraska, Steffen emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, where he took up a position at the Australian National University in Canberra. He served as the Executive Director of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme, a ground-breaking initiative aimed at studying the chemical, physical and biological processes governing Earth as system. His name came to be associated with a host of ideas about our planet, and humanity’s fate. Steffen’s Great Acceleration curves helped corroborate the idea, first proposed by Dutch chemist Paul Crützen, that Earth has entered a new Epoch, the Anthropocene. Will Steffen passed away in January 2023. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 77 This past September 11 – an indelibly dreadful date — thirty-four Palestinians were killed in a pair of Israeli airstrikes on a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza. Twelve-thousand were sheltering there at the time, most of them women and children. Among the casualties, six aid workers with the UN Relief & Works Agency, UNRWA. Founded in 1949, UNRWA provides humanitarian aid, protection and social services to millions of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and is mandated to do so until a “just and durable solution” to the plight of the Palestinian people is found. In theory, that solution would involve fulfillment of the UN-mandated right of the Palestinian people to return to their homes inside present-day Israel, or be compensated for their losses. Not surprisingly, Israel has had a hate-on for UNRWA since its inception. Indeed, the Swedish diplomat responsible for the agency’s formation, Count Folke Bernadotte, was gunned down by Zionist militants shortly after his plan for Palestinian refugees driven from their homes in the course of Israel’s founding was tabled at the United Nations. Bernadotte’s vision and plan lived on. So has Israel’s hatred for the agency he helped create. Seventy-five years after Bernadotte’s brutal assassination, in the course of its seemingly genocidal war on Gaza, Israel has killed at least 220 UNRWA staff with US bombs and missiles. For thoughts on Israel’s September 11 attack on the Nuseirat school, the GPM reached out to former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness, now the Executive Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Count Folke Bernadotte According to Wikipedia, Zionism is “an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside Europe … a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became Israel’s national or state ideology.” In 1975, the UN General Assembly declared Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” In 1991, that resolution was revoked. Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism, Israel’s allies and advocates insist. Tell that to US-based Jewish Voice for Peace, “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.” North of the border, Independent Jewish Voices Canada has just declared itself to be anti-Zionist. For thoughts on that stance, the GPM reached out to IJV founding member Sid Shniad. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 76 It’s a staggering statistic. Covid killed almost seven million worldwide. The number is likely higher. Meanwhile, a potentially deadlier pandemic sweeps the planet — Bacterial infections antibiotics can’t cure. According to one UK government study, by 2050, ten million may die annually, infected by multi or pan-resistant microbes no drug will kill. Drug resistance is the ineluctable result of antibiotic overuse or misuse – to treat viral infections, for example. What doesn’t kill infectious bacteria makes them stronger. So, science searches for new ones. The trouble is, Big Pharma isn’t interested. There’s no profit to be made developing drugs that will end up on the top shelf, reserved for emergencies, when no other drug will work. Big Pharma wants to produce drugs that billions will use, all the time – precisely how antibiotics can’t be used, or else they’d become useless! So, academic researchers are picking up the slack. At McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario a team of scientists are screening thousands of hopeful candidates, totally new kinds of antibiotics, that bugs have never seen, and are unlikely to become resistant to. And, for hot tips on what will work and what won’t, they’re turning to artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning. Jon Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus Since ancient times, nothing has fascinated human beings more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work. The identification and description of living things has come a long way since ancient Greece and Rome. Today, biologists use DNA barcodes to identify living creatures. a DNA barcode is a small fragment of DNA that’s characteristic for a species. A half-dozen standardized barcodes exist for different groups of organisms. COX1 is used to identify animals. Botanists use a chloroplast gene. The ‘Internal Transcribed Spacer’, or ITS barcode, is used to identify fungi. Bacteria have their own barcodes too. Within any broad group, that standard barcode varies from species to species. A digital device reads it, just like a supermarket scanner reads the barcode on a can of soup or a roll of toilet paper. Predictably, DNA barcode readers are getting small. Here’s a story about that. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Dutch biologist Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader (David Kattenburg) Men are from Mars, women from Venus, John Gray famously wrote, back in the nineties. Science says it’s true – sort of: male and female brains are wired differently. Sandra Witelson is a veteran brain researcher, with a collection of over a hundred brains she’s been gathering for years. Albert Einstein’s was the first. The differences between male and female grey matter – especially in the language and speech regions – interest Witelson greatly. Witelson’s studies revolve around brain lateralization – anatomical and functional differences between people’s right and left cerebral hemispheres just above the ears. And, how male brains get sexualized. At the tender age of five weeks, male embryos get doused in testosterone, changing them and their brains forever. Sandra Witelson is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry & Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Sandra Witelson (David Kattenburg)

GPM # 75 Humanity has never faced a more monumental challenge. After two centuries of burning fossil carbon, trashing the atmosphere, pushing Earth systems to the edge of collapse, industrial societies need to develop other sources of energy that are renewable and clean. The prospects are frightening, but climate angst has an antidote. Wind and solar, for sure. There’s another vast storehouse of energy on half the world’s doorstep — Earth’s oceans. Covering three quarters of the planet’s surface, they store colossal volumes of heat, that can be tapped. So can the kinetic energy from ocean waves and tides. This past spring, in the Dutch capital of Den Haag, several hundred entrepreneurs and engineers came together to showcase innovative devices for doing just that, at the annual gathering of Ocean Energy Europe. Listen to some voices the GPM gathered. Click on the play button above, or go here. Alejandro Marques de Magallanes Crespo, founder of Magallanes Renovables Talking about the energy of ocean tides — rising and falling like clockwork, under the influence of the moon — no better place to tap this colossal energy resource than the Shetland Islands, on the northern tip of Scotland, and in the Bay of Fundy, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in eastern Canada, home to the highest tides in the world. That’s what a company called Nova Innovation is doing. Simon Forrest is founder and CEO. In a quiet spot on the margins of last spring’s Ocean Energy Europe conference, in The Hague, the GPM sat down for a chat with Simon. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Petit Passage, on the Bay of Fundy, where a Nova turbine will soon generate tidal energy Conferences are fun. Lots of interesting people to meet and sessions to attend. Better still, heading out into the field. Especially if it’s North Holland. That’s where the GPM went, last spring, on a bus trip organized by the Dutch Energy From Water Association, together with forty ocean energy innovators from around the world. Our first stop: Den Helder, at the manufacturing facility of Symphony Wave Power, to see their wave energy demonstrator. Fred Gardner is Symphony’s founder. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Rik Siebers, Director of REDstack, showing small-scale model of reverse electrodialysis Of all the forms of energy readily available to coastal communities around the world, none is more intriguing than salt. To be more precise, salt gradients. Wherever fresh river water flows into salty ocean, that freshwater gets infused with sodium, calcium, chloride and sulfate ions, and salt gradients form. Make this happen across a plastic membrane, under controlled conditions, you generate electricity. Reverse electrodialysis, it’s called. No better place to see this in action – indeed, the only place – than the Afsluitdijk. Check it out on a map. It’s that long highway, built on a dike between the Dutch provinces of North Holland and Friesland, separating the freshwater Ijsselmeer from the salty Waddenzee. Afsluitdijk Right in the middle of the Afsluitdijk, a company called REDstack is bringing fresh and saltwater together, and putting electricity into the Dutch grid. RED stands for Reverse Electrodialysis. The first voice you’ll hear is Peter Scheijgrond, Chairman of the Dutch Energy From Water Association, our tour leader last spring. Then Rik Siebers, REDstack’s Managing Director and Michael van Oostrom, Head of Market Development. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 74 Five weeks shy of the first anniversary of October 7, 2023 and the launch of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza, the GPM sat down with one of the conflict’s most astute observers, Mouin Rabbani. Rabbani shared his thoughts about Israel’s genocidal war, the Palestinian people’s depleted, divided and leaderless ‘national liberation movement’ (a state of affairs much to Israel-USA’s liking), and about the much touted ‘Axis of Resistance’ — a coalition of independent parties that know how far to push Israel, ostensibly on behalf of the Palestinian people, without damaging their own interests. Shifting perceptions of the self-declared ‘Jewish State’ in Europe, the US, and within Israel itself, and recent groundbreaking developments at the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, all point towards an uncertain future for Palestinians and Israelis alike, Rabbani tells the GPM in this interview. Mouin Rabbani is a Dutch-Palestinian researcher, analyst, and commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and contemporary Middle East issues. He’s served as the head of political affairs with the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, and as Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group. These days, Rabbani is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, and co-Editor of Jadaliyya.com. The GPM spoke with Mouin Rabbani in The Hague. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Mouin Rabbani (David Kattenburg)

GPM # 73 “It’s the economy, stupid.” In search of US presidential campaign slogans summing up what concerned voters, this was the catchiest Bill Clinton strategist Jim Carville came up with, back in 1992. “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care” were much less memorable. Thirty-two years and eight presidential campaigns later, another pressing issue is on the minds of those who’d likely vote for Kamala Harris, if she gets on the right page — an arms embargo on Israel, and a US-enforced halt to the Gaza genocide. The GPM spoke about the Harris campaign and Israel-USA’s ongoing Gaza genocide with Medea Benjamin, co-founder and tireless guerilla activist with the American feminist antiwar group, CODEPINK. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above or go here. Gaza (Tasnim News Agency) Here’s another slogan – ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall be Free’. Sounds righteous, no? Calling for freedom … or an end to non-freedom? According to allies and advocates of the ‘Jewish State’ of Israel, this popular slogan is horridly antisemitic – a vulgar rallying cry for racial hatred and genocide. In the Federal Republic of Germany, shouting out this phrase can land you a stiff fine, or get your fired. Earlier this month, a Berlin court slapped a 600 Euro fine (about 600 US dollars) on a young German-Iranian woman for shouting out this two-phrase declaration at a Berlin rally, four days after Hamas’ assault on southern Israel. Bad timing. According to a court spokesperson, the slogan “could only be understood as a denial of Israel’s right to exist.” All the more reprehensible, Judge Birgit Balzer sniffed, given Germany’s responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust, and its sacred obligation to be perpetually penitent. Staatsräson, it’s called. Reason of state. To learn more about Staatsräson — and the hazards of calling for Palestinian liberation in Germany, especially if you’re a person of colour — the GPM reached out to Wieland Hoban, Chairman of Germany’s Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East — Jüdische Stimme. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here:   Konrad Adenauer, architect of Staatsräson And … Shout out about to another Harbinger Media Network podcast you might be interested in — Cyborg Goddess: a Feminist Tech Podcast. Host Jennifer Jill Fellows interviews researchers about the effects of technology. From bicycles to vibrators, birth control to fitbits, social media to chatGPT, Cyborg Goddess unpacks it all from a feminist intersectional lens. Check them out here.