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November 8. 2024
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We are witnessing today –live-streamed– a 21st century version of the Christian, western European imperialist takeover of what are known as the Americas, and the genocidal creation of settler colonialist States from Canada to Argentina.
Below
- Democracy Now interview, October 31, 2024, with Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in occupied Palestinian territory.
- Democracy Now interview, October 22, 2024, with Naomi Klein, author, journalist and activist
Connecting the dots, from Guatemala to Palestine
For over 30 years, Rights Action has supported genocide survivors in Guatemala, telling the truth about and seeking justice for genocides carried out by U.S. and western-backed military regimes in the 1970s and 80s. Over 250,000 mainly Mayan boys and girls, women and men, young and old were slaughtered. The U.S. brought in Britain, France, Israel, and military regimes of Argentina and Chile to arm, train and operate with the genocidal regimes.
The U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala was not live-streamed.
At bottom: Get informed, Get involved
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“Genocide as Colonial Erasure”
U.N. Expert Francesca Albanese on Israel’s “Intent to Destroy” Gaza
Democracy Now interview, October 31, 2024
The U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, has released a major report accusing Israel of committing genocide. Albanese concludes that Israel’s war on Gaza is part of a campaign of, quote, “long-term intentional, systematic, State-organized forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians,” end-quote.
The report is titled “Genocide as colonial erasure.”
Francesca Albanese
“The Palestinians, like Ilan Pappé says, are victims not of war, but of a political ideology that has been unleashed. Palestinians have always been an unwanted encumbrance in the Israeli mindset, because they are an obstacle both as an identity and as legal status to the realization of Greater Israel as a state for Jewish Israelis only.”
“The main feature of this genocide, apart all the horrible aspects of it, is that this is the first settler-colonial genocide to be ever litigated before a court, an international court.
“And this is why coming to [the U.S.], which is a country birthed from a genocide, when I meet the Native Americans, for example, I feel the pain of these people. And I say if we manage to build on the intersectionality of Indigenous struggle, the cry for justice behind this case for Palestine will resonate even louder, because it will somewhat be an act of atonement from the settler-colonial endeavor, which has sprouted out of Europe, toward Indigenous peoples.”
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Israel Has Weaponized October 7 Trauma to Justify Genocide in Gaza
Democracy Now interview, October 22, 2024
We speak with Naomi Klein who says a “trauma industry” has emerged to keep Israeli society permanently in crisis in order to justify the country’s expansionist wars and human rights abuses.
NERMEEN SHAIKH
Naomi — you just mentioned, which your piece talks about at length, the conflation of October 7th with the Holocaust. First of all, what that makes possible? And whether an argument can be made for whether this is precisely a trivialization of the Holocaust, a kind of banalization of it, which is precisely what survivors and scholars of the Holocaust warned against?
NAOMI
The implications are that if you conflate these events, it justifies any response, right? If you cast Palestinians as Nazis, if you create this false continuum, then the original crime in the creation of the state of Israel, which is the Nakba - which is the mass, forced ethnic cleansing, displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, is after the fact justified, right?
NERMEEN SHAIKH
I want to ask, Naomi — one of the people that you cite in your piece on the question of grief and grieving, is historian Gabriel Winant. He writes, “The genuine humane sentiment that it is possible to grieve equally for those on both sides is, tragically, not true. One side has an enormous grief machine, the best in the world, up and running, feeding on bodies and tears and turning them into bombs. The other is starved for grief.”
Gabriel wrote that piece less than one week after October 7, 2023. Now it’s over a year later and over 42,000 Gazans killed. If you could elaborate on this? Because this is something that people have struggled with because, as you said earlier, people have a right to grieve what happened on October 7th, and yet there is this massive discrepancy.
NAOMI
Massive asymmetry in who’s grievable, right? I mean, this is Butler’s term, Judith Butler’s term, that within a vastly unequal, white supremacist society, you have lives that are treated as more grievable than others. And so many justice struggles are about asserting that every life is grievable.
In the piece, I also quote a Lebanese Australian scholar, Ghassan Hage, who talks about how he felt this pressure to grieve those deaths, after October 7th, in a way that he described as “supremacist mourning,” which had encoded in it the idea that these lives were more important, more precious than Palestinian lives, Lebanese lives. And that’s what we must reject on all counts.
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Accountability for Western complicity
As Rights Action continues our work related to human rights and justice, environment and land defense struggles in Guatemala and Honduras, we are clear in our understanding that these are not and never have been “national” issues. Since October 2023, we have regularly shared information about the US-led, Western-backed genocide in Palestine, so as to continually make the connections from the local to national to global, from the imperialisms and colonialist projects of the past to the imperialisms of today, and this violent settler colonialist project.
Rights Action supports activism and work to hold the US, Canada, the EU and Australia legally and politically accountable for supporting, enabling and legitimizing Israel’s systematic crimes against humanity and war crimes against Palestine and the Palestinian people, crimes that are now making victims of targeted civilians in Lebanon.
Rights Action supports calls for
- Immediate and permanent ceasefire.
- Immediate delivery of massive amounts of comprehensive humanitarian relief, and reconstruction and rebuilding support.
- Release of all political prisoners and illegally detained people.
- And then support, for as long as it takes, a comprehensive negotiation process that deals with the genocide and other human rights violations and war crimes happening now (beginning October 7); that deals with the death, suffering and destruction going back to 1948; and that that addresses the root causes of the establishment of the Israeli Apartheid system, the violent, illegal occupation, and the on-going illegal settler expansionism.
Need to diversify media sources
Rights Action urges everyone to diversify their news sources. As a necessary antidote to the oftentimes harmful, misleading reporting coming from much of the mainstream government and corporate media in the US, the EU and Canada, we suggest the daily news coverage provided by Al Jazeera news (https://www.aljazeera.com; @AJEnglish) and Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org; @democracynow).
Get involved with, follow news feeds of
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