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      Idaho’s Far Right Suffers Election Loss to 18-Year-Old Climate Activist

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Tuesday, 13 September, 2022 - 16:09 · 7 minutes

    The nationwide campaign to stifle discussions of race and gender in public schools through misinformation and bullying suffered a reversal in Idaho on Monday, when a high school senior vocally opposed to book bans and smears against LGBTQ+ youth took a seat on the Boise school board.

    The student, Shiva Rajbhandari, was elected to the position by voters in Idaho’s capital last week, defeating an incumbent board member who had refused to reject an endorsement from a local extremist group that has harassed students and pushed to censor local libraries.


    Rajbhandari, who turned 18 days before the election , was already well-known in the school district as a student organizer on climate , environmental , voting rights , and gun control issues. But in the closing days of the campaign, his opponent, Steve Schmidt, was endorsed by the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs, which in response helped Rajbhandari win the endorsement of Boise’s leading newspaper, the Idaho Statesman.

    Rajbhandari, a third-generation Idahoan whose father is from Nepal, was elected to a two-year term with 56 percent of the vote .


    In an interview, Rajbhandari told The Intercept that although he had hoped people would vote for him rather than against his opponent — “My campaign was not against Steve Schmidt,” he said — he was nonetheless shocked that Schmidt did not immediately reject the far-right group’s endorsement. “I think that’s what the majority of voters took issue with,” Rajbhandari said.

    The Idaho Liberty Dogs, which attacked Rajbhandari on Facebook for being “Pro Masks/Vaccines” and leading protests “which created traffic jams and costed [sic] tax payers money,” spent the summer agitating to have books removed from public libraries in Nampa and Meridian, two cities in the Boise metro area.


    But, Rajbhandari said, “that’s the least of what they’ve done. Last year, there was a kid who brought a gun to Boise High, which is my school, and he got suspended and they organized an armed protest outside our school.”

    Rajbhandari, who started leading Extinction Rebellion climate protests in Boise when he was 15 , is familiar with the group’s tactics. “We used to have climate strikes, like back in ninth grade, and they would come with AR-15s,” he said, bringing rifles to intimidate “a bunch of kids protesting for a livable future.”

    So when the Idaho Liberty Dogs called on Boise voters to support Schmidt — and a slate of other candidates for the school board who, ultimately, all lost — Rajbhandari told me he texted his rival to say, “You need to immediately disavow this.”

    “This is a hate group,” Rajbhandari says he told Schmidt. “They intimidate teachers, they are a stain on our schools, and their involvement in this election is a stain on your candidacy.” Schmidt, however, refused to clearly reject the group, even after the Idaho Liberty Dogs lashed out at a local rabbi who criticized the endorsement by comparing the rabbi to Hitler and claiming that he harbored “an unrelenting hatred for white Christians.”

    While the school board election was a hyperlocal one, Rajbhandari is aware that the forces he is battling operate at the state and national level. “Idaho is at the center of this out-of-state-funded far-right attack to try to undermine schools, with the end goal of actually abolishing public education,” Rajbhandari told me. “There’s a group, they’re called the Idaho Freedom Foundation , and they actually control a lot of the political discourse in our legislature. Their primary goal is to get rid of public education and disburse the money to charter schools or get rid of that funding entirely.”

    “Idaho is at the center of this out-of-state-funded far-right attack to try to undermine schools, with the end goal of actually abolishing public education.”

    “And the way they’ve done that, is with this very well-thought-out attack on teachers,” he added, promoting “baseless claims of ‘indoctrination’” in schools as well as “attacks on LGBTQ youth, with claims of ‘grooming.’”

    Last year, when he was 16, Rajbhandari publicly confronted Idaho’s far-right lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, telling her that the task force she had set up to “Examine Indoctrination in Idaho Education” was investigating an entirely imaginary threat.

    During in-person testimony to the task force, the young activist told McGeachin, who was running for governor at the time, and her running mate, state Rep. Priscilla Giddings, that Idaho teachers were not “indoctrinating students to hate America, as this committee purports.” He went on to accuse the two Republican officials of endorsing baseless conspiracy theories as a political stunt in support of their candidacies.

    “You won’t succeed,” he told them. “You won’t succeed in silencing student voices. You won’t succeed at bringing Idaho back to the 1800s. You won’t succeed at abolishing public schools as the Freedom Foundation aspires. And you won’t succeed in being elected to the executive branch of state government, which I feel is the true purpose of this.”

    “And you won’t succeed because despite all your efforts, we Idahoans are smart, we’re educated, and we can’t be fooled into believing that something exists when the opposite is true,” Rajbhandari added. “All across the state, there are young people like me who will vote in the Republican primary for the first time in 2022.”

    McGeachin — who was, as Rajbhandari had predicted, ultimately defeated in the Republican primary for governor — had launched the task force by appealing for “information regarding problematic teachings on social justice, critical race theory, socialism, communism, or Marxism” in public schools. But the response from Idahoans was so overwhelmingly opposed to her claims of widespread indoctrination that she refused to make the comments submitted to the task force public until a court ordered her to do so.

    A review of the records by the Idaho Capital Sun showed that about 90 percent of the public comments on the subject either denied that Idaho teachers were indoctrinating students or criticized McGeachin for wasting taxpayer dollars “chasing an illusion.”

    The initial impetus for Rajbhandari’s run for office was a feeling of frustration that the Boise school board was simply ignoring pleas from student climate activists to make a clean energy commitment. Two years ago, he said, a group of high school and junior high students tried everything they could think of to urge the board to make a commitment to renewable energy. “We sent emails; we did a postcard drive and wrote like 300 postcards; we met with our local power company; we had a petition, we delivered the largest petition ever to our school district,” Rajbhandari said, but the board never responded. “Last year, I wrote a letter to our school board president, just asking for a meeting … and I never got anything back. But I know that he read my letter because about a week later, I was called to the principal’s office.”

    “That’s when I knew I was going to run” for a seat on the board, Rajbhandari recalled. “Because that is indicative of a problem. Students are the primary stakeholders in our education, right? And yet our board wasn’t seeing us as constituents, and they weren’t willing to meet with us, and they weren’t taking our ideas seriously,” he said.

    “That’s not to say that my run for the board comes from a place of animosity,” he added, “but it comes from a place of need, which is that we don’t have student representation on the Boise Schools board, and our board members aren’t boots-on-the-ground in the classroom.”

    One of the most urgent priorities for action from the board, Rajbhandari says, is finding resources to address a mental health crisis in a state that has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the country.

    If all goes according to plan, Rajbhandari hopes to serve on the board for the whole school year, then hand over the seat to one of the high school juniors from the district who will shadow him for the year. The idea is to ensure student representation on the Boise school board going forward.

    As for his own future, Rajbhandari told me that he is looking at colleges now but is not yet certain about what’s next. “I’m really passionate about climate justice, environmental issues — so maybe study law,” he said. “But I think that’s what school’s for, is figuring out who you want to be. And really, Boise Schools is what made me who I am, and so I can thank my teachers for that.”

    The post Idaho’s Far Right Suffers Election Loss to 18-Year-Old Climate Activist appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Saudi Prince Taunts Biden for Caring More About Khashoggi Than Shireen Abu Akleh

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Sunday, 17 July, 2022 - 02:34 · 4 minutes

    Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly accused President Joe Biden of hypocrisy during their meeting in Jeddah on Friday, by asking why the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in Turkey in 2018 seemed to matter more to him than the fatal shooting of Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh during an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank May.

    Biden, who had said during his campaign for the presidency in 2019 that Khashoggi was “murdered and dismembered… I believe on the order of the crown prince,” told reporters that he had confronted Prince Mohammed over the killing of the dissident Saudi journalist at the start of their meeting this week.

    But, according to a Saudi official who spoke to the state broadcaster Al Arabiya , the prince contrasted Biden’s concern about the brutal murder of Khashoggi, a long-term resident of the United States, with his failure to hold Israel’s government accountable for the killing of Abu Akleh, an American citizen who was shot — according to witnesses and visual investigations — from an Israeli military convoy.


    Ayman Mohyeldin of MSNBC also reported that a Saudi official told him that Prince Mohammed, known as M.B.S., denied that he had ordered the assassination, “the same way George Bush did not order the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.” The Crown Prince then asked, according to Mohyeldin’s source, why “with so many U.S. journalists killed, missing or detained,” including Shireen Abu Akleh, “the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was being politicized.”

    Saudi state television was also careful to keep viewers inside the repressive kingdom from hearing Biden reiterate the C.I.A. conclusion that the Crown Prince had ordered the murder of Khashoggi.

    When Biden was asked during a news conference in Jeddah on Friday night how Prince Mohammed had responded to his comments about Khashoggi, Al Arabiya’s sister station Al Hadath cut away from its live broadcast so abruptly that its studio anchor and control room seemed to be caught off guard. After viewers heard Biden begin, “He basically said that he was not personally resp—” the picture jumped back to a startled anchor who took four seconds to start speaking. Then, when she did, her mic was not on.


    A C-SPAN clip of the same moment from the news conference shows that what Saudi viewers nearly heard Biden say was: “He basically said that he was not personally responsible for it. I indicated that I thought he was.”


    Earlier on Friday, Biden was confronted with images of Shireen Abu Akleh at a news conference in Bethlehem, because her colleagues in the press corps had reserved a seat for a photograph of the renowned Palestinian American journalist, and several wore T-shirts with a drawing of her face above the words, “Justice for Shireen.”


    In a letter to the White House last week, Abu Akleh’s family had asked Biden to meet with them during his trip to the region, and expressed their anguish that the U.S. seems unwilling to press Israel to open a credible criminal investigation into her killing. Instead, the family has been invited to Washington by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

    At the news conference in Bethlehem, standing alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Biden called Abu Akleh’s death a loss for the United States as well, and promised to “insist on a full and transparent accounting of her death.” His sincerity, in the eyes of many critics, was however undermined by his inability to pronounce Abu Akleh’s last name correctly.


    The post Saudi Prince Taunts Biden for Caring More About Khashoggi Than Shireen Abu Akleh appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Abortion Rights Activists Call New Group Leading Protests a Front for a Far-Left Cult

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Thursday, 14 July, 2022 - 16:26 · 13 minutes

    When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined protesters outside the Supreme Court the day that Roe v. Wade was overturned, the progressive representative from New York was quickly surrounded by members of a newly formed group, Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, who wore green bandanas and waved signs with slogans and the group’s web address.

    A founder of Rise Up, Sunsara Taylor, pushed past an Ocasio-Cortez aide and got the New York representative to join her in chanting through a megaphone that the decision was “illegitimate” and needed to be contested by going “into the streets!”


    Taylor, a longtime leader of the tiny, Harlem-based Revolutionary Communist Party — a group better known as the Revcoms, which is dedicated to spreading the ideas of the former ’60s radical Bob Avakian — then offered Ocasio-Cortez the mic. As the Democratic congresswoman spoke, Taylor also handed her a green bandana , a symbol of abortion rights in Latin America available for purchase on the Rise Up website.

    After Ocasio-Cortez told the protesters that the effort to restore the right to an abortion nationwide would be “a generational fight,” a reporter asked what Congress could do. As Ocasio-Cortez gathered her thoughts, Taylor interjected: “Fill the streets.” Ocasio-Cortez agreed. “We have to fill the streets,” she said. “Right now, elections are not enough.”


    Before she left, Ocasio-Cortez took a moment to comfort one of the young Rise Up protesters, Julianne D’Eredita, a 21-year-old from Texas, who was in tears behind her. As Ocasio-Cortez hugged D’Eredita, Taylor started a chant of the slogan that is also the group’s name: “Rise up for abortion rights!”


    Anyone watching news coverage of the protests at the court that day, and in the weeks since, would be forgiven for thinking that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights must be one of the nation’s leading reproductive rights organizations, since its activists , chants , placards , and the green bandanas and stickers sold on its website have been prominently featured in report after report .

    The day after Roe v. Wade was overturned, for instance, an MSNBC interview with D’Eredita and another young member of the group, Zoe Warren, 19, went viral, as their frustration at Democrats for failing to codify Roe and fundraising off the decision was seconded by progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and Nina Turner .


    But the flurry of attention in recent weeks is misleading, since Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has only existed since January, when Taylor and a handful of other Revcom activists launched it with a protest outside the Supreme Court on the 49th, and final, anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

    Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has only existed since January.

    The role played by Revcom members in the recent wave of abortion rights demonstrations has alarmed grassroots organizers for reproductive justice and experts on left-wing movements who liken the devotion of self-described “followers of Bob Avakian” to a cult .

    “That viral clip of the woman in the green shirt (Zoe Warren)?” Imani Gandy, senior editor of law and policy for Rewire News Group, tweeted . “She is associated with RiseUp4Abortion rights which is yet another one of Bob Avakian’s many social justice fronts. He occupies space in order to get more people to join his weird cult.”

    Talia Jane, an independent reporter who covers extremism and activism, has compared the Revcoms and their new offshoot to a multilevel marketing, or MLM, scam.

    “RevCom showed up even though they’re not welcome, so I told people about how they’re a scam cult taking advantage of new people who want to get involved,” Jane reported on Twitter after a protest in New York in May. “If you took any pictures or flyers of RiseUp4AbortionRights (the girls with the white pants with blood in the crotch),” she added, “please know they are a scam front run by a MLM cult that thinks their dear leader will return to tell them how to revolution if everyone joins their cause.”

    Sam Goldman, a Rise Up leader who has promoted Avakian’s teachings in the past, sent me an official statement from the group rejecting the criticism. Goldman, who also hosts a podcast for another offshoot of the Revcoms called Refuse Fascism, said that it was incorrect “to untruthfully conflate” Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and the Revcoms. But recent Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights protests in New York and Los Angeles have been led by Revcom activists wearing Revcom T-shirts.

    Rise Up has also been criticized by veteran abortion rights activists for focusing, from January through June, on the quixotic strategy of trying to stop the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority from overturning Roe by calling on millions of Americans to take to the streets.

    To that end, in June, Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights volunteers staged a series of small, theatrical protests which drew media attention but failed to either ignite a mass movement or keep five justices from signing Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which held that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

    Grassroots reproductive rights organizers also claim that Rise Up’s own fundraising, which is boosted by media coverage, has only served to divert much-needed resources and attention away from organizations that do important work, like defending abortion clinics and providing funds to people who need to travel to obtain abortions.

    In early June, for example, the Texas-based writer and reproductive justice activist Andrea Grimes criticized a protest in Houston at the televangelist Joel Osteen’s megachurch, in which D’Eredita and two other women stripped down to their underwear during a service and shouted, “It’s my body, my fucking choice!”


    “I haven’t seen this gaining traction anywhere meaningful, but for reporters covering whatever these dipshits do next: these folks are part of a widely despised cult of personality not tied to any serious repro health, rights, or justice organization,” Grimes commented on Twitter . “They are not supported by folks here doing the work on the ground. Nobody knows them. Nobody likes them. They’re not a thing. They show up when the cameras come on.”

    Grimes added that she, and other members of a group called Texans for Reproductive Justice, had previously denounced a prior Revcom abortion rights group led by Taylor, called Stop Patriarchy, when it staged a series of unwelcome marches there in 2014 in which activists wore chains and chanted, “Forced motherhood is female enslavement!” By equating restrictions on abortion to slavery, Grimes wrote at the time, Taylor and other followers of Avakian disrespected the suffering experienced by the ancestors of people of color.

    When she led the protest outside the Supreme Court that Ocasio-Cortez joined last month, Taylor was wearing a Revcom T-shirt that read: “Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement.”

    In late June, Rise Up was similarly criticized for staging a protest outside Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s home, in which a 15-year-old girl and a half dozen others wore white pants with fake blood stains and carried dolls in their bound hands.


    “Why do they have these kids out here doing this dumb shit?” Mary Drummer, an activist and digital strategist who has led advocacy campaigns for Planned Parenthood, Color of Change, and MoveOn, asked on Twitter . “What purpose does this serve? How is this strategic?”

    Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, Drummer argued , “is a front group of the Revolutionary Communist Party (also known as RCP or Revcom), which is basically a cult run by Bob Avakian and is known for co-opting social justice movements & protests.”

    Drummer noted that Revcom activists had previously been accused of trying to amplify anger over racist policing to trigger the full-scale communist revolution mapped out in Avakian’s tracts. For instance, Revcom activists in T-shirts with Avakian quotes were greeted with suspicion when they appeared in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 , when the police shooting of Michael Brown gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.

    “RevComs is notorious for ‘swooping’ — descending on protests organized by other groups, positioning their banners and signs prominently where they’ll be photographed, but then leaving the event at the first sign of police or counter protesters,” one left-wing organizer, who asked to remain anonymous to comment on the group’s tactics, told me in an interview. “All they do is lead pointless marches designed for photo-ops.”

    In the days after the viral video of Zoe Warren’s comments brought Rise Up national attention, a coalition of pro-abortion activists from nearly two dozen organizations, led by NYC for Abortion Rights, released a statement denouncing the group as “a cult and pyramid scheme.”

    “Similar to its parent group RevCom, RiseUp’s only goal appears to be gaining more followers in order to raise more and more money,” the activists argued. “Both essentially function as pyramid schemes that prey on social movements.”

    They “essentially function as pyramid schemes that prey on social movements.”

    “RevCom and its fronts — RiseUp and Refuse Fascism — are notorious for raising tens of thousands of dollars and using those funds to pay RevCom leadership, and to purchase marketing materials (to raise even more money),” the statement continued. “ The RiseUp website, for instance, features urgent prompts to donate with no information about where this money goes. What we do know is that this money never goes to abortion funds ( which they argue are not a strategy to defend abortion access ), providers, practical support groups, or anyone actually working to increase abortion access.”

    The activists also criticized Rise Up for “theatrical tactics” like “the wearing of white pants painted with fake blood, die-ins, and coat-hanger imagery,” which “further the extremely harmful idea that abortion is a violent procedure and safe self-managed abortion is not possible.”

    Rise Up and the Revcoms have heard and rejected the criticism, as evidenced by a Rise Up protest last week in Los Angeles — led by a Revcom activist in a “Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement” T-shirt — in which four women wearing white pants daubed with fake blood chained themselves to City Hall as the steps were drenched in red paint.


    “Some so-called ‘leaders’ in the so-called ‘movement’ have decided that the fall of Roe — shutting down of abortion in 8 states immediately w more to follow quickly — is the time to attack the ONE org that consistently fought to mobilize people to prevent the fall of Roe,” Sunsara Taylor tweeted in response to Rise Up’s critics. “There is an unthinking fanatical pile-on to using the scary word ‘cult’ to try to tar and keep people away from uniting with followers of Bob Avakian or… heaven forbid… looking into what he is about for themselves,” she added .

    The Rise Up statement sent to me by Sam Goldman also attacked the veteran organizers as people who “have done absolutely nothing to mobilize people to fight this decision when it was impending over the past 6 months.”

    The statement, which was signed by Taylor and two other founders of the group who are not Revcoms, also said that “Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has never used any funds it has raised for any purposes other than exactly what the funds were raised for.”

    Last week, Rise Up added an update to the statement which said that the group’s lawyer had “sent a letter to those who have accused us of financial wrongdoing instructing them to cease and desist in spreading these blatantly untrue, baseless, extremely dangerous allegations.”

    A separate statement on the Revcom website also rejected the criticism that the group is a cult, but does so in a curious way: by lavishing praise on Bob Avakian to such an extent that it seems to reinforce the charge.

    “Bob Avakian’s leadership, and the new communism he has brought forward is absolutely essential for making revolution and emancipating humanity,” the Revcom statement reads. “Any chance at all for not just avoiding the nightmare we are heading toward but bringing forward instead an emancipating future requires all of you who read this to engage what Bob Avakian has written in a serious way.”

    Despite the group’s best efforts to sell Avakian as a revolutionary leader, skepticism of the Revcoms is deeply rooted among left-wing activists and commentators. For instance, when Hasan Piker, a popular progressive Twitch streamer, discovered that the two young Rise Up activists who criticized Democrats in the viral MSNBC clip were linked to Revcoms, he collapsed in despair during a live broadcast.


    In a phone interview, however, Warren told me that she had no idea that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights was “associated with Revcoms” when she first volunteered for the group two months ago and does not share Sunsara Taylor’s belief in communism or devotion to Avakian’s leadership.

    “I’m not a member of the Revcoms and I never have been and I don’t plan to be,” Warren said. “When I first got involved with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, I didn’t know that they were associated with Revcoms, and when I found that out, that was a little concerning for me,” she added.

    Still, she said, the group’s efforts to pressure Democrats to pass a federal law legalizing abortion by protesting makes sense to her. “I believe that Rise Up is doing something that no other organization is really doing right now, and that is calling people into the streets to do something they might not have done before, which is demand more from their government than they are getting,” Warren said.

    Because the excerpt from her MSNBC interview that was clipped and went viral online focused on her anger at Democrats, I asked her if she agreed with Taylor, who tweeted the day after Roe v. Wade was overturned that it was pointless to “Rely on voting and the fucking Democrats.” Warren told me that she did not think protesting instead of voting was a good idea.

    “I believe that a combination of both is definitely necessary,” she said. “I think that to a certain point getting as many people in the streets as possible to demand that our current government make abortion legal nationwide now is an amazingly powerful thing to do. But, when November comes around, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote. We most definitely need to vote, and we most definitely need to vote for Democrats because we do live in a two-party system and they’re our only option.”

    The post Abortion Rights Activists Call New Group Leading Protests a Front for a Far-Left Cult appeared first on The Intercept .

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      In Letter to Biden, Shireen Abu Akleh's Family Demands a Meeting and an End to Israeli Impunity

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Friday, 8 July, 2022 - 14:01 · 5 minutes

    The family of slain journalist Shireen Abu Akleh has asked to meet President Joe Biden during his upcoming visit to Jerusalem, accusing the White House of an “abject response” to the apparent killing of a U.S. citizen by Israeli forces.

    “Dear Mr. President,” the family’s letter , sent to Biden on Friday morning, began, “We, the family of Shireen Abu Akleh, write to express our grief, outrage and sense of betrayal concerning your administration’s abject response to the extrajudicial killing of our sister and aunt by Israeli forces on May 11, 2022, while on assignment in the occupied Palestinian city of Jenin in the West Bank.”

    The letter, which was provided to The Intercept by the family, reminded the American president that Abu Akleh was not just “a prominent, beloved Palestinian journalist” and “a role model and a mentor” to women in her community. “She was also a United States citizen.”

    The family, including Abu Akleh’s brother Anton and his children, demanded that Biden make time during his visit to the Middle East next week to meet with them, “and hear directly from us about our concerns and demands for justice.”

    The U.S. “has been skulking toward the erasure of any wrongdoing by Israeli forces.”

    They also described their anger and disappointment at a lack of support from the Biden administration, and suggested that instead of using its leverage over Israel to demand a credible investigation of the fatal shot that witnesses said was fired from an Israeli military convoy, “the United States has been skulking toward the erasure of any wrongdoing by Israeli forces.”

    “In the days and weeks since an Israeli soldier killed Shireen, not only have we not been adequately consulted, informed, and supported by U.S. government officials, but your administration’s actions exhibit an apparent intent to undermine our efforts toward justice and accountability for Shireen’s death,” the renowned Al Jazeera correspondent’s relatives wrote.

    The family provided links to a half-dozen painstaking examinations of the video and audio evidence of the killing — conducted by the Washington Post , CNN , The Associated Press , the New York Times , Bellingcat , and the United Nations Human Rights Office — which all concluded that the fatal shot had likely been fired from the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, raiding party.

    “All available evidence suggests that Shireen, a U.S. citizen, was the subject of an extrajudicial killing,” the Abu Akleh family told Biden, “yet your administration has thoroughly failed to meet the bare minimum expectation held by a grieving family — to ensure a prompt, thorough, credible, impartial, independent, effective and transparent investigation that leads to true justice and accountability for Shireen’s killing.”

    The family urged Biden to direct the Department of Justice to use the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Bureau and the FBI to investigate the killing of Abu Akleh.

    The letter was sent days after the State Department released an oddly vague statement , on the Fourth of July holiday, reporting that “an extremely detailed forensic analysis” of the bullet that killed the journalist, carried out in Israel by unnamed “independent, third-party examiners,” overseen by the regional U.S. security coordinator, Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel, was unable to determine if the shot had been fired from an Israeli rifle.

    According to the State Department, the American general’s review of other information gathered by Israeli and Palestinian officials led him to the conclusion “that gunfire from IDF positions was likely responsible for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh.” Fenzel, however, “found no reason to believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances,” the statement added.

    As the Abu Aklehs noted in their letter to Biden, the U.S. has offered no explanation of how the American general determined that no Israeli soldier intended to fire at the journalist, who was wearing a blue vest marked “PRESS,” but the statement seemed to exactly echo a claim the Israeli military has made repeatedly. “The IDF investigation conclusively determined that no IDF soldier deliberately fired at Ms. Abu Akleh,” Israel’s military said in a statement released the same day.

    The U.S. has offered no explanation of how the American general determined that no Israeli soldier intended to fire at the journalist.

    The journalist’s family also pointed out that just one day after State Department spokesperson Ned Price “announced that Shireen’s killing was likely unintentional,” he admitted, during questioning by reporters, that the U.S. security coordinator’s review of the evidence was “not a law enforcement investigation” and his conclusion about intent was simply “a judgment.”

    “Nonetheless,” the family wrote to Biden, “your administration deemed it necessary to include and perpetuate the baseless and damaging conclusion that the killing was not intentional, seemingly choosing political expedience over actual accountability for a foreign government’s killing of a U.S. citizen.”

    The Abu Aklehs went on to demand that the State Department retract the July 4 press statement and turn over to them any forensic report prepared by the ballistic experts, and reveal their identities. Price, the State Department spokesperson, told reporters that the forensic experts were not Americans but came from one of the seven other NATO countries that help train Palestinian Authority security forces.

    While Price declined to say what country the experts came from, Israel’s military insisted in its own statement that “Israeli experts examined the bullet” in the presence of representatives of the U.S. security coordinator. The Israelis added that their ballistic examination was looking for evidence that the bullet had been fired from a specific weapon which was examined in the lab. That statement appears to indicate that Israel has identified the soldier from the Duvdevan commando unit who fired in Abu Akleh’s direction from the convoy during the raid.

    The family also reminded Biden that 57 members of Congress and 24 senators had signed letters asking for the U.S. to be directly involved in investigating the killing of Abu Akleh, given that Palestinians and Israelis do not trust each other to conduct a credible and independent investigation.

    “We reaffirm these demands on behalf of our beloved Shireen as your administration’s actions to date have not only fallen woefully short of ‘full accountability’ but they amount to express acceptance for Shireen’s killing,” the family wrote. “Your administration’s actions can only be seen as an attempt to erase the extrajudicial killing of Shireen and further entrench the systemic impunity enjoyed by Israeli forces and officials for unlawfully killing Palestinians.”

    The post In Letter to Biden, Shireen Abu Akleh’s Family Demands a Meeting and an End to Israeli Impunity appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Israeli Investigation Into Killing of Palestinian-American Journalist Ends Before It Begins

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Thursday, 19 May, 2022 - 17:39 · 4 minutes

    Israel’s military police have reportedly decided not to open any criminal investigation into the fatal shooting of the Palestinian-American reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, even though newly released video appears to contradict the Israeli army’s claim that the journalist was standing close to Palestinian militants when she was shot last week in the occupied West Bank.

    Amos Harel, the senior military correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported on Thursday that the decision not to investigate the Israeli soldiers who might have fired the fatal shot came after an internal review by the commando unit of the Israel Defense Forces “found six instances of IDF gunfire at armed Palestinians who were near Abu Akleh” as she reported on an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in Jenin.

    According to Harel, the criminal investigations division of the Israeli army simply accepted the accounts of the soldiers who opened fire, but “testified that they did not see the journalist at all and aimed their fire at gunmen, who were indeed nearby.”

    However, within hours of Harel’s report, video posted on Twitter by Rushdi Abualouf, a Palestinian journalist for the BBC, appeared to contradict the claim that Abu Akleh was near any Palestinian gunmen engaged in a firefight with Israeli troops. The clip shows that Abu Akleh and several other journalists, all wearing blue vests marked “Press,” were instead walking in the direction of the Israeli soldiers, as young men behind them stood around talking and joking, when shots suddenly rang out and Abu Akleh and a colleague were both hit.


    As the writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer explained on Twitter, “At the start of the video you can see the mood is relaxed, what they are saying isn’t really clear mostly because they are chuckling.” After multiple shots are heard, and the young men scatter, a voice is heard saying, “Did anyone get hit?” and calling for an ambulance. Then, after more shots, someone shouts, “Shireen! Shireen!” and, amid frantic calls for an ambulance, the desperate warning: “Stay where you are, don’t move!”

    Video posted on the day of the killing last week appeared to show that people who tried to reach the mortally wounded Abu Akleh were fired on as they approached her.

    Harel also reported that there were no plans for a real criminal investigation of the Israeli soldiers because “such an investigation, which would necessitate questioning as potential criminal suspects soldiers for their actions during a military operation, would provoke opposition and controversy within the IDF and in Israeli society in general.”

    This latest evidence of impunity for Israel’s army outraged critics of the ongoing Israeli occupation, which imposes military rule over millions of Palestinians living in territory seized during war in 1967. “Israel is actively calling the bluff of all the countries that demanded it conduct an investigation,” observed Edo Konrad, the editor of +972, an online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists. “It knows no one will hold it accountable, that the money will keep flowing, while at the same time ensuring that no will ever ‘truly know’ who killed Shireen Abu Akleh,” Konrad added.

    While commentators in the United States asked how the Biden administration would react to the news that Israel’s military was refusing to conduct the thorough investigation it had committed to just a week ago, senior American officials have gone out of their way in recent days to demonstrate what National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called “ironclad support for Israel’s security.”


    As Sullivan met with Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, at the White House on Thursday, the Israeli army was celebrating a friendly visit to Israel by Lt. Gen. Michael Kurilla, the new Commander of U.S. Central Command.

    The killing of Abu Akleh might not have shaken Israel’s relations with the U.S. but it has destabilized the country’s fragile coalition government. On Thursday, a left-wing lawmaker cited the Israeli police attack on mourners at the funeral of the beloved Palestinian-American correspondent in Jerusalem last week as one of the reasons that she was withdrawing her support for the government, which could force new elections.

    Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who represents the Meretz party, wrote in a letter explaining her decision, that her hope that Arabs and Jews could work together to bring about “a new path of equality and respect,” had been dashed by a series of “hawkish, hard-line and right-wing positions,” taken by the coalition’s leaders. The sight of the police attacking mourners at Abu Akleh’s funeral, and nearly causing them to drop the coffin, prompted her to make what she called “a moral decision” to stop supporting the government.

    The post Israeli Investigation Into Killing of Palestinian-American Journalist Ends Before It Begins appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Israel Admits It Might Have Killed Journalist, Attacks Her Funeral

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Friday, 13 May, 2022 - 17:40 · 5 minutes

    Israeli police attacked the funeral of Shireen Abu Akleh in occupied East Jerusalem on Friday, nearly causing mourners to drop the casket of the renowned Palestinian American journalist.


    Abu Akleh was fatally shot while covering an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday. Fellow journalists who witnessed the shooting said Israeli forces had fired on them. Israel’s prime minister and other senior officials initially said Palestinian militants were “likely” to blame, but the Israeli army admitted on Friday that one of its soldiers might have fired the fatal shot.

    The assault on the mourners, who were beaten with clubs at a hospital in East Jerusalem, stunned viewers who watched it unfold on live television, further enraging Palestinians and the dead journalist’s colleagues and fans.


    Israeli police said they attacked the procession because mourners waved Palestinian flags and chanted nationalist slogans. An official Israeli police account shared drone video to support the authorities’ claim that two of the mourners had thrown rocks at them. But a comparison of that video to ground-level news footage showed that the police video had been edited to remove the initial police charge and slowed down to make it seem as if a man who just waved his arms in frustration had thrown something at the officers.


    The televised assault on the funeral of a beloved figure only intensified the outrage over her death and the images were quickly remixed and shared across social networks.






    Thousands of people later joined the procession for a beloved national hero before a funeral at a Catholic church in Jerusalem’s Old City.



    The suppression of dissent continued throughout the day.



    Later on Friday, Israel’s army said the results of an interim internal investigation suggested that its soldiers might have fired the shots that killed the Al Jazeera correspondent and wounded her colleague.

    That admission marked a sharp retreat from the initial version of events offered by Israeli officials, who responded to anger over the killing of Abu Akleh on Wednesday by quickly distributing video of a Palestinian gunman firing down an alley during the raid. Officials also released statements calling it “likely” that the journalist was killed by a Palestinian militant, not an Israeli soldier.

    Later the same day, however, a researcher for the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, Abdulkarim Sadi, recorded video showing that the Palestinian militant had been in a part of the camp that made it impossible for him to have shot Abu Akleh.

    Israel’s military then released body camera video of its soldiers retreating from that part of the camp and emerging on a street where armored vehicles were waiting to extract them. Geolocation by the B’Tselem researcher and others showed that the Israeli armored vehicles were parked on the street where Abu Akleh was shot.

    The interim Israeli investigation acknowledged that the Israeli vehicles were parked about 200 meters away from Abu Akleh, and said that if she was shot by an Israeli soldier, it must have been because the soldier “fired several bullets from a special slit in the jeep and through a telescopic site at a terrorist … and there’s a possibility that the reporter stood near the terrorist.”

    That version of events was flatly contradicted by several other journalists who were with Abu Akleh at the time and insisted that they were nowhere near any of the Palestinian militants in the camp.

    Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of B’Tselem, told me by phone on Friday that there is no reason to expect the Israeli army to release any more of the video it collected from soldiers after the incident. The Israel Defense Forces, El-Ad said, has a track record of only releasing video evidence “when it is beneficial to support the Army version of events.”

    The rights activist also called it “grotesque” that the United States had called for Palestinian authorities to conduct a joint investigation with Israel, given that Israel had repeatedly used slow-moving investigations to “whitewash” the killing of Palestinian civilians living under Israeli military rule.

    The American pressure on Palestinian officials to allow Israel to take part in the investigation of itself shows the “U.S. complicity in what’s going on here,” El-Ad said, even when the victim is, like Abu Akleh, an American citizen.

    Updated: May 14, 2022
    This article was updated to add an analysis of Israeli police video that was posted online on Saturday night.

    The post Israel Admits It Might Have Killed Journalist, Attacks Her Funeral appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Video Shared by Israel Shows Palestinian Gunman Was Not Firing at Journalist Killed During Israeli Raid

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Wednesday, 11 May, 2022 - 18:42 · 4 minutes

    An effort by Israeli officials to use social media evidence to blame Palestinian militants for the fatal shooting of a journalist in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday unraveled within hours, as a close analysis of video shared by Israel showed that a Palestinian gunman was shooting in the direction of Israeli soldiers, not the reporter.

    Immediately after the tragic killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a renowned Palestinian American journalist who was gunned down while covering an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in Jenin, three other journalists who were with her, including one colleague who was shot and another who tried to save her, said that the group had come under fire from Israeli soldiers.



    In response, a chorus of senior Israeli officials insisted that it was “likely” the reporter had been killed by Palestinian militants, who exchanged fire with Israeli soldiers during the raid.

    To support that case, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett , the Israeli Foreign Ministry , and the Israeli Embassy in Washington all shared video on social networks that showed a Palestinian gunman opening fire during the raid.

    The edited and subtitled video, which was originally released by Palestinian militants, included a comment from an unseen person who said, in Arabic, that the militants had shot a soldier who was “laying on the ground.”


    Israeli officials called this evidence that the Palestinian militants might have mistaken Abu Akleh, a well-known correspondent for Al Jazeera who was wearing a blue helmet and flak jacket labeled “press,” for an Israeli soldier.

    However, an investigation of the video by a local researcher for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem showed that the militant had been firing down an alley in the densely populated refugee camp that was nowhere near the entrance to the camp where Abu Akleh and other journalists had been pinned down by gunfire.


    Working with visual clues from the harrowing video of Abu Akleh’s colleagues and bystanders attempting to rescue her, and a tip from an Agence France-Presse correspondent on the scene, geolocation experts confirmed that the Al Jazeera correspondent was at the edge of the camp, about a six-minute walk from where the militant was recorded firing down an alley.




    As the Al Jazeera English producer Linah Alsaafin noted , video clip of the effort to rescue Abu Akleh seemed to show that anyone who approached her was fired on, which suggests that the group of journalists was under deliberate attack and not just subject to indiscriminate fire.

    Later on Wednesday, after the B’Tselem investigation showed that the bullets fired by the Palestinian militant in the video Israel circulated could not have struck Abu Akleh, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Gen. Aviv Kochavi, said in a statement that it was not yet possible to be sure who had shot Abu Akleh, expressed regret for her death, and ordered an investigation. That, several activists noted, was quite different from an earlier statement from an Israeli military spokesperson who said that the journalists who were shot had been “ armed with cameras .”

    The Israeli army also released body camera footage shot during the raid to illustrate that its forces had come under fire from Palestinian militants in the camp.


    Remarkably, several visual clues in the Israeli military’s video exactly match the path shown in the video recorded by the B’Tselem researcher, which seems to prove that Israeli soldiers were at the end of the alley the Palestinian militant was filmed firing down and then emerged onto the very same street that Abu Akleh was at the end of when she was shot.

    The post Video Shared by Israel Shows Palestinian Gunman Was Not Firing at Journalist Killed During Israeli Raid appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Mark Esper Waited Two Years to Tell Us Trump Wanted Troops to Shoot George Floyd Protesters

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Friday, 6 May, 2022 - 20:52 · 4 minutes

    According to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, on June 1, 2020, a week after the murder of George Floyd, then-President Donald Trump asked him to deploy 10,000 active-duty troops to the streets of the nation’s capital and have them open fire on protesters. “Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked, in an Oval Office meeting Esper describes in the introduction to his new memoir. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

    Esper, who waited nearly two years to reveal that an American president had urged him to launch a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown on dissent, is well aware that Trump’s plan was both illegal and immoral. That’s clear because his account of this “surreal” request is included not just in the introduction to his memoir, “A Sacred Oath,” but also featured on back cover of the book, due to be published next week.

    The cover of former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir.

    But instead of immediately resigning and letting the American people know that their president was a danger to the republic, here is what Esper did that day: He tried to placate Trump and then joined the president in posing for photographs outside St. John’s Church, across Lafayette Square from the White House, after federal agents had used chemical irritants and force to violently disperse peaceful protesters from the square.

    A month later, when Esper was called before the House Armed Services Committee to explain how the military had been used to suppress dissent that day — and that night, when Black Hawk and Lakota helicopters swooped low over protesters in Washington, D.C., using winds from the rotor wash to instill terror — the defense secretary made no mention of Trump’s request to use potentially deadly force.

    In that hearing , Rep. Adam Smith, the Democratic chair of the House Armed Services Committee, asked Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to describe “what sort of conversations went on between the Department of Defense and the president and others in the White House” about Trump’s public threat to use active-duty soldiers to clear the streets.

    Instead of answering that question, Esper offered bland assurances that the military, including 43,000 Army and Air National Guard personnel deployed in 33 states and the District of Columbia during “the civil unrest” after Floyd’s murder, was committed to “remaining apolitical” and ensuring that “our fellow Americans have the ability to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights.”

    US Attorney General William Barr (L) and US Defense Secretary Mark Esper walk around downtown Washington, DC during curfew on June 1, 2020. - Police fired tear gas outside the White House late Sunday as anti-racism protestors again took to the streets to voice fury at police brutality, and major US cities were put under curfew to suppress rioting.With the Trump administration branding instigators of six nights of rioting as domestic terrorists, there were more confrontations between protestors and police and fresh outbreaks of looting. Local US leaders appealed to citizens to give constructive outlet to their rage over the death of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis, while night-time curfews were imposed in cities including Washington, Los Angeles and Houston. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP) (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

    Attorney General William Barr and Defense Secretary Mark Esper inspect the work of federal security forces in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 2020.

    Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

    Esper — who said last year that he was writing his book because the “American people deserve a full and unvarnished accounting of our nation’s history, especially the more difficult periods” — told the New York Times this week that he had concluded that Trump “is an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in the position of public service.”

    Given that his firsthand experience of Trump led him to this view, it is important to ask why Esper chose not to reveal that the president he served had wanted to turn the military on the people when it might have made a real difference — either before the 2020 election, when it might have dented Trump’s chances of winning, or just after it, when Trump fired him and put loyalists in charge of the Pentagon before urging his own supporters to disrupt the certification of his loss.

    And here, it must be said, there appears to be something even more troubling at work than just the fact that Esper might expect to sell more copies of his book by waiting to reveal the most damaging information about Trump — as former Trump aides John Bolton and Stephanie Grisham did before him.

    What I’m thinking of is a disturbing deference to presidential authority that seems deeply rooted in Washington. There was clear evidence of that in something else that Smith said to Esper and Milley at the start of the July 9, 2020, hearing on the events of June 1 that year.

    Before asking the top officials in the Pentagon to explain what role the military had been asked to play in the abusive policing of the racial justice protests, Smith told them that he was aware of “the difficult position that any secretary of defense and any chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in. You work for the president. He’s commander-in-chief.”

    But given the gravity of what Esper knew about Trump’s desire to see American troops open fire on peaceful protesters, what he chose to conceal from Congress and the public is far more grave than the sort of policy disagreement that Smith described as routine.

    And while other senior officials — including Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, and his former chief of staff, John Kelly — let their dim views of the former president’s character and intellect trickle out through leaks to reporters like Bob Woodward, Esper sat on explosive evidence about Trump’s willingness to unleash a form of martial law even after he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election.

    Looking at Esper’s silence until after Trump was out of office, we are left with a very strange definition of what it means to be a public servant — one who cannot be expected to tell the public that the president would have them shot.

    The post Mark Esper Waited Two Years to Tell Us Trump Wanted Troops to Shoot George Floyd Protesters appeared first on The Intercept .