Chris Hedges's Blog, page 275

Parents Who Starved and Shackled Children Get Life Sentence

RIVERSIDE, Calif.—The eldest son and daughter of a couple who starved and shackled 12 of their children spoke publicly for the first time Friday, alternately condemning and forgiving their parents before a judge sentenced the pair to up to life in prison.

Since being freed from their prison-like home more than a year ago, the two adult children of David and Louise Turpin described how they had gained control of lives and, despite receiving little education at home, were now enrolled in college and learning simple things, including how to ride a bike, swim and prepare a meal. They are still thin from years of malnutrition.

“I cannot describe in words what we went through growing up,” said the oldest son, now 27. “Sometimes I still have nightmares of things that have happened, such as my siblings being chained up or getting beaten. But that is the past and this is now. I love my parents and have forgiven them for a lot of the things that they did to us.”

The hearing put an end to a shocking case that had gone unnoticed until a 17-year-old girl escaped from the home in January 2018 and called 911. Investigators discovered a house of horrors hidden behind a veneer of suburban normalcy.

The children — ages 2 to 29 — had been chained to beds, forced to live in squalor, fed only once a day, allowed to shower only once a year and deprived of toys and games. They slept during the day and were active a few hours at night.

As her children spoke from a lectern, 50-year-old Louise Turpin sobbed and dabbed her eyes with tissues.

“I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to hurt my children,” she said. “I love my children so much.”

Her husband, who was shaking and could not initially read from a written statement, let his lawyer speak for him until he regained his composure. He did not apologize for the abuse but wished his children well with their educations and future careers and hoped they would visit him. He then began sobbing.

Jack Osborn, a lawyer representing the seven adult Turpin children, said they understand the consequences of their parents’ actions and are working hard toward forgiving them. Some plan to talk with their parents eventually, but others want no contact with them for 10 years.

The one who called police was a hero for liberating her siblings, Osborn said.

“Maybe but for that we wouldn’t be here today,” he said.

The sentence of life with no chance of parole for 25 years was no surprise. It had been agreed to when the couple pleaded guilty in February to 14 counts each that included torture, cruelty and false imprisonment.

The courtroom fell hushed as the oldest daughter, now 30, entered the courtroom. Her eyes were already red from crying when she began to speak in the voice of a little girl.

“My parents took my whole life from me, but now I’m taking my life back,” she said, as her mother’s lower lip quivered trying to hold back the tears. “Life may have been bad but it made me strong. I fought to become the person I am. I saw my dad change my mom. They almost changed me, but I realized what was happening. I immediately did what I could to not become like them.”

There was no explanation from the parents or lawyers about why the abuse occurred, but a letter from one of the children read by an attorney hinted at a home life that veered from birthday celebrations and trips to Disneyland and Las Vegas to severe punishment and disarray.

“Through the years, things became more and more overwhelming, but they kept trusting in God,” the girl wrote. “I remember our mother sitting in her recliner and crying, saying she don’t know what to do.”

She said her parents did not know the children were malnourished because they thought the children inherited a gene from their mother, who was small.

From the outside, the home in a middle-class section of Perris, a small city about 60 miles (96 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, appeared to be neatly kept, and neighbors rarely saw the kids outside, but nothing triggered suspicion.

But when deputies arrived, they were shocked to find a 22-year-old son chained to a bed and two girls who had just been set free from shackles. All but one of the 13 children were severely underweight and had not bathed for months. The house was filled with the stench of human waste.

The children said they were beaten, caged and shackled if they did not obey their parents. Investigators concluded that the couple’s youngest child, a toddler, was the only one who was not abused.

David Turpin, 57, had been an engineer for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Louise Turpin was listed as a housewife in a 2011 bankruptcy filing.

The teenage daughter who escaped jumped from a window. After a lifetime in isolation, the 17-year-old did not know her address, the month of the year or what the word “medication” meant.

But she knew enough to punch 911 into a barely workable cellphone and began describing years of abuse to a police dispatcher.

Although the couple filed paperwork with the state to homeschool their children, learning was limited. The oldest daughter only completed third grade.

Referring to the restraints, the oldest daughter’s statement said her mother “didn’t want to use rope or chain but she was afraid her children were taking in too much sugar and caffeine.”

Life got more difficult after her mother’s parents died in 2016.

Her parents tried their best, “and they wanted to give us a good life,” she said. “They believed everything they did was to protect us.”

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Associated Press writers Amanda Lee Myers and Michael R. Blood in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

‘Black Is Beautiful’: Identity, Pride and the Photography of Kwame Brathwaite

On an evening in the early 1950s on the corner of 125th and 7th Avenue in Harlem, two teenage brothers named Elombe Brath and Kwame Brathwaite stood in the crowd to hear Carlos Cooks speak about Pan-Africanism and the legacy of Marcus Garvey. Cooks’ message of black pride and a vibrant history dating to the beginnings of mankind was part of a tradition of corner speakers rooted in radicalism dating to Garvey himself and peers like Hubert H. Harrison, A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen and W.A. Domingo. Cooks’ words stayed with the brothers, none more than one elegant truth: “Black Is Beautiful.”

A few years later, Kwame and Elombe went on to co-found the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS), a collective of artists, playwrights, designers and dancers, giving African Americans a way to share and celebrate their culture unmolested by a monolithically white racist society. From AJASS they launched Naturally ’62, a fashion event celebrating black women and the African American aesthetic. Out of it came “Black Is Beautiful,” a mantra for a generation.

“Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite,” at Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center through Sept. 1, covers the photographer’s early years documenting jazz concerts and cultural events organized by him and his brother.

“He didn’t just propel the Black Is Beautiful movement forward with his iconic imagery, he created a template on how to bring a community together around an anthem of positivity and inspire an entire generation to love themselves during a period of segregation, when the world was telling them not to,” is how Skirball managing curator Bethany Montagano sums up the show. “He used his photography as a vehicle for social change and that definitely comes out in the exhibition. But the exhibition is also a road map on how to do it.”

Kwame and Elombe started AJASS mainly because they loved jazz. “They couldn’t get Miles [Davis], but they could get all the people who played with Miles. They brought Paul Chambers,” says curator Kwame Brathwaite Jr., who speaks regularly with his 81-year-old father at his home in New York City. “It was a place where you could have African Americans enjoy jazz in their neighborhoods rather than deal with the club barriers and things going on downtown and in Manhattan.”

When a local photographer came by selling images from their shows, Kwame became captivated and decided he would teach himself photography. On display are over 40 black-and-white images, some as large as 5 feet square, of everyday people as well as jazz legends like Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln and Dizzy Gillespie, or Art Blakey taking five with a smoke and a drink, as well as the women of Grandassa Agency, a modeling firm that featured black women—some professional models, others off the street—representing a variety of body shapes and skin tones.

Named for Grandassaland, Cooks’ description of an ancient Africa before continental drift, the Grandassa models, Naturally ’62 and especially the phrase “Black Is Beautiful” resonated beyond Harlem and into mainstream culture. The “Naturally” shows continued on a regular basis over the years, capturing the styles of the times and taking to heart Cooks’ own heckle of some smart-looking female passersby, “Your hair has more intelligence than you. In two weeks, your hair is willing to go back to Africa and you’ll still be jivin’ on the corner.”

“Hooking jazz photography with the social action and activism, then he was able to put women on the frontlines,” Montagano says, laying out Brathwaite’s guide to implementing change. “The teachings of Marcus Garvey recognize equity between men and women. Something that’s very distinctive about Kwame Brathwaite’s work is that women and men have equity. And this is also some of the first positive imagery of African American women, where their hair is worn naturally, they don’t wear makeup. That’s a huge disruption in photography at the time.”

An original Grandassa model known as Black Rose was a stylist who wound up teaching how to style and care for natural hair, rather than getting it straightened as so many did in the 1950s and early ’60s. Brathwaite showed an uncanny prescience in understanding the power of photography to shape people’s worldview. Seeing African Americans denigrated by a monolithic white society and media, he used his camera to refocus how they saw themselves.

“They were trying to convey a message to the Garveys, their own following, through this thing that they called edutainment,” says Brathwaite Jr. of his father’s agenda. “It was specifically to make sure ideas of pride and unity came across when they were doing these shows.”

Not in the exhibit are works that came later, shots of Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye, as well as The Jackson Five on their 1974 trip to Africa, and Muhammad Ali, a longtime friend of Brathwaite, in the Congo that same year in the days leading up to his “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman. The Champ sits alone, pensive, in the quiet after a meeting with the press.

“It’s by far one of the most poignant moments of him dealing with whatever he was dealing with in his life, but this kind of peaceful, quiet, muted Ali, which is rare to see cause he’s always on when cameras are around,” observes Brathwaite Jr. Even as his father became known among celebrities in the ’60s and ’70s, he continued to photograph everyday people, placing the famous on equal footing with Harlemites celebrating at the Garvey Day parade.

“He didn’t take a violent approach, he didn’t take a hateful approach, he took an approach about bringing everybody back to self-love. And I think that’s what makes it so dynamic,” concludes Montagano, referencing the new monograph on Brathwaite’s work by Aperture available May 1. “Kwame and the story behind his photography and the way he was able to bring his community together offers a template to young people on how they do it in a way that’s accessible and positive. The scholarship and the fact that this provides such a great model for anyone viewing this today when faced with this struggle are two of the most important parts of this exhibition.”

House Escalates Trump Inquiry With Subpoena for Full Mueller Report

WASHINGTON—The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena Friday for special counsel Robert Mueller’s report as Congress escalates its investigation of President Donald Trump.

“It now falls to Congress to determine the full scope of that alleged misconduct and to decide what steps we must take going forward,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. He expects the Justice Department to comply by May 1.

While Mueller declined to prosecute Trump on obstruction of justice, he did not exonerate the president, all but leaving the question to Congress.

Mueller’s report provides fresh evidence of Trump’s interference in the Russia investigation and challenges lawmakers to respond. The risks for both parties are clear if they duck the responsibility or prolong an inquiry that, rather than coming to a close, may be just beginning.

“My committee needs and is entitled to the full version of the report and the underlying evidence consistent with past practice,” Nadler said in a statement.

But the committee’s top Republican, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, said the subpoena was “wildly overbroad” and that Trump already declined to assert executive privilege in a move of “unprecedented openness.” Collins said Nadler was rushing the process for political gain.

“This is politically convenient,” Collins said, allowing the chairman “to grandstand and rail against the attorney general for not cooperating on an impossible timeline.”

Attorney General William Barr sent Congress a redacted version of the report, blacking out several types of material, including classified information, material pertaining to ongoing investigations and grand jury evidence.

Nadler said he is open to working with the department “to reach a reasonable accommodation for access to these materials, however I cannot accept any proposal which leaves most of Congress in the dark, as they grapple with their duties of legislation, oversight and constitutional accountability.”

The materials are due the day Barr is scheduled to testify before a Senate committee and one day before Barr is set to appear before Nadler’s committee. Nadler also has summoned Mueller to testify.

Republicans are eager to move beyond what Trump calls the “witch hunt” that has overshadowed the party and the presidency. While Democrats say Mueller’s findings are far more serious than initially indicated in Barr’s four-page summary last month, they’ve been hesitant to pursue the ultimate step, impeachment proceedings, despite pressure from the left flank of the party to begin efforts to try to remove the president from office.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, traveling Thursday on a congressional trip to Ireland, said in a joint statement with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer that Mueller’s report revealed more than was known about the obstruction question.

“As we continue to review the report, one thing is clear: Attorney General Barr presented a conclusion that the president did not obstruct justice while Mueller’s report appears to undercut that finding,” they said.

Later, in a letter to House Democrats, Pelosi vowed: “Congress will not be silent.”

It’s unlikely that the full Mueller report or the public testimony will untangle the dilemma that Democrats face. Mueller laid out multiple episodes in which Trump directed others to influence or curtail the Russia investigation after the special counsel’s appointment in May 2017, and Trump made clear that he viewed the probe as a potential mortal blow — “the end of my presidency.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the acts described in the report “whether they are criminal or not, are deeply alarming in the president of the United States. And it’s clear that special counsel Mueller wanted the Congress to consider the repercussions and the consequences.”

Schiff, D-Calif., said that “if the special counsel, as he made clear, had found evidence exonerating the president, he would have said so. He did not. He left that issue to the Congress of the United States.”

Republicans sought to portray Democrats as unwilling to let go of the idea that Trump colluded with Russia to swing the election. “What you’re seeing is unprecedented desperation from the left,” tweeted Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., a top Trump ally. “There was no collusion. It’s over.”

Other Republicans were more measured. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is one of the few members of Congress mentioned in the report, told reporters in Kentucky, “It’s too early to start commenting on portions of it.”

McConnell was among several people the report said former White House Counsel Don McGahn had reached out to on behalf of the president when Trump was trying to stop then Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself at the start of the Russia probe.

In all, the report revealed 10 areas of potential obstruction, from Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey to his attempts to thwart Mueller’s investigation. In many cases, the additional details show a president restrained only by aides and others around him.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said his reading of the report shows that Trump “almost certainly obstructed justice” and it was only his staff that intervened to prevent certain actions.

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Associated Press reporters Mary Clare Jalonick, Padmananda Rama, Jennifer Peltz in New York and Dylan Lovan in LaGrange, Kentucky contributed to this report.

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For complete coverage of the Mueller report, go to https://www.apnews.com/TrumpInvestiga...

Once-Counterculture 420 Marijuana Holiday Goes Mainstream

LOS ANGELES—Potheads have for decades celebrated their love of marijuana on April 20, but the once counter-culture celebration that was all about getting stoned now is so mainstream Corporate America is starting to embrace it.

No, Hallmark doesn’t yet have a card to mark “420.” But many other businesses inside and outside the multibillion-dollar cannabis industry are using April 20, or 4/20, to roll out marketing and social media messaging aimed at connecting with consumers driving the booming market.

On Saturday, Lyft is offering a $4.20 credit on a single ride in Colorado and in select cities in the U.S. and Canada. Carl’s Jr. is using a Denver restaurant to market a hamburger infused with CBD, a non-intoxicating molecule found in cannabis that many believe is beneficial to their health.

On 420 last year, Totino’s, a maker of frozen pizza snacks, tweeted an image of a microwave and an oven with the message: “To be blunt, pizza rolls are better when baked.”

“I think brands that associate themselves with cannabis kind of get that contact high. In other words, they’re just considered to be cooler by association,” said Kit Yarrow, consumer psychologist at Golden Gate University. “As pot becomes more legal, more discussed, more interesting to people, more widely used, then 420 becomes more mainstream as well.”

Marijuana normalization has snowballed since 2012, when Colorado and Washington were the first states to legalize recreational use. Eight more followed, including California, Oregon and Michigan. Medical marijuana is legal in two-thirds of the states, with conservative-leaning Utah and Oklahoma among recent additions.

Meantime, the CBD market has exploded. CBD oil can be found in candies, coffee and other food, drinks and dietary supplements, along with perfume, lotions, creams and soap. Proponents say CBD helps with pain, anxiety and inflammation, though limited scientific research supports those claims.

U.S. retail sales of cannabis products jumped to $10.5 billion last year, a threefold increase from 2017, according to data from Arcview Group, a cannabis investment and market research firm. The figures do not include retail sales of hemp-derived CBD products.

Ben & Jerry’s was one of the earliest big brands to foster a connection with the marijuana culture through marketing. The Vermont-based ice cream company features Cherry Garcia and Phish Food, honoring late Grateful Dead member Jerry Garcia and the band Phish. Both bands are favorites of the marijuana-smoking crowd.

To mark 420 in recent years, Ben & Jerry’s debuted taco and burrito inspired ice cream sandwiches. This year the company partnered with a San Francisco Bay Area cannabis retailer to give customers who place delivery orders on Friday and Saturday a free pint of Half Baked, a combination of cookie dough and fudge brownie.

“We have a lot of fun, never being overt, but really playing into the moment of 420,” said Jay Curley, the company’s global head of integrated marketing.

Last year, Ben & Jerry’s also turned more serious, asking consumers to call on lawmakers to expunge prior marijuana convictions and press for pardons or amnesty for anyone arrested for smoking pot. This year the company is using the holiday to call for criminal justice reform.

“We’re actually using this as an opportunity not to tell a stoner joke like we have in the past, but to raise what we see as a much more serious issue around justice,” Curley said.

Those in the marijuana marketplace also are ramping up advertising around 420. Much of the marketing about cannabis or related products takes the form of online ads, emails, text messages and social media. Shops typically offer discounts. Some host parties with food and entertainment. The larger 420 events can draw thousands of people.

Verano Holdings, whose businesses include cannabis shops, sponsors street festivals in Chicago and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where attendees can learn about marijuana products, listen to music and grab a bite. The company expects this Saturday’s festival in Chicago, going on its third year, will draw more than 4,000 people. Last year, it drew 1,500, said Tim Tennant, Verano’s chief marketing officer.

In San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Hippie Hill will again be the site of a 420 celebration. Last year, more than 15,000 attended the event, which has transformed from a small informal gathering into a full-blown festival of corporate sponsors and commercial booths selling smoking devices, T-shirts and food.

Roger Volodarsky, whose Los Angeles-based Puffco makes portable vaporizers, has celebrated 420 since he was a teenager. Back then, he said, “420 was the day that you splurged on yourself and got high in interesting ways. It was the day that you made a gravity bong and coughed your brains out.”

Volodarksy likes that some Main Street brands are getting into the industry and the holiday.

“What’s important to me about these ad campaigns is they’re speaking to people who aren’t users and they’re normalizing the space to people who aren’t users,” he said.

Even as popularity grows, some companies will stay away from 420 as a marketing tool, said Allen Adamson, co-founder of Metaforce, a marketing consulting company.

“If you’re talking about a big brand that needs to appeal to everybody and is very risk-averse, then probably not,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll see large financial institutions doing it.”

Biden Expected to Launch Presidential Campaign Next Week

WASHINGTON—Former Vice President Joe Biden is expected to join the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential race next week.

The decision answers one of the most significant outstanding questions of the early presidential primary season, which has already seen announcements from 18 high-profile Democrats. Biden, 76, would be the oldest and most experienced politician in the race.

His plans were confirmed by three people with knowledge, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The announcement is expected as early as Wednesday and would cap months of deliberation over his political future.

The specific launch date and location is unclear. Biden is likely to quickly make visits to early-voting states.

One person said Biden’s advisers are also considering an early event in Charlottesville, Virginia, the site of a deadly clash between white supremacists and counterprotesters in 2017. The location would be intended to draw a contrast between Biden and President Donald Trump, who initially said there were some “very fine people on both sides” of the violent confrontation.

Biden has been particularly outspoken against the rise of white supremacy in the Trump era.

One of the most recognizable names in U.S. politics, Biden served as Barack Obama’s two-term vice president after nearly four decades as a Delaware senator. His high-profile, working-class background and connection to the Obama years would help him enter the race as a front-runner, although he faces questions about his age and whether his more moderate record fits with a party that has become more liberal.

With a record in elected office that stretches half a century, Biden faces multiple challenges.

Last month he struggled to respond to claims he touched 2014 Nevada lieutenant governor nominee Lucy Flores’ shoulders and kissed the back of her head before a campaign event. A few other women have made similar claims, though none has alleged sexual misconduct.

The incident is just a taste of the harsh vetting from both parties expected for Biden, who has run for president twice before but never from such a strong political starting point.

His first White House bid in 1988 ended after a plagiarism scandal. And in recent weeks, he was repeatedly forced to explain his 1991 decision, as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, to allow Anita Hill to face questions about her allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, then a nominee for the Supreme Court.

Biden has since apologized for his role in the hearing. But in the #MeToo era, it’s another example of why critics believe he may struggle to catch on with the Democratic primary voters of 2020.

On paper at least, however, he may be well positioned to take on Trump in a general election.

The Republican president’s allies have privately warned that Biden might be the biggest threat to Trump’s re-election given Biden’s potential appeal among the white working class in the Midwest, the same region that allowed Trump to win the presidency.

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Associated Press writers Steve Peoples and Jonathan Lemire in New York contributed to this report.

Anti-Vaxxers Are Just as Bad as Climate Deniers

There have been at least 555 confirmed cases of the highly contagious measles virus since January alone, prompting officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to call this sudden eruption the worst outbreak of the disease in nearly 20 years. The story about measles spreading across the U.S. is unfolding alongside a parallel and troubling trend of increased measles infection rates globally. The World Health Organization issued a report at the same time as the CDC, finding that measles cases worldwide have surged by nearly four times the average number in the first three months of the year.

But the national and global trends spin a tale of two separate realities. An irrational fear of vaccines among well-educated and largely white Americans has fueled an utterly preventable and dangerous disease that had been considered “eliminated” by scientists. Reuters explained that “[a] growing and vocal fringe of parents in the United States oppose measles vaccines believing, contrary to scientific evidence, that ingredients in the vaccines can cause autism or other disorders.” Michelle M. Mello, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and a professor of health research and policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine explained to me in an interview that while there have been pockets of low vaccination rates in minority communities—like Somali Americans in Minnesota or Orthodox Jews in New York City—“On a national level, overwhelmingly, the demographic is educated, relatively affluent white families” that are choosing not to vaccinate their children. The epicenters of measles outbreaks are in liberal states such as California, New York, Oregon and Washington.

Meanwhile, as an example of how the rest of the world struggles with a dangerous infectious disease, the East African island of Madagascar is experiencing its worst measles outbreak in history. More than 115,000 cases of the virus have been confirmed in a country of 25 million, and at least 1,200 people have so far died. The dead are mostly children under the age of 15. Less than 60% of that nation’s residents are vaccinated, but not because of a fear that vaccines cause autism. Instead they face a more traditional obstacle: poverty.

In Madagascar, mass malnutrition has helped the virus spread faster among young people with compromised immune systems. According to Associated Press, although the measles vaccine is free, “Simply reaching a clinic for help can be a challenge. Many people in Madagascar cannot afford to see a doctor or buy medicine, and health centers often are understaffed or have poorly qualified workers.”

It is a monumental ode to human stupidity that the wealthiest nation in the world teeters on the edge of a dangerous measles epidemic at the same time that poor nations are struggling to vaccinate their residents. It is worth contrasting the first-world problems of misinformed American parents who are literally organizing “measles parties” for their children with poverty-stricken families in nations like Madagascar.

Measles is not a disease to be taken as lightly as the so-called “anti-vaxxers” would have you believe. Mello explained, “This is not a disease where your [unvaccinated] kid has to share saliva or snot with another kid to get infected. You just have to be in a room where another person with measles has passed through in the last couple of hours to have a 90% chance of infection.” Although mortality rates from measles are low in a nation like the U.S., there can be long-lasting damage to health, including severe hearing loss. Yet there are hordes of American parents who are more terrified of vaccines than they are of measles.

There has been much hand-wringing in the U.S. about how best to approach the fiercely defended views of the anti-vaxxer crowd. Study after study conducted by reputable scientists and published in peer-reviewed journals confirm the same thing: Vaccines do not cause autism. Worse, an examination of how best to convince parents about the safety of vaccines had a depressing conclusion that “existing strategies to correct vaccine misinformation are ineffective and often backfire, resulting in the unintended opposite effect, reinforcing ill-founded beliefs about vaccination and reducing intentions to vaccinate.” In other words, anti-vaxxers are fact-resistant and, when presented with reality, dig their heels in even harder to maintain their fantasy.

If any of this sounds familiar, there is an analogy to be made between anti-vaxxers and climate-change deniers. Both groups place faith in a gut-level sense of their rightful position on an issue that has far-reaching existential implications. And both groups refuse to acknowledge the vast body of sound scientific literature proving them wrong. But on the issue of climate there is an encouraging trend showing that a significant percentage of Americans who once believed global warming wasn’t real are now accepting the science. One report found that about a fifth of those who had recently seen the light did so because they personally felt the impacts of climate change.

Where vaccination rates are concerned, we see the opposite trend. Federal officials released data late last year showing that the percentage of unvaccinated toddlers in the U.S. increased four-fold in the last 17 years. It is no wonder we are seeing outbreaks of a disease like measles. Mello explained that “In order for us to stop the spread and slow it to the rate where the outbreak actually extinguishes itself in relatively short order, we need about 95% of the population to receive the [measles] vaccine.” She issued a dire warning that “If it goes any lower than that, the very high rate of spread will cause the outbreak to take on a wildfire aspect.” Just as some have suggested that “climate-change deniers are a danger to our security,” there is a strong case to be made that anti-vaxxers are a threat to our collective health.

Perhaps it is a testament to the effectiveness of vaccines in the U.S. that has fueled the ignorance of just how necessary they are. We had more or less eliminated measles from the U.S. and have had similar levels of success in eradicating other infectious diseases through vaccinations. We no longer live in a world where a parent’s worst nightmare is their child contracting smallpox. But as vaccination rates drop, diseases are returning. The question is: Do we really need to wait for hardcore anti-vaxxers to come around once they see the fatal impacts of their choices?

Just as combating climate change requires strong policy solutions and laws to stop runaway warming, laws are needed to maintain the herd immunity our society relies on. The state of California passed a mandatory vaccination law banning parents from refusing vaccines based on their personal beliefs. While this has encouragingly led to increased vaccination rates, the rate of medical exemptions has also increased, suggesting that some physicians and parents are taking advantage of a loophole. More recently, New York City officials have taken even stricter measures—requiring mandatory vaccinations and barring unvaccinated people who have been exposed to the disease from being in public places.

There are, of course, limits to the analogy of climate change denialism and the beliefs of anti-vaxxers. But there is also a terrifying link. As our planet warms, scientists predict that infectious diseases like measles are more easily transmitted. In other words, two waves of ignorance could be colliding at this very moment to produce the kind of mayhem we have not seen in our lifetimes. At a time when we have so much information at our fingertips, could humanity’s downfall really be marked by such incomprehension and thick-headedness?

Five Critical Takeaways From the Mueller Report

After nearly two years of waiting, we have a redacted version of the report of special counsel Robert Mueller. A searchable copy can be found and examine here.

The report is 448 pages long and is divided into two volumes. Volume I, in the words of the report, “describes the factual results of the Special Counsel’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and its interactions with the Trump Campaign.” If you are concerned about allegations of conspiracy, cooperation or “collusion” (more on that misnomer ahead) between the campaign and persons associated with the Russian government, this is where you will find Mueller’s reasoning.

Volume II “addresses the President’s actions towards the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and related matters, and his actions towards the Special Counsel’s investigation.” If you are interested in learning whether the 45th president of the United States obstructed justice in connection with the Russian investigation, this is where you should focus your attention.

Volume II discusses 11 alleged instances of possible obstruction, covering, among other subjects, the firing of former FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, and the president’s directive in June 2017 to then-White House counsel Donald McGhan to fire Mueller—an order McGhan refused to carry out, fearing another “Saturday Night Massacre.”

Each volume is preceded by a detailed executive summary. The report also includes four appendixes, lettered A through D, that total 53 pages. Appendix C contains Trump’s answers to the written interrogatories sent to him by the special counsel’s office, which Trump’s legal team provided last November.

On the whole, the report is moderately redacted. However, key segments of the report are entirely blacked out, including details about Mueller’s decision not to cite members of the Trump campaign for conspiracy. Consider, for example, page 28 of volume I:

Screen shot of The Washingtonian’s coverage.

Although it will take time to digest the entire redacted report, here are five critical takeaways:

Do Not Trust Anything Attorney General William Barr Has Said About the Report. Read the Report Yourself.

If you want to understand the Mueller report, the last thing you should do is rely on Barr’s attempts to summarize Mueller’s findings. You can read analyses like mine or any number of others written by experts in criminal and constitutional law that will be published in the coming days, but there is no substitute for the hard slog of studying the report yourself.

Barr’s press conference Thursday morning, staged ahead of the report’s release, contained his most misleading statements to date. Crossing the line from spinning to outright lying, he remarked five times during the brief televised event that Mueller had concluded “there was no evidence of Trump campaign ‘collusion’ with the Russian government’s hacking [of the DNC’s emails].”

As elaborated below, that is not what the report says.

On obstruction, Barr falsely claimed that the White House had “fully cooperated” with the Mueller probe. It didn’t. The report makes crystal clear, among other things, that Trump refused to be interviewed by the special counsel.

Barr also remarked at his press conference that the president was “frustrated and angered” by the probe, implying that anger and frustration could provide the president with a legal defense to obstruction charges.

Not so.

The crime of obstruction of justice requires the corrupt intent to impede an official proceeding. Anger and frustration have no bearing on corrupt intent.

At the press conference, as in his previous letters to Congress, Barr acted more like the president’s personal attorney than the highest-ranking member of the Justice Department.

Mueller Did Not Find There Was No Evidence of Conspiracy. Nor Did He Make Any Finding on the Misnomer of Collusion.

The report did not conclude, as Trump, Barr, and, sadly, even some Mueller skeptics on the left have claimed, that there was no evidence of conspiracy or collusion.

Rather, the report states, “[W]hile the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges.”

This does not mean that the probe failed to uncover any evidence of conspiracy. It means that the evidence fell short of the exacting criminal-law standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

To quote directly from the text:

“The report describes actions and events that the Special Counsel’s Office found to be supported by the evidence collected in our investigation. In some instances, the report points out the absence of evidence or conflicts in the evidence about a particular fact or event. In other instances, when substantial, credible evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence, the report states that the investigation established that certain actions or events occurred. A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.” [Emphasis added.]

As for collusion, Mueller and his colleagues wrote:

“In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion.’ In so doing, the Office recognized that the word ‘collud[ e ]’ was used in communications with the Acting Attorney General confirming certain aspects of the investigation’s scope and that the term has frequently been invoked in public reporting about the investigation. But collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law.”

Mueller Declined to Make a Formal Finding on Obstruction Because of the Justice Department’s Policy Against Indicting a Sitting President. Nonetheless, He Concluded the President Could Not Be Exonerated of Obstruction.

While it is true that Mueller did not make a traditional prosecutorial judgment about obstruction of justice, it is not true, as Barr implied in his March 24 letter to Congress, that Mueller demurred on obstruction because of the “difficult issues of law and fact” he was called on to examine. He demurred because of Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president.

As the report states:

“[A] traditional prosecution or declination decision entails a binary determination to initiate or decline a prosecution, but we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has issued an opinion finding that ‘the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions in violation of “the constitutional separation of powers.” ’ Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney in the Department of Justice and the framework of the Special Counsel regulations … this Office accepted OLC’s legal conclusion for the purpose of exercising prosecutorial jurisdiction.” [Footnote and legal citations omitted.]

Notwithstanding Justice Department policy, the report makes it abundantly clear that the special counsel’s office would have cleared Trump of obstruction if the evidence had allowed it to do so. But it didn’t.

Quoting again from the report:

“[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. … Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Trump Did Not Cooperate Fully With the Special Counsel.

If the president had wanted to cooperate fully with the Mueller probe, he would have consented to an in-person interview with Mueller or members of his team. He refused. As a result, any claim of full cooperation is totally devoid of merit.

“Beginning in December 2017,” Appendix C notes, the special counsel’s office “sought for more than a year to interview the President on topics relevant to both Russian-election interference and obstruction-of-justice. We advised counsel that the President was a ‘subject’ of the investigation … [and] [ a]n interview with the President is vital to our investigation. … We additionally stated that ‘it is in the interest of the Presidency and the public for an interview to take place’ and offered numerous accommodations to aid the President’s preparation and avoid surprise.”

Instead of an interview, Trump agreed only to answer a set of written interrogatories limited to alleged Russian election interference. He declined to answer any questions on obstruction.

The responses drafted by Trump’s attorneys are an exemplar of lawyerly evasion. They consist almost exclusively of the president’s professed lack of “independent recollection” about such key events as the Trump Tower meeting of June 2016, between Russian operatives and members of the Trump campaign, including Donald Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner.

Given the flimsy answers, Mueller again sought to interview Trump, but to no avail. The special counsel’s office considered issuing a subpoena to force Trump to testify in person, but ultimately decided not to, both to avoid a protracted legal battle and because the office believed—correctly or not—that it had conducted an otherwise thorough investigation.

Mueller Did Not Request Barr to Draw His Own Conclusions on Obstruction. That Decision Should Be Left to Congress by Means of an Impeachment Investigation.

There is not even the slightest hint in the report that Mueller wanted Barr to make the final call on obstruction, as Barr suggested in his March 24 letter.

To the contrary, the report implies that such determination should be made by Congress: “With respect to whether the President can be found to have obstructed justice…, we concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice.”

Although the Mueller report contains no substantive discussion of Congress’ impeachment power, it ends with a citation to the landmark case of United States v. Nixon, which led to a former president’s resignation in the face of certain impeachment and removal from office. In that case, decided in 1974, the Supreme Court announced a principle in no uncertain terms that Mueller undoubtedly wanted Trump to hear loudly and plainly: “[n]o [person] in this country is so high that he is above the law.”

Who Are the Real Terrorists in the Mideast?

Back when I still wore the uniform of a U.S. Army officer, and well before many of my former brothers in arms labeled me a traitor, I taught freshman (“plebe”) history at West Point. I loved asking my cadets provocative questions, the sort of queries they never heard in high school Advanced Placement U.S. history courses. Consider just one. At the end of the class on World War II, I always asked: “What is the moral difference between flying three planes into the Twin Towers and Pentagon—killing 3,000 civilians—and using hundreds of U.S. planes to firebomb Tokyo on March 9, 1945—killing some 90,000 civilians?” Suffice it to say that most cadets didn’t like this question at all.

Nevertheless, let’s break that debate query down. The standard retorts of cadets ran something like this: “Well, Japan attacked us first,” or “It’s different—the U.S. had officially declared war on Japan!” Fair points, both. Still, an honest analysis complicates the standard American apologetics. Osama bin Laden and company would argue that actually, the U.S. had attacked (the Muslim world) first. After all, U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iraq caused the death of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children from 1991 to 2003. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted as much on camera, callously declaring that “we think the price is worth it.” Indeed, bin Laden pointed to the Iraqi sanctions regime as one of his three core motives for attacking the U.S. homeland. Furthermore, I’d remind my cadets, bin Laden did publicly declare jihad on America on Aug. 23, 1996, more than five years before the 9/11 attacks.

Now, I’m no fan of al-Qaida or bin Laden, or of any attacker of civilians. I grew up in a Staten Island neighborhood in New York where the avenues are named for dead firemen. I took 9/11 personally. Still, intellectual honesty demands a fair analysis of complex ethical issues in warfare—my profession of choice. Critical thinkers must be able to hold two seemingly opposing thoughts in their heads at the same time; in this case, that the 9/11 attacks were criminal and that American firebombings of Japanese women and children were lawless. One of the architects of that deliberate bombing—former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara—has admitted as much.

I got to thinking about Americans’ peculiar definitions of terrorism recently when President Trump took an unprecedented step and designated a military unit of a sovereign nation—the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)—as a foreign terrorist organization. In another bit of (to me, comical) theater, Iran quickly responded by labeling U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)—the headquarters commanding all U.S. troops in the Greater Middle East—as terrorist. One can’t help but wonder if Iran has a point! Either way, it seems that a comparison of the two military commands is in order.

The IRGC certainly dabbles in proxy wars and meddles in the region (so does Uncle Sam, by the way). It provides limited aid to the Houthi side in the Yemeni Civil War and, in the past, lent support to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. The latter two groups have, though not recently, engaged in suicide attacks on Israeli civilians. Furthermore, from 2004 to 2011, the IRGC aided Iraqi Shiite militias with the homemade bomb expertise these groups later applied to kill some 600 American troops. None of this activity is particularly appealing to a former U.S. military officer.

Then again, American troops were, at the time, militarily occupying Iraq in violation of the spirit of a slew of international strictures and, soon after the conquest of Iraq, senior U.S. policymakers reportedly seriously considered regime change in Iran—joking that “boys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran!” Washington, then, might not act so different from Tehran if Iran had just conquered Mexico and then threatened to overthrow the U.S. government. What’s more, though Tehran exerts influence in its own region, the “terrorist” label seems unwarranted. After all, the IRGC has never attacked the U.S. homeland; in fact, no Iranian on a visa has ever committed an act of terrorism in America, and no citizen of Iran has struck on U.S. soil since at least 1975.

In the interest of fairness, let us examine just a few of the recent CENTCOM-directed or -enabled actions that an objective observer might label “terrorist.” Under Donald Trump’s relaxed bombing standards, U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan have increased fivefold, and civilian deaths from those strikes rose 87% between 2017 and 2018 alone, to 463. Furthermore, since the regional anti-Islamic State bombing campaign began in 2014, the U.S. military admits to 1,139 civilians killed—though human rights organizations estimate the true number is likely between 7,000 and 16,000 deaths. Purposeful or not, those many thousands of people are still dead. After all, the Irish Republican Army didn’t mean to kill civilians in Britain or Northern Ireland, but back then, the U.S. State Department still labeled them terrorists when they inevitably did!

What’s more, though CENTCOM may not drop the bombs, the U.S. provides much of the intelligence, munitions and Air Force in-flight refueling that enables the Saudi terror bombing of Yemen. The sordid scorecard for that little war reads as follows: tens of thousands of civilians killed by Saudi airstrikes, 85,000 children starved to death as a result of the Saudi blockade, and the outbreak of the worst cholera outbreak in world history. And, lest we forget, Saudi Arabia could not have pulled this off quite as deftly without ample CENTCOM support!

Turn the clock back a bit farther and matters look worse. The CENTCOM-directed invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 unleashed chaos, violence, looting and, eventually, civil war. As a result, at least 183,000 civilians were ultimately killed. According to the Geneva Conventions, an occupying power (read: the U.S.) has legal responsibility for local security, safety and basic services in the aftermath of war. At that, CENTCOM undoubtedly failed. So is Tehran right? Is CENTCOM a terrorist organization? Maybe, maybe not—but Iran does have a point.

Comparisons aside, the very counterproductivity of the “foreign terrorist organization” announcement is staggering. This unnecessary—and purely symbolic—designation will only serve to rally Iranian moderates and liberals around their flag and the IRGC that those citizens largely detest. It seems the U.S. government will never learn. Escalation begets escalation; violence begets violence.

Washington is playing a dangerous game in the Persian Gulf. War with Iran is both unnecessary and ill-advised. But war is exactly what this administration’s obsessive Iranophobes—national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—have long desired. The whole mess raises ever more questions as to whether Trump has any coherent foreign policy. One minute he tweets his plans to de-escalate in Syria and Afghanistan; the next he’s threatening war with Iran and even Venezuela! Nevertheless, Trump’s latest symbolic escalation may just usher in the war he, or at least his key advisers—including Assistant President of the United States, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu—apparently want. If war does break out, it’s unclear which side will more aptly carry the title “terrorist.”

Here again, a caveat seems necessary. I’m no fan of the IRGC or their elite Quds Force. The explosively formed penetrator (EFP) bombs that the Quds Force allegedly provided to Iraq’s Mahdi Army affected my life personally. In Baghdad, on the night of Jan. 25, 2007, an EFP turned my platoon’s lead Humvee into Swiss cheese, killing two of my soldiers, including a dear friend—my oldest son’s namesake, Sgt. Alexander Fuller. God, how I used to hate those bombs and that militia.

Still, time has passed and deeper reflection ensued. My platoon was part of an occupation force; nationalist resistance was understandable. I’ll never laud the Mahdi Army or their IRGC backers. But my own command, CENTCOM, was and is far from innocent.

In sum, as we compare the two military organizations, one must conclude, ultimately, that CENTCOM is at least as terrorist as the IRGC. Maybe more.

No doubt many critics will label this assessment “treasonous.” I call it “ethically consistent.”

Let history be the judge.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army major and regular contributor to Truthdig. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Tom Dispatch, The Huffington Post and The Hill. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He co-hosts the progressive veterans’ podcast “Fortress on a Hill.” Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Facebook Partners With Notorious Far-Right Site The Daily Caller on Fact-Checking

The right-wing Daily Caller is the latest site to partner with Facebook on its controversial fact-checking platform, Axios reported Wednesday.

CheckYourFact.com, a for-profit subsidiary of The Daily Caller, is, like all of Facebook’s fact-checking partners, including the Associated Press and PolitiFact, approved by the Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network.

Still, the parent company, as The Guardian’s Sam Levin explained Wednesday, is “a rightwing website that has pushed misinformation and is known for pro-Trump content.” CheckYourFact.com, on the other hand, says it is “loyal to neither people nor parties.”

Among other controversial coverage, The Daily Caller faced scrutiny for, as Levin writes, “the way it reported on a fake nude photo of the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” Levin adds, “and its coverage of immigration and the White House has typically aligned with Trump’s agenda.”

The Daily Caller has also published articles by white supremacists, including Jason Kessler, who organized the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. A Harvard report on partisan disinformation said The Daily Caller also played a “key role” in promoting stories with “anti-Muslim sentiment” and “stoked the belief among core Trump followers” that Hillary Clinton was “criminal and treasonous.”

When Facebook was asked by The Guardian about its decision to partner with The Daily Caller, Facebook pointed to The Daily Caller’s Poynter certification.

The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalism in Florida, owns the Tampa Bay Times. The organization, which advises multiple news organizations as well as trains early and mid-career journalists, came under fire in 2018 after accepting funding from the far-right Charles Koch Foundation, whose founders, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) observed at the time, are “famous for their efforts to discourage and discredit journalism critical of their business and political operations.”

In an interview with CJR, the New Yorker writer Jane Mayer said the Foundation’s grants to Poynter and other media organizations are an attempt at “whitewashing” its reputation for being anti-press.

That Facebook is working with The Daily Caller at all, Axios observes, “highlights how messy and complicated fact-checking can be on Facebook—as well as on tech platforms generally, who do not want to exercise editorial responsibility for content that gets posted.”

In December 2016, Facebook partnered with several news sites and fact-checking organizations, including Snopes, The Associated Press, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. They did so, Casey Newton wrote in The Verge, “after the US presidential election results raised new questions about how viral hoaxes may have contributed to Donald Trump’s victory.”

At the time, Facebook announced it was introducing tools developed with the third-party organizations to confirm or debunk the accuracy of viral stories. If a Facebook user tries to share a story that’s been deemed false by one fact-checking partner, the user will get a message warning that “independent fact-checkers have disputed its accuracy.” If a story has been marked false by two or more of the partner organizations, a banner that reads: “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact Checkers.” appears under the story in Facebook’s news feed.

The partnership, as Levin writes, “has faced growing backlash from journalists and internal problems.” In a 2017 Guardian story on the fact-checking program, one fact-checker, who requested anonymity, told Levin, “I don’t feel like it’s working at all. The fake information is still going viral and spreading rapidly.”

In February, Snopes, a website dedicated to fact-checking news stories, hoaxes and urban legends, announced it was ending its partnership with Facebook. According to The Verge, the company said it was in the process of “evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services, and we want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff,” but dismissed reports that the relationship was strained.

Other former Snopes employees were less restrained. “They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, told The Guardian in February.

CheckYourFact editor David Sivak defended its record, saying in a statement to The Guardian, “I’d be happy to put our track record up against anyone else’s. If you comb through the articles we’ve published on Check Your Fact over the last two years, you’ll quickly see that our fact checks are fair, in-depth and hold figures on both sides of the political aisle accountable, including Trump.”

The Horrors of Israeli Occupation Have Been Laid Bare

Christians the world over look to the Holy Land this week as they celebrate Easter and the resurrection of Jesus, while Jews around the globe observe Passover, recalling their exodus from slavery in ancient Egypt. Current events in Israel and Palestine, though, are no cause for celebration, and are adding fuel to racial and political fires here in the United States.

Benjamin Netanyahu secured an unprecedented fifth term as Israel’s prime minister, despite facing possible indictment on corruption charges. Netanyahu successfully energized his base with promises to annex Israel’s many, illegal West Bank settlements, narrowly defeating his main challenger, Benny Gantz. President Donald Trump amplified Netanyahu’s reelection chances, first by moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, then by formally endorsing Israel’s annexation of the occupied Golan Heights, land Israel seized militarily from Syria in 1967. Israel’s domestic politics have consistently veered further and further to the right, while a global movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people, “boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS),” is growing in opposition to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its brutal siege of the Gaza Strip.

“Netanyahu offers Israelis safety and security, very, very low mortality rate as part of the occupation and siege,” Israeli journalist Haggai Matar said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “Unlike Palestinians who are being killed en masse by Israel.”

The anti-Palestinian rhetoric during the Israeli election was particularly vile. Benny Gantz, the former head of the Israeli military, ran an ad with a rapidly climbing body count laid over images of Palestinian funeral marches. The ad closed with the chilling phrase, in Hebrew, “1,364 terrorists killed — 3.5 years of quiet in the south.” Another ad was run by Oren Hazan, a member of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party, who represents a Jewish-only, illegal West Bank settlement. In it, Hazan’s face is superimposed over Clint Eastwood’s character in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” as he kills a man with the face of Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

Israel is wrongly described as the Middle East’s only democracy — for whom? Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian attorney and citizen of Israel, spoke to “Democracy Now!” from Haifa, explaining, “about 16% of the people who are eligible to vote are Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. Look at the vast remainder of people that Israel controls … in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip or in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. Close to 6 million individuals who are ineligible to vote in Israeli elections, and yet are being governed by Israel.”

While many Palestinians who were eligible to vote boycotted the election, there is a growing nonviolent resistance movement in the occupied territories and around the world. In Gaza, 2 million people live under Israeli siege in what former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron called the world’s largest “open-air prison.” For the past year, tens of thousands of Palestinians have marched every Friday to the separation fence between Gaza and Israel. It’s called the “Great March of Return,” and is met by Israeli military snipers who fire live ammunition into the nonviolent crowd. According to the U.N., over 270 Gazans have been killed, at least 41 of whom were children, and close to 30,000 have been injured, with many of those injured suffering amputations. Journalists and medical first responders have also been shot, some fatally.

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian activist who co-founded the BDS movement in 2005 to pressure Israel to comply with international law and respect Palestinian rights. He was scheduled to speak in the United States this week, at Harvard and New York University, and to meet with members of Congress, but was prevented from boarding his plane in Israel. The Trump administration had rescinded his permission to enter the U.S., despite his valid visa, which he has used when visiting many times.

Unable to fly out of Israel, Barghouti appeared on “Democracy Now!” from a TV studio in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, explaining, “It shows how this right-wing [Trump] administration, which is completely in alliance with Israel’s far-right regime, is terrified of our voices, is terrified of telling the truth.”

Justice and security for Palestinians will only enhance security for Israel. Stifling speech, blocking travel and violating human rights won’t bring peace. A negotiated settlement will.