Chris Hedges's Blog, page 29

U.S. Media Conveniently Overlooks the World’s No. 1 Sponsor of Terrorism

After the illegal assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, FAIR (1/9/20) noted that the corporate media offered no moral objections to murdering another country’s high-ranking state official. The media consensus was that Soleimani was a despicable “terrorist” responsible for the deaths of “hundreds of Americans”—a formula that buried the crucial distinction between terrorism and armed resistance, presenting military combat against the US and its allies’ occupation forces in the Middle East as inherently illegitimate.

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The New York Times’ editorial board (1/3/20) declared that the “real question” about the Trump administration’s drone strike was “not whether it was justified, but whether it was wise,” because Soleimani was “indisputably an enemy of the American people,” and an “architect of international terrorism responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and a great many others in the region, from Yemen to Syria.” The LA Times editorial board (1/3/20) claimed that Soleimani was a

key architect in Iran’s destabilizing policies in the Middle East, and a force behind militias and terror groups that have killed and maimed countless civilians and soldiers, including US troops and contractors.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (1/3/20) proclaimed that “Mr. Trump’s decisive action” has struck “a blow against terror in the cause of justice and American interests,” and dismissed the need for evidence of Soleimani’s alleged plans to “attack American diplomats and service members.” because it was “belated justice” for the “hundreds of Americans whom Soleimani had a hand in killing,” and was another successful “show of force” to “deter terrorism against Americans.”

This credulous acceptance of the US government’s practice of branding Official Enemies as “terrorists” goes far beyond Soleimani. If there are any questions, they are often confined to whether this will negatively impact the US, with the credibility of US “terrorist” designations, with all of their repercussions, being unimpeachable. For years, corporate media have uncritically parroted the US State Department’s absurd assertions of Iran being the world’s “leading state sponsor of terrorism” with a “near-global reach” (Washington Post, 9/19/18; CNN, 6/2/16, Fox News, 11/2/19). According to the US State Department’s “Country Reports on Terrorism 2018,” Iran is the “world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism” because it supports

Hezbollah, Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and various groups in Syria, Iraq and throughout the Middle East.  Iran used the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) to provide support to terrorist organizations, provide cover for associated covert operations, and create instability in the region.  Iran has acknowledged the involvement of the IRGC-QF in the Iraq and Syria conflicts, and the IRGC-QF is Iran’s primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad.

FAIR (Extra!, 3/02; FAIR.org, 3/13/19) has repeatedly pointed out that US media conveniently avoid defining “terrorism,” because a consistent definition would undermine the conventional usage—that terrorism is what you call weak, nonstate actors using homemade bombs, regardless of their target. If you defined it, say, as “deliberately and violently targeting civilians for political purposes,” that would tend to rule out roadside bombs hitting US military patrols, and rule in Saudi Arabia’s US-backed bombing of Yemeni civilians.

Defining terrorism by the means used to carry out violence rather than the targets of that violence, and emphasizing the identity of the perpetrators rather than their political motives, is a convenient way to avoid the conclusion that the US’s so-called “War on Terror” is a hypocritical farce (FAIR.org, 3/29/18). Glenn Greenwald noted the dishonesty and hypocrisy of US media covering attacks on military targets as terrorism, while the Obama administration redefined “combatant” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone”—which, in practice, can be anywhere.

Nevertheless, when the State Department declared that Soleimani’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a “terrorist” organization, many reports offered little pushback, except for the possibility that it might “complicate military and diplomatic work by prohibiting contact with foreign officials who have worked with the Guard” (The Hill, 4/8/19)  or “incite retaliation by Tehran against American troops and intelligence officers” (New York Times, 4/8/19).

The New York Times (4/8/19) also raised the limited consideration of whether “other government intelligence agencies that use violence—including those of Israel, Pakistan and Russia—also now meet that standard.” Politico (4/8/19) tellingly remarked that it’s the “first time the United States has designated an official military force of another country a terrorist group,” because such designations are “typically reserved for non-state actors.”

But when one examines the State Department’s rationale for designating Iran as the “world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism,” it should be clear that Iran is considered so because it supports armed resistance groups opposing the US and Israel’s illegal occupation of Middle Eastern territories. As FAIR (6/6/19, 1/21/20) noted, if US media tend to consider the imperial violence committed by the US and its allies to be righteous and inherently defensive by default, then any anti-imperialist violence must be considered aggressive and illegitimate, simply because it resists US-backed violence.

Of course, as Stephen Zunes and Gareth Porter have already pointed out (FAIR.org, 1/21/20), there is little evidence that the IRGC-Quds Force formerly headed by Soleimani were responsible for the 13-year old talking point of Iran killing “hundreds of Americans” in Iraq—a country the US illegally invaded and is currently occupying against the will of its elected representatives—except for the far-fetched claim that those IEDs were too “sophisticated” to have been made in Iraq. Contrary to reports, Soleimani did not seem to have “imminent” plans to attack the US, because he had arrived in Baghdad to attend regional peace talks with Saudi Arabia on behest of the Iraqi prime minister, with Trump’s knowledge. Soleimani was also a widely respected adversary of ISIS and the US-backed Syrian rebels linked to Al Qaeda (FAIR.org, 3/21/16, 1/4/17, 7/27/17).

Corporate media’s propagandistic coverage is most apparent when they consistently refuse to hold the US government accountable to its own standards for what constitutes “state sponsors of terrorism.” Comparing Iran’s relationship with armed Middle Eastern resistance groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi rebels with the US’ relationship with Israel and Saudi Arabia make it abundantly clear that the US far eclipses Iran in terrorism sponsorship.

If Iran is a “state sponsor of terrorism” because it provides support to “Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza,” then does the US providing cash, weapons and surveillance for Israel’s state terrorism against Palestinians qualify the US as a “state sponsor of terrorism”? According to B’Tselem’s figures from 2000 all the way through the end of 2019, while Palestinian militants have killed a total of 301 Israeli civilians, Israeli security forces have killed 5,279 Palestinians who did not take part in hostilities, or were killed during the course of targeted killings (which are illegal under international law).

Likewise, if Iran is considered a state sponsor of terrorism because it provides material support to Hezbollah, what does that say about US support for Israel, whose illegal occupation of southern Lebanon prompted Hezbollah’s rise? In the conflict over Lebanon, Israel has been responsible for shedding far more civilian blood: According to Human Rights Watch, the 2006 Lebanon War resulted in the deaths of 43 Israeli civilians from Hezbollah’s indiscriminate rocket attacks, and around 900 Lebanese civilian deaths from Israeli airstrikes.

Even though the vast majority of State Department–designated terrorist groups are Sunni extremists that view the West and Iran as their biggest enemies, Grayzone reporter Ben Norton has repeatedly noted that US officials dishonestly conflate Sunni miitant groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS—who advocate a genocidal takfiri policy towards civilians and fellow Muslims—with Shi’a Islamist groups like Hezbollah, which primarily attack military and government targets for the purpose of expelling US presence from the region.

Despite the dubious media consensus on Iran being the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism, annual reports from the National Counterterrorism Center attribute the vast majority of terrorist attacks since 2001 to “Sunni extremists” who adhere to the Wahabbi-Salafi ideology, held in common by ISIS and Al Qaeda. US ally Saudi Arabia spends vast sums of money to export this extremist Sunni ideology—while Iranian/Shi’ite terrorism isn’t even a category in US counterterrorism reporting, and is a much smaller threat than domestic white nationalist terrorist attacks. Yet, under current US law, Americans can sue Iran, but not Saudi Arabia, for terrorism in US courts, because Iran is on the US list of designated state sponsors of terrorism and Saudi Arabia is not.

Aside from the alleged link between Saudi officials and the 9/11 attacks killing nearly 3,000 people on US soil, Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war to crush Yemeni independence (considered by the UN to be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis) can also qualify as state sponsorship of terrorism.

According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), the conflict has caused over 100,000 deaths since 2015. While the Houthi rebels have killed over 2,000 civilians, Saudi Arabia has killed 8,000 by deliberately attacking civilian targets. The US sponsors Saudi Arabia by being its biggest arms dealer, as well as providing intelligence, training and refueling, which makes the US a partner to the Saudi-led coalition’s war crimes (Guardian, 10/3/19).

Despite US media obfuscation, it’s often admitted that Saudi Arabia couldn’t wage this war without crucial US support, meaning the US could end this conflict anytime it wants to by withdrawing that support.

Even on the debate’s own terms, there’s a much stronger case that the US rather than Iran is actually the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. A country that supported bringing “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba to sabotage its revolutionary government, and funded terrorist Contra groups in Nicaragua with cash gained from selling weapons to Iran, as well as providing the groundwork for Al Qaeda and ISIS to emerge (Extra!, 1/02; FAIR.org, 11/22/19), has no credibility to designate any other state as a terrorist organization.

‘Parasite’ Is a Class-Conscious Climate Parable

What follows is a conversation between Dr. Min Song and Kim Brown of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

KIM BROWN: Welcome to The Real News. I’m Kim Brown.

At the 92nd annual Academy Awards show that aired Sunday, the film Parasite became the first foreign language film ever to win the Oscar for best picture. The film simply cleaned up; picking up the best original screenplay, and the erudite director Bong Joon-Ho won the Oscar for best director. Spoiler alert: It is first and foremost about segregation by class between the elites and everyone else in South Korea. But it’s also about climate change and those who will bear the brunt of it on the front lines, a topic that makes a key twist in the movie’s plot about halfway through the film. As The Real News climate reporter alumnus Dharna Noor wrote for the publication Earther, Parasite is not only the first foreign language film to win one of the industry’s most hallowed prizes, it is also the first best picture winner to zoom in on the societal impacts of the climate crisis.

Now joining us to talk about it is Dr. Min Song who wrote a piece for the Chicago Review of Books titled, Climate Change in the Film Parasite: An Ecological Look at Bong Joon-Ho’s new film. Dr. Song is a professor in the English department at Boston College. He also directs the school’s Asian American studies program. He’s the former editor of the Journal of Asian American Studies, and he’s the author of the forthcoming book titled Climate Lyricism. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Song.

MIN SONG: Thank you for having me.

KIM BROWN: So again, if you’re watching: spoiler alert. Now that said, Dr. Song, do us a favor and summarize your piece for us and any thinking that you’ve done on the topic since because, how and why is Parasite a film about the climate crisis?

MIN SONG: Okay, so it never actually mentions climate change or global warming anywhere in the film, but it does if you’re paying attention for it, really come across very strongly. It starts really about halfway through the film. It carefully sets up the story where these very poor working class people find a way to get jobs working for this very wealthy family. Halfway through the film, the wealthy family go away on a camping vacation, and this poor family, the Kim’s, get to just take it easy and kind of celebrate what they have and they’ve just kind of camped out in the house.

Of course, this huge rain happens at this point, and this is where I think climate change really starts to figure in. Not so much saying, here’s an example of climate change as much as, here’s an effect of what happens when the weather gets really extreme. The wealthy people have to come back from their camping trip because they’re almost washed away. And for them, it’s just a minor annoyance. But for this family who have to scramble to escape, there’s this really, I think amazing dramatic scene.

MIN SONG: It’s such a dramatic moment in the film to see the difference between these very wealthy people who live on top of a hill for whom this unusually extreme weather is just an annoyance, and this working class family who loses everything and ends up in a gymnasium that’s made into a kind of temporary shelter. In that way, I think the film does just a really brilliant job of traumatizing for viewers how the effects of extreme weather is being lived right now. I don’t mean in the future, but I mean right now. All over the world in low lying areas where poor people live, they live in very similar circumstances. Extreme weather, not even like a hurricane but just a heavy downpour can be ruinous for people who live in these areas.

KIM BROWN: Clearly the climate crisis is not being felt equally, it’s not being shared equally amongst people of differing classes. In this film, Parasite, class is really integral to the plot of the film. These interconnected issues, how do you think they were conveyed by the director, Joon-Ho?

MIN SONG: I think the film does just a really great job of conveying the sense in which the wealthy people are sheltered, they’re literally living on a hill. The poor people live below, they’re always associated with the ground, the earth. A lot is made about their smell. There’s definitely a sharp class distinction being made. I think there’s two important parts to this film that we need to keep in mind when we’re talking about class. The first part is that the wealthy family are not evil characters. They aren’t going out of their way to mistreat their workers, and in fact they treat their workers as well as one could in those situations. It’s clear that they pay them very well and they take care of them. Though they boss them around. And basically, they’re expected to be there and be invisible. They also do say sort of obnoxious things about their smell later in the film.

But the people themselves aren’t notably evil characters. They’re just really normal, ordinary kind of people. And in some ways, the problem that the wealthy family have in the film is that they’re ordinary and they really want to believe that they are more than that, that they are extraordinary people. The mother is desperate to believe, for instance, that her son has artistic talent or that her daughter is going to be a really stellar student, and it’s clear throughout the film that the son probably doesn’t have a whole lot of artistic skill, and that the daughter isn’t going to be a great student. The other thing that the film does with class that’s really interesting is that in order for the poor family to get the positions that they get in this wealthy household, they have to push out another woman who’s working there as a maid.

The film becomes also a conflict between working class people. One of the challenges for the characters in the film is not so much overcoming the resistance of the wealthy people in terms of giving them or valuing their labor properly, as much as it is also about the difficulties of creating solidarity within working class people. They are fighting each other for what are really scraps or really menial jobs. And so, the film is also about the incredible difficulty of people who are in very similar socioeconomic positions, finding solidarity with one another. More often than not in the film, what’s shown is that they are in fierce competition and constantly undermining.

KIM BROWN: Dr. Song, there’s also some Native American imagery at the center of many key scenes in the movie. What did you make of that in a film mostly about South Korea? What do you think Parasite is conveying there with regards to the United States and its Indigenous population?

MIN SONG: That’s a really great question, and I’ve been mulling it since I’ve seen the film. I’ve been trying to figure out what the Native American imagery is doing. On the one hand, I think it’s extremely important to be careful about such imagery. It just gets so abused. Native American headdresses and figures get used as ornaments all the time in I think extremely troubling ways. The film may be doing that, and it’s certainly something to keep in mind when we’re watching the film and really thinking about what the imagery means. I don’t want to at all suggest that we should dismiss that possibility. My own sense of the film was that it really wanted to create that it’s meant to show something about the wealthy family, that they are oblivious to how offensive that that use of Indian headdresses and tomahawks and teepees are. That they see that as just a kind of fun affectation, or just entertainment. They are oblivious to the controversy around it.

So if that’s the point of the film, I think it’s a really extraordinary thing that it’s meant for a Korean audience first, and that a Korean audience then is being expected to understand how messed up the Native American imagery is and that they’re supposed to understand that this does not say nice things about the wealthy family, that they are people who don’t understand or insensitive to these kinds of issues. And if that’s the case, I think it’s actually quite an extraordinary move in the film in the ways in which it assumes its audience knows this stuff and is sophisticated about understanding the face of Native Americans and US racial politics.

KIM BROWN: Dr. Song, you teach classes on climate change in literature, but it’s also becoming increasingly popular as a film topic. Paul Schrader’s recent film, First Reformed, nominated for best original screenplay in 2019, it comes to mind. Talk to us about the importance of pop culture books and film in particular in conveying the urgency of the climate crisis in a way that reaches new audiences.

MIN SONG: Yeah. I think it’s obviously important. The ways in which it’s important though I think really needs to be thought carefully about. On the one hand, we do have a lot of very popular narratives in TV shows, and movies, and novels, and comic books even that show people living under extreme weather conditions where their climate has changed. But it’s often in places far away like on another planet or in some future place, like a apocalyptic narrative. Sometimes it’s caused by things like a meteorite or the sun inexplicably expanding and heating up. There’s all sorts of weird reasons why the climate changes in these films, and they’re always seen as kind of fantastical moments. So we are quite comfortable actually with depictions of our planet or our human inhabited planet becoming uninhabitable and then people struggling to survive on that planet.

That’s a actually very, very familiar story. But there’s always, what makes it entertainment in some way is it’s so far away from us and so distance. So what’s interesting about a newer wave of stories of films and movies and so on, or films and novels and so on, is the ways in which the setting is not far away but it’s actually very close and it’s set in the present, not in the far future. Those kinds of things are happening all around a very familiar landscape, which looks a lot like our own. I think that’s actually a really important move for narratives about climate change to make to show how people are struggling to survive in a world that’s already changing around them, where extreme weather events are becoming more common, where there are droughts and fires, and that fiction in some ways is already reflecting a landscape that is our landscape.

Those are the kinds of narratives I think we need more of, and we’re starting to get them. In some ways what’s happened I think though, is that narratives have kind of lagged behind what’s actually happening in the world around us. It’s been true for a long time. At least in my memory I think that one extreme weather event that really sticks out to me is Hurricane Katrina. I remember very vividly watching it on TV and thinking, wow, this is like a movie. But movies themselves haven’t really been able to show how those events are connected to climate change and how people are living that kind of reality until more recently. I think that’s maybe a reflection of that lag that’s happening in literature.

KIM BROWN: We’ve been speaking with Dr. Min Song, who is a professor in the English department at Boston College. He also directs the school’s Asian American studies program. He’s working on a new book titled Climate Lyricism. Dr. Song, we do appreciate your time today. Thank you so much.

MIN SONG: Thank you.

KIM BROWN: And thank you for watching The Real News.

Girls Sue to Block Participation of Transgender Athletes

HARTFORD, Conn. — The families of three female high school runners filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday seeking to block transgender athletes in Connecticut from participating in girls sports.

Selina Soule, a senior at Glastonbury High School, Chelsea Mitchell, a senior at Canton High School and Alanna Smith, a sophomore at Danbury High School are represented by the conservative nonprofit organization Alliance Defending Freedom. They argue that allowing athletes with male anatomy to compete has deprived them of track titles and scholarship opportunities.

“Mentally and physically, we know the outcome before the race even starts,” said Smith, who is the daughter of former Major League pitcher Lee Smith. “That biological unfairness doesn’t go away because of what someone believes about gender identity. All girls deserve the chance to compete on a level playing field.”

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The lawsuit was filed against the Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and the boards of education in Bloomfield, Cromwell, Glastonbury, Canton and Danbury.

“Forcing girls to be spectators in their own sports is completely at odds with Title IX, a federal law designed to create equal opportunities for women in education and athletics,” attorney Christiana Holcomb said. “Connecticut’s policy violates that law and reverses nearly 50 years of advances for women.”

The Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference says its policy follows a state anti-discrimination law that says students must be treated in school by the gender with which they identify and the group believes the policy is “appropriate under both state and federal law.”

The lawsuit follows a Title IX complaint filed last June by the girls’ families and the Alliance Defending Freedom with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which is investigating the policy.

The lawsuit centers on two transgender sprinters, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, who have frequently outperformed their cisgender competitors.

The two seniors have combined to win 15 girls state indoor or outdoor championship races since 2017, according to the lawsuit.

The three plaintiffs have competed directly against them, almost always losing to Miller and usually behind Yearwood. Mitchell finished third in the 2019 state championship in the girls 55-meter indoor track competition behind Miller and Yearwood.

“Our dream is not to come in second or third place, but to win fair and square,” Mitchell said. “All we’re asking for is a fair chance.”

Yearwood, a senior at Cromwell High School, and Miller, a senior at Bloomfield High School, issued statements vehemently defending their right to run in girls events.

“I have faced discrimination in every aspect of my life and I no longer want to remain silent,” Miller said. “I am a girl and I am a runner. I participate in athletics just like my peers to excel, find community, and meaning in my life. It is both unfair and painful that my victories have to be attacked and my hard work ignored.”

Yearwood said she also is a girl and has been hurt by the efforts to “tear down my successes.”

“I will never stop being me!” she said in her statement. “I will never stop running! I hope that the next generation of trans youth doesn’t have to fight the fights that I have. I hope they can be celebrated when they succeed not demonized. For the next generation, I run for you!”

The American Civil Liberties Union said it will represent the transgender teens and defend the Connecticut policy in court. Attorney Chase Strangio, deputy director for Trans Justice with the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, said transgender girls also are protected by Title IX.

“The idea that the law only protects the individuals with XX chromosomes as compared to individuals with XY chromosomes is found nowhere in the legislative history of Title IX, in any implementing regulation or in any other aspect of the interpretation of Title IX over the last 50 years by the courts,” he said.

The attorneys Alliance Defending Freedom is asking the court to prevent the transgender girls from competing while the lawsuit moves forward. No hearing date on that request had been scheduled Wednesday, the day before the state’s indoor track championships begin.

Connecticut is one of 17 states that allowed transgender high school athletes to compete without restrictions in 2019, according to Transathlete.com, which tracks state policies in high school sports across the country. Eight states had restrictions that make it difficult for transgender athletes to compete while in school, such requiring athletes to compete under the gender on their birth certificate, or allowing them to participate only after going through sex reassignment procedures or hormone therapies, according to Transathlete.

Yearwood and Miller have said they are still in the process of transitioning but have declined to provide details.

America and Israel Against the World

My Spotify workout playlist is a time warp. Growing up in a blue-collar neighborhood of New York City in the 1990s and early 2000s, listening to popular East Coast hip-hop was practically required. So on a recent morning in which I had planned to write a column about Israel/Palestine, I jammed out to the Jay-Z & Beyonce’s famous original power-couple-jam, “’03 Bonnie and Clyde.” The song revolves around a former street dude and his loyal girlfriend, ready to face off against the world like the title’s outlaw couple.

Ironically, this got me thinking about the U.S. and Israel, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu.

Because, if we’re honest with ourselves, the ditty could just as easily describe the still-fresh political romance of “B and D,” as well as the 70-year relationship between the U.S. and Israel.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has recently, and probably accurately from his perspective, called Donald Trump “the best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” Netanyahu has proven himself all too willing to exchange political loyalty for gifts, and perhaps no one has offered him more than the 45th president of the United States. These include, but are not limited to:

moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the contested Golan Heights region (after which Bibi cutely named a Golan ghost town settlement for The Donald), and reversing 50-plus years of U.S. policy by declaring that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not in violation of international law. In light of these giveaways, the terms of the administration’s newest “peace” deal for the Holy Land should come as no surprise.

In characteristically bashful style, Trump has dubbed his Israel-Palestine plan the “Deal of the Century.” But even a cursory reading of the lengthy proposal, and an elementary understanding of the contested region’s history, reveal that it’s nothing more than a “raw deal” that effectively erases the Palestinian people. “Scam,” “Betrayal,” “Deceit,” or “Shame of the Century” would all be more accurate descriptions.

The U.S. has never been an “honest broker” in the Holy Land, having provided more more financial support to Israel since World War II than to any other nation. So it’s no surprise that it’s the Palestinians who stand to lose the most in this proposal: all semblance of a contiguous sovereign state, control of their own borders, an equal-status capital in East Jerusalem, any “right of return” for expelled refugees or restitution of lands stolen by Israeli settlers.

Trump, ever the corrupt real estate tycoon, seems to believe he can buy off Palestine’s unconditional surrender with a few modest subsidies for a rump statelet. It’s Extortion 101, and yet another example of Trump’s toxic negotiating style. Alliances are meaningless, and everything is transactional.

That the deal’s terms were negotiated by Jared Kushner, the president’s 39-year-old son-in-law and a billionaire with no expertise in diplomacy or the Arab world, makes it all the more cynical and insulting.

Trump’s plan has absolutely zero chance of bringing peace to a blood-soaked land, and given that this is the latest in a long line of increasingly bad deals from the “international community” (read: Israeli leaders and their American allies), it’d be hard to blame Palestinians for taking up arms. Why not rise in a third intifada? Tell me, what do they really have to lose if the only alternative is Trump’s take-it-or-leave-it threat? Even if armed Palestinian resistance has been historically counterproductive, violent reaction would be hard to dismiss. If I were a young, hopeless, underemployed Palestinian, I know I might respond to Trump’s plan by grabbing the nearest AK-47.

The most disturbing evidence that Trump and Netanyahu — and by extension the U.S. and Israeli governments — stand proudly against the world is this: The only other nations supporting this plan are dictatorial and/or monarchical Arab client states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. These regimes, some of which have gunned down peaceful protesters by the droves and still behead women for “sorcery,” also just happen to be huge recipients of U.S. military aid, arms sales, training, and “protection” from Iran. Pretty nice company to keep for a republic that bills itself as the world’s “beacon of democracy,” huh?

What should really be dubbed the “Long Con of the Century” is finally nothing more than an ex cathedra endorsement of apartheid from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, it appears that the most radical, chauvinistic Zionists have achieved their long-standing dream, perhaps indefinitely.

History shows that apartheid states, brutal in practice and often lasting decades, are doomed to fail. South Africa’s, which endured from 1948-1994, eventually collapsed under the weight of international sanctions, disapprobation and internal indigenous resistance. It may take another generation, but Israeli apartheid won’t last forever either; it too will crumble under the weight of its own contradictions. How can a country be both “Jewish” and “democratic” while some 50% or more of its population live as second-class citizens or under military occupation?

We must also ask the question, “Why now?”. Why introduce a plan at this particular moment?  Plenty of media outlets have asserted that the proposal’s unveiling is little more than an attempt by Trump and Netanyahu to distract the public from their impeachment and criminal trial, respectively. I only caution that we don’t put too much stock in this theory as it pertains to Trump: This president was anything but scared rolling out this “peace plan,” and the president himself is made of John Gotti-grade teflon. Witness his disturbingly effective performance at the State of the Union address in which he made House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Democrats more broadly look like petulant children.

That his speech was riddled with lies, half-truths and obfuscations doesn’t seem to matter. Trump’s “ride or die” base (there’s Jay and Bey again), and about half of Americans, could care less. Add to that the perhaps 50% (or more) of Democrats, anti-Trumpers and nonvoters who are either reflexively loyal to Israel or simply don’t care about foreign policy, and this farcical peace plan is unlikely to face much in the way of a public challenge. Like the explosive Afghanistan Papers, the “Deal of the Century” will fade fast from the headlines.

For even a modestly informed follower of Palestinian affairs, the announcement of this prejudicial, inhumane ultimatum rates as more than a little disturbing. Add to this the violence that U.S. has waged against Arabs across the region, to which I contributed as a former water carrier for the empire, and I’m embarrassed to be an American.

Fittingly, it was President Trump who neatly captured America’s view of the region in his State of the Union address. “Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life,” he said, in a nod to his Evangelical base. “And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: All children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God.”

All children, that is, so long as they are not Palestinian.

Barr Agrees to Testify as Democrats Question his Leadership

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr has agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee next month, appearing for the first time before the panel as questions swirl about whether he intervened in the case of a longtime ally of President Donald Trump.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., released a letter Wednesday to Barr “to confirm your agreement to testify” on March 31. In the letter, Nadler and committee Democrats write that they have concerns that Barr has misused the criminal justice system for political purposes.

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“In your tenure as attorney general, you have engaged in a pattern of conduct in legal matters relating to the president that raises significant concerns for this committee,” Nadler and the Democrats wrote.

The Justice Department confirmed Barr would testify. His appearance will be the first before the House Judiciary panel since he became attorney general a year ago, and since he declined an invitation to testify about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report after it was released.

The Democrats said they plan to ask Barr about the department’s decision this week to overrule four federal prosecutors and lower the amount of prison time it would seek for Trump’s confidant Roger Stone. The four prosecutors immediately quit the case, in which Stone was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election.

They said they will also ask Barr about his department’s announcement that it is taking information that Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is gathering in Ukraine about the president’s Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son. The House voted in December to impeach Trump because of his pressure on Ukraine to investigate Democrats; the GOP-led Senate acquitted him this month.

“In the past week alone, you have taken steps that raise grave questions about your leadership,” the Democrats wrote.

After the department indicated it would overrule the prosecutors, Trump tweeted congratulations to Barr “for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have been brought,” suggesting the prosecutors had gone rogue.

The department insisted the decision to undo the sentencing recommendation was made Monday night, before Trump began tweeting about it, and that prosecutors had not spoken to the White House about it.

The Senate has shown less interest in grilling Barr on the Stone episode, defending the department’s decision to reduce the sentence and saying they didn’t expect to call him specifically to discuss it.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Wednesday that he had spoken to the Justice Department and was told that their sentencing guidelines call for three and a half or four and a half years, instead of the seven to nine years the prosecutors had recommended.

“I don’t think any of us should tweet about an ongoing case, but having said that, I appreciate the Department of Justice making sure that their recommendations to the court are to seek justice for the law as it’s written,” Graham said.

___

Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

U.N. List Targets Firms Linked to Israeli Settlements

JERUSALEM — The U.N. human rights office on Wednesday released a list of more than 100 companies it said are complicit in violating Palestinian human rights by operating in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank — a first-ever international attempt to name and shame businesses that has drawn fierce Israeli condemnation.

The list’s publication after repeated delays escalated a looming showdown between Israel and the international community over its more than half-century policy of building settlements in the West Bank. Emboldened by a new U.S. Mideast initiative, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to annex Israel’s more than 100 settlements, while the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague has indicated she will soon launch a war-crimes investigation into settlement policies.

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The list included well known global companies, among them Airbnb, Motorola and General Mills. Although the vast majority of the world considers settlements illegal, Wednesday’s report did not accuse the companies of violating international law. Instead, it appeared to be aimed at pressuring them by drawing negative attention to their ties to a much-maligned Israeli policy.

“I am conscious this issue has been, and will continue to be, highly contentious,” said Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. “However, after an extensive and meticulous review process, we are satisfied this fact-based report reflects the serious consideration that has been given to this unprecedented and highly complex mandate.”

The Human Rights Council in 2016 instructed the U.N.’s human rights office to create a “database” of companies deemed to be linked to or supportive of the settlements. Beginning with a potential list of over 300 companies, it narrowed it down to 112 firms involved in practices that raised human rights concerns, such as settlement construction, security services, banking and equipment that was used to demolish Palestinian property.

The report does not call for sanctions or have any concrete impact on the companies. But Israeli officials accused the report of caving in to pressure from the grassroots Palestinian-led boycott movement against Israel and raised concerns the list could be used as the basis for boycotts and other economic pressure against the companies.

In a statement, Netanyahu called the rights council “unimportant.”

“Instead of the organization dealing with human rights, it only tries to disparage Israel. We strongly reject this contemptible effort,” he said.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki hailed the list as a “victory for international law and for the diplomatic effort to dry up the sources of the colonial system represented by illegal settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

With broad international backing, the Palestinians claim the West Bank and east Jerusalem as parts of a future independent state. Israel, which captured both areas in the 1967 Mideast war, has annexed east Jerusalem — a step that is not internationally recognized — and said it has no intention of dismantling any of its West Bank settlements. Nearly 500,000 Israelis live in the West Bank, in addition to more than 200,000 in east Jerusalem.

In a reflection of how entrenched the settlements have become, the list is dominated by Israeli companies, including leading banks, construction companies, supermarkets and mobile phone operators.

But there also were international companies, including travel firms like Airbnb, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Booking.com and Opodo. Many offer vacation rentals in the settlements.

Other names include consumer food maker General Mills, tech and communications giants Motorola Solutions and Altice Europe, and infrastructure companies like France’s Egis and Alstom, and British company JC Bamford Excavators.

In a statement to The Associated Press, JC Bamford said it is “not involved in the activities referred to in this report” and should not have been included. The company’s products are offered through a local dealer, Comasco, that also appeared on the list.

Airbnb declined comment. The San Francisco company said in November 2018 that it was removing its listings in West Bank settlements. After some Israeli-American homeowners sued, the company reversed course and said it would donate all profits from the listings to humanitarian aid organizations.

Israel and the U.S. regularly accuse the Human Rights Council of anti-Israel bias, and the Trump administration withdrew the United States in 2018 — faulting the U.N. for accepting autocratic governments that the administration said have repeatedly violated human rights.

The rights council is made up of 47 governments, with countries like Libya, Venezuela and Somalia among its members. The overwhelming majority of resolutions passed by the council has focused on Israel and its treatment of Palestinians, and Israel is the only country in the world whose policies automatically face scrutiny at every council session.

For decades, the U.S. joined the rest of the international community in criticizing settlement construction. That began to change after President Donald Trump took office in 2017. Surrounded by advisers with close ties to the settlement movement, Trump took a more sympathetic line toward Israel and halted the automatic criticism of settlements of his predecessors.

In November, the U.S. said it did not consider settlements illegal. And last month, Trump unveiled a Mideast plan that would allow Israel to retain permanent control over large parts of the territory, including all of its settlements.

This warm U.S. embrace could cause trouble for Israel. Emboldened by the Trump plan, Netanyahu has vowed to soon annex the settlements — a step that International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has warned against as she prepares her decision on whether to open a war crimes inquiry. Under U.S. pressure, Netanyahu has put off his annexation plans until after March 2 Israeli elections.

The Palestinians have rejected Trump’s plan, and other countries have expressed little support for it while remaining opposed to the settlements.

The rights council had never before requested such a list scrutinizing corporate activities. The report said its authors had communicated directly with the companies to allow them to defend themselves or say whether they had changed their practices. The report’s authors called on the council to set up “a group of independent experts” to update the database each year.

Human Rights Watch, a vocal critic of the settlements, applauded the report.

“The long-awaited release of the U.N. settlement business database should put all companies on notice: To do business with illegal settlements is to aid in the commission of war crimes,” said Bruno Stagno, HRW’s deputy executive director for advocacy.

But Israel’s allies accused the council of collaborating with the BDS movement — a grassroots Palestinian-led coalition that advocates boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. The movement says it advocates nonviolent tactics to protest Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Israel and its allies say BDS has a deeper agenda of destroying the country and accuse it of anti-Semitism — a charge the movement strongly denies.

“The U.N. Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights has officially decided to endorse anti-Semitic BDS by issuing a defamatory list of companies it claims are supposedly involved in ‘settlement activity,’” said Anne Herzberg, legal adviser for NGO Monitor, an Israeli advocacy group that is highly critical of the U.N.

But in a statement, the BDS movement called for action against the companies. “These companies must be held to account, including through strategic boycotts and divestment campaigns,” it said.

___

Keaten reported from Geneva. Associated Press writer Dee-Ann Durbin in Detroit contributed.

Fall in New Cases Raises Hope in Virus Outbreak in China

BEIJING — The number of new cases of the coronavirus in China dropped for a second straight day, health officials said Wednesday in a possible glimmer of hope amid the outbreak that has infected over 45,000 people worldwide and killed more than 1,100.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, promised tax cuts and other aid to industry as the ruling Communist Party tries to limit the mounting damage to the economy. And in Japan, 39 new cases were confirmed on a cruise ship quarantined at Yokohama, bringing the total to 174 on the Diamond Princess.

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A look at the latest developments in the crisis, which started in December in the city of Wuhan:

NEW CASES DECLINE

The number of new cases has trended down in the past week, raising hopes that the epidemic may be plateauing.

China’s National Health Commission said 2,015 new cases had been tallied on Tuesday, the second straight daily decline and down from nearly 3,900 a week ago. Commission spokesman Mi Feng said the situation is still grim but “we have seen some positive changes.”

“I’m going to be optimistic that is a sign that their aggressive actions have been effective, but I really do think it’s too soon to say that for sure, not having hands on the data ourselves,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

She said she is hopeful an advance team now in China from the World Health Organization will be able to examine the findings: “It would certainly be reassuring if we were now seeing at least a slowdown of this outbreak in China.”

All but one of the deaths recorded so far have been in China, as have more than 99% of all reported infections in the world. The country has put an unprecedented 60 million people in a near quarantine.

ECONOMIC FALLOUT

China is struggling to restart its economy after the annual Lunar New Year holiday was extended to try to curb the spread of the virus. Traffic remained light in Beijing, and many people were still working at home.

Xi’s announcement of tax cuts came as companies face increasing losses because of the closing of factories, offices, shops and other businesses in the most sweeping anti-disease measures ever imposed.

A large cluster of cases in Tianjin, a port city southeast of Beijing, has been traced to a department store, Chinese state media said. One-third of Tianjin’s 104 confirmed cases are in Baodi district, where the store is situated, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

A salesperson in the store’s home appliance section was the first diagnosed on Jan. 31, Xinhua said, and a series of cases followed. None of those infected had visited Wuhan recently, and with the exception of one married couple, they worked in different sections of the store and did not know one another.

Elsewhere around the world, DBS bank in Singapore cleared its office, telling 300 employees to work from home after it learned that an employee had been infected. The city-state has 50 confirmed cases.

A Formula One race in Shanghai in April became the latest event canceled because of the virus. Nokia, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom became the latest companies to pull out of a major wireless trade fair this month in Spain that usually draws 5,000 to 6,000 Chinese visitors.

CITIZEN JOURNALIST DISAPPEARS

A citizen journalist reporting on the epidemic in Wuhan has disappeared, activists said, becoming the second to vanish in recent days amid tightening controls on information in China.

Fang Bin, a seller of traditional Chinese clothing, stopped posting videos or responding to calls and messages on Sunday, activists Gao Fei and Hua Yong said, citing Fang’s friends. His phone was turned off Wednesday.

Fang had posted videos of Wuhan’s overcrowded hospitals, including bodies in a van waiting to be taken to a crematorium. The last video he posted was of a piece of paper reading, “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”

Another citizen journalist, Chen Qiushi, vanished on Friday. Non-sanctioned reporting on the outbreak by actitivists is challenging the Communist Party’s tightly policed monopoly on information on an unprecedented scale.

CRUISE SHIP WOES

Passengers aboard a cruise ship that has been barred from docking by four governments may finally set foot on land again.

Holland America Line said the MS Westerdam will arrive Thursday morning in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. The ship has been turned away by the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan and Thailand, though its operator said no cases of the disease have been confirmed among the more than 2,200 passengers and crew.

TWO RUSSIANS FLEE QUARANTINE

Two Russian women who were kept in isolation for possible inflection by the virus say they escaped from Russian hospitals because of uncooperative doctors, poor conditions and fear they would become infected.

Both women said their hospital ordeals began after returning from Hainan, a tropical island in southern China popular with Russian tourists. One said she jumped out of a hospital window to escape her quarantine, while the other broke out by disabling an electronic lock.

Many of those quarantined in Russian hospitals have complained about conditions in the isolation rooms and lack of cooperation from doctors who are uncertain about quarantine protocols.

Two cases of the virus have been reported in Russia.

NO EVIDENCE YET OF MOTHER-TO-BABY SPREAD

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Lancet, Chinese scientists reported there is no evidence so far to suggest the virus can be passed from mother to baby.

The study looked at nine pregnant women who all had the COVID-19 virus and delivered via cesarean section in a hospital in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. After the babies were born, scientists tested samples from the newborns, including the amniotic fluid, cord blood and throat swabs. All tested negative for the virus.

But the scientists acknowledged the study was small.

To date, two cases of the virus have been confirmed in babies, including a newborn diagnosed just 36 hours after birth. It is unknown how the child was infected.

___

Associated Press writers Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Elaine Kurtenbach in Singapore, James Heintz in Moscow, Grant Peck in Bangkok, Kelvin Chan and Maria Cheng in London and Joe McDonald, Dake Kang, Yanan Wang and researcher Yu Bing in Beijing contributed to this report.

Klobuchar Surged in New Hampshire. Can She Make It Count?

CONCORD, N.H. — It took a year of campaigning, countless stump speeches and an especially strong night on the debate stage for little-known Democratic presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar to break into the top tier of the 2020 campaign in New Hampshire.

Now she has less than two weeks to make it count.

The Minnesota senator on Tuesday immediately worked to turn her better-than-expected night into enough momentum to be competitive in next-up Nevada and beyond. For Klobuchar, that means consolidating establishment and moderate voters, picking up traction with black and Latino Democrats and introducing herself to most everyone else.

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“Hello, America!” she yelled over a cheering crowd at a campaign party in Concord as she was on track to finish in third place. “I’m Amy Klobuchar, and I will beat Donald Trump.”

A third-place finish in New Hampshire counted as a victory for a candidate who spent much of the campaign boasting about being in the “top five” of the crowded field. Klobuchar used the moment to put her no-nonsense appeal in the spotlight. She spoke of growing up the granddaughter of an iron ore miner, becoming the first female senator from Minnesota and defying expectations in the 2020 race. She pledged to take her green campaign bus to Nevada and around the country and to win the nomination.

The senator appeared to benefit Tuesday from former Vice President Joe Biden’s sliding support, picking up moderate and conservative voters looking for an alternative to liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders, the New Hampshire winner, and rejecting political newcomer and second-place finisher Pete Buttigieg.

But Klobuchar’s quest is still an uphill climb. The senator has focused almost all her time and campaign resources in Iowa and New Hampshire, building only spare operations in the states that follow on the primary calendar. She has polled poorly among minority voters, a big obstacle in more diverse states like Nevada and South Carolina. Although she will likely see a bump in support, a surge of donations and new media attention, Klobuchar’s challenge is to set up the infrastructure to capitalize on her moment.

She’s starting from behind. Klobuchar’s Nevada team wasn’t hired until last fall and numbered fewer than a dozen until the campaign redeployed staff from Iowa last week, giving her about 30 people on the ground. Sanders, who essentially tied Buttigieg in Iowa, has been organizing in Nevada since April 2019 and has more than 250 staffers in the state. Biden has more than 80, Buttigieg has about 100 and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has more than 50.

Klobuchar is now hoping the appeal that worked for her in New Hampshire will have a similar impact in Nevada on Feb. 22. The three-term senator campaigned as someone who has won even in conservative areas and who could draw support from Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans to beat Trump. She also points to her record of getting things done in Washington and argues that proposals like “Medicare for All,” backed by Sanders and Warren, are nonstarters in the Senate.

But it was Klobuchar’s debate performance that appeared to have the biggest impact on her showing Tuesday. More than half of Klobuchar’s supporters made up their minds in the last few days, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 3,000 Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Klobuchar went on the attack against Buttigieg and delivered a passionate closing promise to fight for the voters who don’t feel seen or heard by politicians in Washington.

Those selling points helped convince voters like Linda Muchemore, a retiree from Greenland, New Hampshire, who settled on Klobuchar last week after leaning toward Warren.

Klobuchar’s record in the Senate “spoke to me of somebody who could maybe heal the animosity we have,” Muchemore said. ”I found out that I’m not as liberal as I thought I was. Those moderate plans that Amy has speak more to me than Elizabeth’s more radical, Bernie plans.”

Klobuchar’s late surge over Warren was a surprise twist in the race. Warren, from neighboring Massachusetts, has been leading in the polling, but both women have struggled to convince voters that a woman can win. On Tuesday night, Warren congratulated Klobuchar — “my friend and colleague” — and noted how wrong pundits are “when they count us out.”

Klobuchar responded to “my friend Elizabeth” soon after.

“People told me just like they told her that they didn’t think a woman could be elected,” she said. “In my case it was elected to the U.S. Senate. No woman had ever done it before. But I came back, I defied expectations, and I won.”

For much of the race, Klobuchar has lagged toward the back of the pack in fundraising and had just under $5 million in reserve at the end of 2019 — far less than all other leading contenders. Her goal coming out of Friday’s debate was to raise $1 million, a lifeline that would allow her to forge on in contests ahead. She quickly reached that amount and, to her own surprise, she doubled it within 24 hours. By Tuesday, her campaign said that sum had climbed to $4 million — and was still going up.

That post-debate haul is in line with the $4 million Buttigieg raised in the days after landing at the top, along with Sanders, in the Iowa caucuses last week. The money will help pay for ads in Nevada and South Carolina, which holds its primary the week after Nevada, and to beef up the campaign in the March 3 “Super Tuesday” contests, when the largest number of delegates are up for grabs of any date on Democrats’ calendar.

Unlike the other leading contenders in the race, Klobuchar is the only candidate who is not getting extra help from a super PAC or outside group, which can raise and spend unlimited sums so long as they do not coordinate advertising spending decisions with the candidate they support.

In contrast, a super PAC called Unite the County has spent over $6 million on advertising amplifying Biden’s message. The group VoteVets has spent a minimum of $1.6 million on ads backing Buttigieg, according to the Federal Election Commission. Sanders, too, has drawn support from a network of “dark money” nonprofit groups, which don’t have to reveal their donors and won’t have to disclose full spending figures until after the election. And Warren is backed by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is not operating a super PAC to support her but serves as a surrogate voice and routinely attacks Buttigieg and Biden.

Much of Klobuchar’s support, meanwhile, comes from donors in her home state of Minnesota, who account for the lion’s share of her presidential fundraising, according to campaign finance disclosures, which only provide information about donors who give over $200. She also supplemented her presidential run with a $3.5 million transfer from her Senate campaign account, records show.

Klobuchar is scheduled to be in Nevada starting Thursday, when she will participate in a town hall sponsored by the League of United Latin American Citizens.

___

Burnett reported from Chicago. Associated Press reporters Brian Slodysko and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington and Michelle Price in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

Pope Avoids Question of Married Priests in the Amazon

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis refused Wednesday to approve the ordination of married men to address a shortage of priests in the Amazon, sidestepping a fraught issue that has dominated debate in the Catholic Church and even involved retired Pope Benedict XVI.

Francis, in an eagerly awaited document, did not refer to the recommendations by Amazonian bishops to consider the ordination of married men as priests or women as deacons. Rather, the pope urged bishops to pray for more priestly vocations and to send missionaries to a region where faithful Catholics in remote areas can go months or even years without Mass.

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The papal dodge disappointed progressives, who had hoped he would at the very least put both questions to further study. It outraged liberal Catholic women’s groups. And it relieved conservatives who used the debate over priestly celibacy to heighten opposition to the pope, and saw his ducking of the issue as a victory.

Francis’ document, “Beloved Amazon,” is instead a love letter to the Amazonian rain forest and its indigenous peoples, penned by history’s first Latin American pope. Francis has long been concerned about the violent exploitation of the Amazon’s land, its crucial importance to the global ecosystem and the injustices committed against its peoples.

Quoting poetry as frequently as past papal teachings, Francis addressed the document to all peoples of the world “to help awaken their affection and concern for that land which is also ours and to invite them to value it and acknowledge it as a sacred mystery.”

Francis said he has four dreams for the Amazon: that the rights of the poor are respected, that their cultural riches are celebrated, that the Amazon’s natural beauty and life are preserved, and that its Christian communities show Amazonian features.

Francis had convened bishops from the Amazon’s nine countries for a three-week meeting in October to debate the ways the church can help preserve the delicate ecosystem from global warming and better minister to the region’s people, many of whom live in isolated communities or in poverty in cities.

The Argentine Jesuit has long been sensitive to the plight of the Amazon, where Protestant and Pentecostal churches are wooing away Catholic souls in the absence of vibrant Catholic communities where Mass can be regularly celebrated.

According to Catholic doctrine, only a priest can consecrate the Eucharistic hosts distributed at Mass, which the faithful believe are the body of Christ. Given the priest shortage, some remote communities in the Amazon only see a priest and attend a Mass once every few months or years. For Catholic communities in the Amazon, some of which date from the time of the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the continued priest shortage coupled with the spread of evangelical churches risks the very Catholic nature of the communities themselves.

In their final document at the end of the October synod, the majority of bishops called for the establishment of criteria so that “respected” married men in their communities who have already served as permanent deacons be ordained as priests.

In addition, the bishops called for the Vatican to reopen a study commission on ordaining women as deacons, a type of ministry in the church that allows for preaching, celebrating weddings and baptisms, but not consecrating the Eucharist. Francis had created such a commission in 2016 at the insistence of religious sisters who want more say and roles in church governance and ministry, but the group ended its work without reaching consensus.

Francis didn’t mention either proposal in “Beloved Amazon” and didn’t cite the synod’s final document in his text or in a single footnote. But he did say in his introduction that he wanted to “officially present” the synod’s work and urged the faithful to read the final document in full, suggesting that he valued the input.

Cardinal Michael Czerny, one of the synod organizers, said its proposals “remain on the table” and have their own “certain moral authority.” But the fact that the pope didn’t expressly approve the final document, and only presented it, means that the proposals do not form part of his official teaching, said Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, another conference organizer.

Francis did echo some of the synod’s recommendations, calling for greater lay participation in the life of the church and saying the training of priests in the Amazon must be overhauled so they are more able to minister to indigenous peoples. He said “every effort should be made” to give the faithful access to the Eucharist.

“This urgent need leads me to urge all bishops, especially those in Latin America, not only to promote prayer for priestly vocations, but also to be more generous in encouraging those who display a missionary vocation to opt for the Amazon region,” he wrote.

Francis dismissed suggestions that ordaining women to any ministry would serve them or the church. While agreeing that women should have greater decision-making and governance roles, Francis argued that they must find “other forms of service and charisms that are proper to women.”

Groups that advocate for women’s ordination and giving women greater roles in the church blasted the document. Francis justified his refusal to consider ordained ministry for women as sparing them the risk of being “clericalized,” or placed on a pedestal.

“This is a dereliction of his duty as a leader with the power to make positive change and challenge discrimination,” said Miriam Duignan of the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, a British-based progressive Catholic think tank.

Kate McElwee, executive director of Women’s Ordination Conference, said the document betrayed women in the Amazon and elsewhere who perform the lion’s share of the church’s work, pass the faith from generation to generation, and yet enjoy no official recognition or authority.

“Recognizing women’s work with diaconal ordination would be the first, most basic step towards righting the wrong of institutional sexism that hobbles our church as it attempts to respond to the moral crises of our time,” McElwee said in a statement.

The Catholic Church retains the priesthood for men, arguing that Christ and his apostles were male. While Eastern rite branches have married priests, and Anglican and Protestant priest converts can be married, the Roman rite church has had a tradition of priestly celibacy since the 11th century, imposed in part for financial reasons to ensure that priests’ assets pass to the church, not to heirs.

In the weeks leading up to the document’s release, the question of a celibate priesthood made headlines after the publication of a book penned by the retired pope, Benedict, and a conservative Vatican official, Cardinal Robert Sarah, reaffirmed the “necessity” of a celibate priesthood.

Benedict’s participation in the book sparked controversy, since it appeared the retired pope was trying to influence the thinking of the current one, despite his promises to remain “hidden from the world” when he resigned seven years ago.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni noted that Francis finished the document in December, before the book came out, making clear the pope wasn’t swayed by Benedict’s intervention.

Francis avoided the issue altogether, dedicating instead the entire first half of the document to the “injustice and crime” committed against the Amazonian peoples and their environment by local governments, foreign corporate interests, and illegal mining and extraction industries.

“We cannot allow globalization to become a new version of colonialism,” he wrote.

He said the church in the Amazon must have social justice at the forefront of its spirituality, saying ministry that focuses excessively on discipline and rules will turn people away when in fact they need “understanding, comfort and acceptance.”

The traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli, which has been highly critical of Francis, said that by closing the door to a married priesthood and female deacons, the document was “the best possible document we could have hoped for in the current pontificate and in the current age.”

Clare Dixon, Latin America chief for the British Catholic aid agency CAFOD, focused on the environmental good it might do in the global debate about how to fight climate change.

“But Francis is also imploring us to listen to the wisdom of the people of the Amazon, insisting that we learn from the way they live with the environment rather than in competition with it,” she said.

Francis called for the church to incorporate indigenous traditions and cultures into its ministry, including song and dance, myth and festivals, and urged patience when confronted with apparently pagan practices and symbols.

It was a reference to the controversy that punctuated the synod over the appearance in the Vatican of wooden statues of a pregnant woman that critics said were pagan idols. At one point, a conservative activist stole the statues from a Vatican-area church and threw them in the Tiber River in a videotaped stunt that galvanized traditionalist opposition to Francis and the synod itself.

Who’s Afraid of Democratic Socialism?

You knew it was going to be a long night when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos spent the first 11 minutes of the February 7 Democratic presidential debate directing a discussion about how risky it would be to have a democratic socialist at the top of the ticket.

After asking Joe Biden about the “risks” of nominating Bernie Sanders (or Pete Buttigieg)—setting Biden up to make his central campaign claim of electability—Stephanopoulos asked Sanders “why shouldn’t Democrats be worried,” when Donald Trump “certainly thinks this label socialism will work” in defeating him?

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After Sanders’ response, Stephanopoulos asked the field, “Let me just ask, is anyone else on the stage concerned about having a democratic socialist at the top of the Democratic ticket?” Though Amy Klobuchar was the only candidate to raise her hand, he proceeded to turn to each remaining candidate to discuss socialism and electability.

Delving momentarily into policy, sort of, by asking Buttigieg whether Sanders’ “healthcare plan can bring people together,” and allowing a few more responses, Stephanopoulos turned back to non-policy issues with several questions about experience, this time focusing on Buttigieg.

In other words, the first half hour of the debate was almost entirely given over to non-policy sparring over electability (including the bogeyman of socialism) and experience.

Asking candidates to attack each other over electability or experience is one of the least useful ways to run a debate. Electability is a meaningless concept beloved by journalists who fear candidates who stray from the center (FAIR.org, 10/25/19); its ultimate test is not whether another candidate (or journalist) deems a candidate electable, but whether that candidate polls well and wins elections. And the candidate whose electability is most often questioned, Bernie Sanders, just won the popular vote in Iowa, and has consistently polled ahead of Trump in one-to-one matchups. (As Matthew Yglesias pointed out in Vox—1/31/20—this is true even if the polling question includes Trump calling Sanders  “a socialist who supports a government takeover of healthcare and open borders.”)

ABC‘s Linsey Davis factchecks Pete Buttigieg in real time.

Experience is at least somewhat more justifiable as a non-policy topic of interest, but simply asking opponents whether a candidate has the experience necessary to lead is lazy and rarely productive. As a rare example of a much more revealing way to talk about experience, take ABC correspondent Linsey Davis’ question to Buttigieg about his oversight of South Bend’s criminal justice system, in which disparities between black and white marijuana possession arrests increased during his tenure. When Buttigieg asserted that “the overall rate was lower than the national rate,” Davis corrected: “No, there was an increase. The year before you were in office, it was lower.”

Her refusal to let Buttigieg deny his record stands in stark contrast to the way moderators have repeatedly let Biden get away with denying his record on Iraq (FAIR.org, 1/9/20). In last week’s debate, Biden once again lied about his Iraq vote, saying: “I trusted George Bush to keep his word. He said he was not going to go into Iraq. He said he was only using this to unite the United Nations to insist we get inspectors in to see what Saddam was doing.”

Biden’s latest version of his Iraq revisionism should have been particularly easy for his questioner (David Muir) to debunk, given that the Iraq War authorization vote came two days after Bush’s infamous “mushroom cloud” speech, in which he laid out to the public why all efforts short of military action were likely to fail and announced that “Saddam Hussein must disarm himself—or, for the sake of peace, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.” But, whereas pressing candidates on their judgment and record would be a helpful way to get at the issue of experience, moderators instead seem to be mostly content to ask candidates to attack each other on the issue.

In total, ABC gave over more than a quarter of their prompts to non-policy issues (22 of 82), primarily these questions of electability and experience. International issues were the second-largest category (15), followed closely by governance and race (13 each) and the economy (12).

ABC‘s David Muir once again pressing Elizabeth Warren to promise to continue the 18-year-long war in Afghanistan.

Of the international questions, several were about military, and ABC repeated its hawkish September debate performance (FAIR.org, 9/13/20)—including asking Elizabeth Warren almost exactly the same question she was asked in September. At that time, ABC‘s Muir asked her, “Would you keep [your] promise to bring the troops home starting right now with no deal with the Taliban?” When Warren answered in the affirmative, Stephanopoulos jumped in to make the correct answer clear:

Top US leaders, military leaders on the ground in Afghanistan, told me you can’t do it without a deal with the Taliban. You just said you would, you would bring them home. What if they told you that? Would you listen to their advice?

ABC‘s inability to accept Warren’s answer was made even more apparent when, in their second debate, Muir asked her virtually the exact same question:

Senator Warren, you recently said, quote, “We have one general after another in Afghanistan who comes in and says, ‘We’ve just turned the corner,’ and then what happens? It’s all the same. Someone new comes in and says, ‘We’ve just turned the corner.’ You said, “So many say it. We’re going in circles.” We were on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq in recent months, and the generals told us that the US needs some US presence on the ground, US special forces some presence to go after ISIS and the terrorists. If you’re commander-in-chief, would you listen to the generals, or do they fall into the category of the generals you’ve mentioned before?

Muir continued to train fire on Warren’s antiwar positions, giving the floor to Biden next:

I want to take this to the vice president, because you have said of Senator Warren’s comments before, that the United States should get out of the Middle East, you have said, “I quite frankly was surprised that I have never heard anyone say with any serious background in foreign policy that we should pull all troops out of the Middle East.” Is Senator Warren wrong on this?

Muir likewise put a hawkish spin on his questions about the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, setting the stage with this question to Buttigieg, which made no mention of international law, and followed the corporate media line that there was no doubt that Soleimani deserved to die (FAIR.org, 1/9/20):

While there is still debate about whether or not there was an imminent threat, there is no debate about whether or not Soleimani was a bad actor who was responsible for the deaths of many Americans. Given what you know about Soleimani, if your national security team came to you with an opportunity to strike, would Soleimani have been dead, or would he still be alive under your presidency?

Once again, the climate crisis got short shrift at five questions (6%); while some candidates, like Sanders and Steyer, tried to bring climate into other questions, ABC asked about only one environmental issue—the USMCA trade agreement—essentially pitching it as climate vs. jobs:

I want to turn to climate change and jobs here in America. President Trump just signed the United States/Mexico/Canada Agreement, many call it an updated NAFTA. But it does include incentives to make cars here in North America, and it does open Canadian markets for American dairy farmers. Senator Sanders, as we sit here in New Hampshire tonight, both New Hampshire senators, Maggie Hassan and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, supported this, calling it a real win for workers and for farmers. You voted no, because you said you believe it takes us back years on climate. Were the senators from New Hampshire wrong?

In terms of how often each candidate was given the mike, Sanders and Biden, as the top-polling candidates, got the most speaking opportunities. But although Warren had twice the popular support as Buttigieg at the time (an average of 15% vs. 7.3%; see RealClearPolitics.com for all February 7 polling averages), he was given the floor 13 times to her 11. Klobuchar, despite averaging only 4.3% support in polls, got the same 11 chances to speak as Warren, and Tom Steyer, at 2.3%, only got one fewer at ten. In keeping with media’s marked lack of interest in hearing Andrew Yang speak (FAIR.org, 1/4/20), he came in far behind the rest, with seven, though he polls almost as well ( 3.8%) as Klobuchar.