Chris Hedges's Blog, page 547

Philippine President Slammed for Calling God ‘Stupid’

MANILA, Philippines—The Philippine president, notorious for having cursed the pope and world leaders like former U.S. President Barack Obama, has sparked new outrage by calling God “stupid” in Asia’s largest Catholic country.

Opposition Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV shot back Monday by describing President Rodrigo Duterte as “one evil man” and his remarks as “very much consistent with the deceitfulness, heartlessness and ruthlessness of his policies.”

Even some of Duterte’s political allies were critical.

A Catholic bishop, Arturo Bastes, called the president a “madman” and urged Filipinos to pray for an end to Duterte’s “blasphemous utterances and dictatorial tendencies.”

“Duterte’s tirade against God and the Bible reveals again that he is a psychological freak, a psychopath, an abnormal mind who should have not been elected as president of our civilized and Christian nation,” Bastes said.

Another bishop, Ruperto Santos, said the president had crossed a line.

Duterte questioned in a televised speech Friday the Biblical story of man’s creation and asked why God created Adam and Eve only to allow them to succumb to temptation that destroyed their purity.

“Who is this stupid God? This son of a bitch is then really stupid,” said the 73-year-old leader, known for his rambling public statements. “How can you rationalize a God? Do you believe?”

Duterte lamented that Adam and Eve’s sin in Christian theology resulted in all the faithful falling from divine grace.

“You were not involved but now you’re stained with an original sin. … What kind of a religion is that? That’s what I can’t accept, very stupid proposition,” he said.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson, a former national police chief, said he has often backed Duterte’s policies, but after the president’s utterances against God “to whom I pray every single day and with whom I’ve found solace and comfort in all my difficult times, I don’t even have to think of my choice.”

“May my God forgive him and make him atone for all his sins,” Lacson said.

Duterte’s spokesman defended his remarks, saying the president has the right to express his opinion on religion and cited his previous disclosure that he was once sexually abused as a student by a priest.

Duterte stressed that right in another speech Monday. “Why do you bind me with something very stupid? I was given my own mind by God.”

Duterte shocked Filipino Catholics in 2015 when he cursed visiting Pope Francis for having triggered monstrous traffic in Manila. He later apologized but has repeatedly lashed out at bishops and the dominant Catholic church, which has criticized his bloody crackdown on illegal drugs.

Obama, who also raised alarm over the drug killings under Duterte, was also a target of the Philippine leader’s tongue-lashing. He once said the American leader should “go to hell.”

The former longtime city mayor has repeatedly declared he does not care about human rights and has threatened drug dealers and other criminals with death. He warned he would withdraw the Philippines from the United Nations after its human rights experts called for an independent investigation into extrajudicial killings under his rule. He described the world body as hypocritical for failing to prevent genocides worldwide.

Truthdig Wins 10 Prizes at the 60th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards

The Los Angeles Press Club honored Truthdig’s work at its 60th annual Southern California Journalism Awards on Sunday. The news website, which received 19 nominations, earned three first-place prizes, six second-place awards and one third-place finish. Judging of the nearly 1,400 entries was done by press clubs from across the nation.

The announcements were made at a sold-out gala dinner at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. “It was an important judgment by our journalistic peers,” said Editor in Chief Robert Scheer, who attended the event with Publisher Zuade Kaufman.

First Place

In the Gender/LGBTQ Reporting category, Amelia Pang won for “Native American Rape Survivors Tell How Deck Is Stacked Against Them,” a devastating look at sexual violence in the Native American community.

Pang wrote:

Candice, 43, had been sexually assaulted on four separate occasions. Her first perpetrator was a family member who molested her behind some trees by a lake when she was 5 years old. She doesn’t remember whether he was arrested. The next three perpetrators were not arrested. Two of Candice’s three daughters have also been raped. Their perpetrators were never arrested.

The Department of Justice estimates that one in three Native American women reports having been sexually assaulted during her lifetime. They are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual violence than women of any other ethnicity in the U.S.

Candice’s repeated encounters with sexual violence are part of what Native American women call an epidemic of sexual assault on reservations. … Rape survivors say … statistics illustrate the indifference by law enforcement to sexual assault.

Judges’ comment: Kudos to Amelia Pang for this wonderfully written in-depth story looking at the pervasive culture of rape on Indian Reservations. Her story is gripping and horrifying. This is journalism at its best. And this is yet another example of why a dynamic and vibrant press is needed. Congrats on a job well done.

In the Political Commentary–National category, Paul Street took top honors for “An Insubordinate President,” about the rise of Donald Trump.

Street wrote:

“Insubordinate elites,” as the distinguished American foreign policy historian Alfred W. McCoy calls them, have long been a problem for the United States empire. They privilege their own personal interests and/or concept of serving their own nations above fealty to the United States, its allies and the Western-based multinational corporate and financial interests that reign behind the shield of U.S. power.

Over the years, these disobedient foreign leaders have come in different forms. Some have been men of the socialist, populist and nationalist left—actors like Mohammad Mossadeq (Iran), Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala), Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Fidel Castro (Cuba), Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Sukarno (Indonesia), Salvador Allende (Chile), Michael Manley (Jamaica), Maurice Bishop (Grenada), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) and Hugo Chavez (Venezuela). Washington has responded to the defiance of these and other “left” Third World and “developing nation” actors with assassinations, assassination attempts, coups, coup attempts, invasions, counterinsurgency campaigns, espionage, propaganda and the cultivation of political and military opposition and influence within the noncompliant states.

But you don’t have to be on the anti-imperial left to become what the U.S. ruling-class and imperial establishment considers an insubordinate elite and get put on Washington’s shit and target lists.

Judges’ comment: Although I don’t agree with all of Paul Street’s points, he is a winner in this category – that’s how solid his argument is about how there is plenty of blame to go around for Trump’s assent to the White House. His writing is strong, carefully crafted and well researched. And he’s likely going to give me nightmares!

In the Commentary on TV/Film category, Carrie Rickey won for “What Happened to the Female Directors of Hollywood?” a five-part series on women behind the camera in Los Angeles’ own backyard.

Rickey wrote:

It’s a paradox, akin to why women receive 47 percent of law degrees but represent only 35 percent of those working in legal professions. And why, though 42 percent of architecture-school graduates are women, they are just 25 percent of practicing architects. Why do females make up between 33 and 50 percent of film-school graduates but account for only 7 percent of working directors, as Martha Lauzen, professor at San Diego State University, reports in her annual “Celluloid Ceiling” analysis of women on the screen? What happened to the other 43 percent?

In American film (a kind of parallel universe to American life), this asymmetry results in an asymmetry on screen, in which men outnumber women two to one. According to Walt Hickey at fivethirtyeight.com, in movies the workplace is more male—and more sexist—than in reality. “This is an industrywide problem that requires an industrywide solution,” says Lauzen, who has been tracking the numbers for 20 years. “The heads of the studios dutifully mouth that they want change but have yet to introduce any programs or make hiring decisions demonstrating true leadership or vision.”

In October 2016, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), prompted by American Civil Liberties Union findings that “female filmmakers are effectively excluded from directing big-budget films and seriously underrepresented in television,” began investigating Hollywood’s gender gap.

This Truthdig series was published in partnership with Women and Hollywood and Chicken & Egg Pictures. Click here to read Part 1, here for Part 2, here for Part 3,  here for Part 4 and here for Part 5.

Judges’ comment: In a category filled with strong entries, Rickey’s series stands out for its examination of the gender gap in the film industry – how it started, and how it has been allowed to continue for so long. The research is exhaustive and the writing engaging.

Second Place

In the Columnist category, Sonali Kolhatkar, who received the top honor in this category in 2016, was recognized once more.

In the Political Commentary category,  Chris Hedges was recognized for  “The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat.”

In the Best Use of Social Media to Enhance and/or Cover a Story (Individual)  category, Donald Kaufman was recognized for “Love and Peace Over Profits at Standing Rock.”

In the Sports Commentary category, Eric Ortiz was recognized for “Take a Knee for Humanity.”

In the Minority / Immigration Reporting category, Paul Street was recognized for “Government Structure – Not Just Personnel – Needs to Change.”

In the Editorial Cartoon category, Mr. Fish was recognized for “Grope Therapy.”

Third Place

In the Criticism on Books/Art/Architecture/Design category, Paul Von Blum was recognized for  “Poster Power: The Dramatic Impact of Political Art.”

Below is a picture from Sunday’s gala, tweeted by the Los Angeles Press Club.

 

Thank you all for celebrating the 60th Annual SoCal Awards with us pic.twitter.com/gwNBCc657I

— LA Press Club (@LAPressClub) June 25, 2018

‘Fish Wars’ Loom as Climate Change Warms Waters

Accelerating climate change means increasingly that cooler waters tempt fish to more tolerable regions. The result? Decades of diplomacy in creating fishing agreements to fix quotas and protect valuable species count for little, because the fish are moving hundreds of miles to distant seas.

This is raising fears of conflict between countries over one of the world’s most valuable food resources, according to research by a consortium of 17 marine scientific institutions led by the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Fish and other marine animals have already been moving at a rate of 45 miles a decade, and these shifts are expected to continue or even accelerate. The UBC study, published in the journal Science, looked at 892 fish stocks from around the globe to show that climate change is driving them towards the poles.

Many species, including the most commercially valuable such as cod and haddock, need water at specific temperatures to breed. An increase of 1°C in northern European waters, for example, has forced fish northwards to find suitable survival conditions. On the plus side, though, warm water species move in to fill the gaps.

But, as the study points out, this leaves long-established fishing agreements lagging behind reality and makes new ones hard to negotiate, because the fish keep moving while the diplomats drag their heels.

In all, the study suggests, 70 countries will find that they have different fish stocks in their territorial waters by 2100. Most countries have a 200-mile coastal zone for claiming fishing rights, so this will be a challenge for governments since the oceans are a critical source of nutrition for billions of people.

Even in countries with moderate governments this has already caused serious disputes, but the study suggests that worse problems could occur in parts of East Asia where international relations are already fraught because of disputed maritime boundaries and illegal fishing. It says many maritime countries could find they have new fisheries with stocks once exclusively managed by neighbouring states.

“Marine fishes do not have passports and are not aware of political boundaries; they will follow their future optimal habitat,” said co-author Gabriel Reygondeau, a postdoctoral fellow at UBC.

“Unfortunately, the potential change of distribution of highly-valuable species between two neighbouring countries will represent a challenge for fisheries management that will require new treaties to deal with transboundary fish stocks.”

Long history

One of the first disputes caused by changes in fish habits driven by climate change happened between Canada and the US in the 1980s and 1990s, after warming regional temperatures caused Pacific salmon to change their migration patterns.

US fisheries vessels intercepted Canada-bound salmon, and Canadian boats retaliated by targeting salmon migrating the other way to spawn in the US. Only after six years was a new joint management agreement implemented.

Malin Pinsky, an assistant professor of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and lead author of the study, said: “Fisheries management organisations have made the rules based on the notion that particular fish species live in particular waters and don’t move much, but now we know they are moving because climate change is warming ocean temperatures.”

The study also cites international fisheries disputes including the “mackerel war” between Iceland and the European Union in 2007. It suggests that, to avoid conflicts, governments should implement solutions such as allowing the trade of fishing permits or quotas across international boundaries.

William Cheung, associate professor in UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and director of science for the Nippon Foundation-UBC Nereus Program, is the study’s senior author.

Agreements exist

“Examples of such flexible arrangements already exist, such as the agreement for US-Canada Pacific salmon and Norway-Russia Atlantic herring,” he said.

“Fisheries management organisations can draw from these experiences to proactively make existing international fisheries arrangements adaptable to changing stock distributions.”

The researchers say the alternative to such negotiations is grim, including overfishing that reduces food supply, profit, and employment, as well as fractured international relations.

In a recent study postdoctoral associate James Morley reported that many commercially important fish species could move their ranges hundreds of miles northward in search of colder water. This movement is already under way, and the results have been highly disruptive for fisheries.

“Consider flounder, which have already shifted their range 250 miles farther north,” Professor Pinsky said. “Federal fisheries rules have allocated many of those fish to fishers in North Carolina, and now they have to steam hundreds of extra miles to catch their flounder.”

Nicaragua at the Barricades and at a Crossroads

On April 19th, university students in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, exploded onto the streets. Their initial demand? A more effective government response to wildfires burning out of control in the country’s most precious repository of biodiversity.

Soon, a social wildfire took hold in Managua and then spread across the country. Thousands of Nicaraguans added a second demand to the first: for President Daniel Ortega to revoke his recent changes to the country’s social security law, which had simultaneously raised social security taxes (upsetting private enterprise) and cut benefits to seniors (angering many ordinary people). In the ensuing clashes, close to 200 Nicaraguans have died, hundreds have been arrested, and thousands have been injured, almost all at the hands of anti-riot police, unidentified snipers, or gangs of pro-government thugs on motorcycles. Today, this movement of auto-convocados (self-conveners) articulates two key demands: justice and democracy — justice for those who have died at the government’s hand and a return to democratic governance for Nicaragua.

Why should we care? In a world where the U.S. president proclaims his desire to see his people “sit up and pay attention” to him the way North Koreans do for Kim Jung-Un; where his attorney general tore children from their parents’ arms; where the United States plans to initiate the militarization of space (despite our endorsement of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which outlaws exactly that) — in such a world, why should people care what happens in an impoverished Central American nation thousands of miles from the centers of power?

Because there was a time when Nicaragua’s imaginative, idiosyncratic revolution offered the world an example of how a people might shuck off the bonds of U.S. dominance and try to build a democratic country devoted to human well-being. I know, because I saw a little of that example during the six months I spent in Nicaragua’s war zones in 1984, working with an organization called Witness for Peace. My job there was to report on the U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary (Contra) military campaign to overthrow the Sandinista government, which had replaced a vicious dictator in 1984.  The Contras employed an intentional terrorist strategy of torture, kidnapping, and murder, targeting civilians in their homes and fields and workers in rural schools and clinics.

Some (Abbreviated) History

Nicaragua sits dead center on any map of the Americas and, in the 1980s, small as it was, it also occupied the center of the political imaginations of many people. In that country lay the hopes of millions living beyond its borders, hopes that a people really could become the protagonists of their own nation’s story or, in the words of the Sandinista anthem, “dueño de su historia, arquitecto de su liberación” — directors of their own history, architects of their own liberation.

Before the fallof its Washington-supported dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in 1979, very few people outside Central America had given a thought to Nicaragua. It was the poorest, most illiterate nation in the region. Indeed, Somoza is reported to have said, “I don’t need educated people. I need oxen!” (Or, as our own president put it during his 2016 campaign, “I love the poorly educated!”) In the years following the dictator’s ouster, Nicaragua became a symbol of hope for people on the left globally.

Somoza had treated Nicaragua like his own private hacienda, leasing out its hillsides for clear-cutting to U.S. and Canadian lumber companies and, along with an oligarchic class of landowners and businessmen, squeezing every dollar out of the people he ruled. He maintained his power thanks to a regime of intimidation, torture, and assassination. His National Guard functioned like a private army (and would eventually form the nucleus of the Contras after many of its members fled to neighboring Honduras when the Sandinistas came to power).

In 1979, however, after a year-long insurrection fought in the mountainous areas of the country by a guerrilla force armed with AK-47s and in the cities by ordinary citizens wielding homemade bombs thrown from behind barricades, the Somoza regime collapsed. By the time he fled, after a brutal final round of aerial bombardment, no sector of the country backed him. Erstwhile allies like the big landowners, private industry, and the Catholic Church, along with the press of all stripes, had all turned on him. So had the majority of Nicaraguans, the rural campesinos (a word inadequately translated as “peasants”), and the country’s tiny urban working class. In the end, even his patrons in Washington abandoned Somoza as a hopeless cause.

A group called the Frente Sandinista (the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN) stepped into the vacuum he left. Founded in 1961, it took its name from Augusto César Sandino, a guerrilla leader who had fought against a U.S. occupation of Nicaragua decades earlier. In 1978, despite internal disagreements, the group united around four basic principles of governance: political pluralism; the formation of a mixed economy, including private ownership, state-owned enterprises, and collectives; popular mobilization through a variety of mass organizations; and a foreign policy of nonalignment.

In July 1979, when Somoza resigned and fled the country, the FSLN assumed power with long-established plans to improve the lives of the rural and urban poor. The party established health clinics, promoted free public education, and offered a “canasta básica” (basic food basket) of affordable staple foods, quickly reducing the endemic malnutrition in the country. Through a national vaccination campaign, it eliminated polio in 1981. It also brought in laws that protected poor farmers from losing their land to banks and instituted agrarian reform, transferring land titles to thousands of previously landless campesinos.

In 1980, 90,000 people, two-thirds of them middle-class high school students from the cities, took part in a national literacy campaign. In the process, those young students spent five months living with campesino families, learning about the hardships (and joys) of subsistence farming. In return for such hospitality, those students taught their host families to read. Today, my partner sits on the board of a Nicaraguan development NGO, several of whose organizers began their lives of community engagement as teenage participants in that literacy campaign.

Of course, the Sandinista government was not perfect. Some of its worst policies reflected the country’s endemic racism against indigenous groups and English-speaking Nicaraguans of African descent. Existing conflict between the Sandinistas and Miskito Indians was further exacerbated by the government’s imposition of a military draft in response to the Contra war. Many Miskitos were members of the pacifist Moravian church, but the Sandinistas interpreted their resistance to the draft as complicity with the enemy, and so opened the way for successful CIA infiltration of the group.

The military draft became deeply unpopular throughout the country and its enforcement was sometimes heavy-handed. More than once, I sat on a bus stopped at a Sandinista roadblock, waiting for soldiers to check the papers of all the young men on board to be sure none of them were draft dodgers.

The Sandinistas also created and consolidated government structures, including a presidency and national assembly. When the party swept the 1984 elections with 67% of the vote, and Daniel Ortega became president, no one doubted that the result represented the will of the overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans.

In 1986, the National Constitutional Assembly approved a new constitution, which granted abundant rights to Nicaraguans, including women and LGBT people. One of its articles even called for absolute equality between men and women and the full sharing of housework and childcare. (Let’s pause here to remember that the U.S. Constitution has yet to include any kind of Equal Rights Amendment, let alone an article requiring men to share equally in domestic labor!)

Among the new constitution’s provisions was a six-year fixed term for the presidency.

However, Nicaraguans were not stupid. They knew that, as long as the Sandinistas ran the government, the U.S. would continue its Contra war. So, in 1990, Nicaraguans replaced the FSLN with the UNO party run by Violeta Chamorro in a result that shocked many people outside Nicaragua, including the Sandistas’ U.S. polling firm. The people had spoken, and the Sandinistas accepted their verdict.

And that was momentous in itself. For the first time in history, a victorious revolutionary party allowed itself to be voted out of office, relinquishing many of its hopes, but preserving the democratic structures so many Nicaraguans had died to create and maintain.

Nicaragua in U.S. Hearts and Minds

While Nicaragua was having its revolution, back in the United States we were enduring our own: the Reagan Revolution. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s successful attack on the New Deal structures still embedded in American life. The Reagan administration undermined unions, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated vital industries from banking to health care (with disastrous results still felt today), attacked social programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Medicaid, and turned perfectly respectable words like “welfare” and “entitlement” into code for African American moral turpitude. AIDS was ravaging gay communities, but the president refused to even say the word in public until the first year of his second term. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration escalated Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs” into a full-scale assault on poor communities. In 1986, the president signed a drug law requiring guaranteed — and long — prison sentences even for minor, non-violent drug offenses.

In other words, things in the U.S. were pretty grim. That made it tempting indeed to adopt someone else’s ready-made revolution, especially one that had already achieved so much and had such a great soundtrack: the music of the brothers Luis and Carlos Mejía Godoy, including the Sandinista anthem mentioned above and the beloved “Nicaragua, Nicaragüita,” with its final line, “Pero ahora que ya sos libre, Nicaragüita, yo te quiero mucho más.”(“But now that you are free, little Nicaragua, I love you so much more.”)

And Nicaragua was indeed free, although also under attack. The United States had always been its biggest trading partner. In 1985, however, President Reagan embargoed all trade with the country and cut off air and sea transport to and from the U.S. Other nations, including Soviet bloc countries, Cuba, and the European Union, along with many thousands of American individuals and organizations, stepped in to offer material aid, technical assistance, and in the case of Witness for Peace, accompaniment in the war zones. Such volunteers risked their lives — young engineer Ben Linder actually lost his — for the privilege of being part of this experiment in liberation.

In my six months there, I met Nicaraguans who had never been more than 50 kilometers from the tiny villages in which they were born, but had a vision of change that would spread across Central America, Latin America, and — as in my case — even reach the United States. Over and over, people told me, “Americans can stop Congress from voting for aid to the Contras this year; you can stop it next year, but until you make a revolution in your own country, nothing will really change. We will always be confronted by U.S. power.”

Heady stuff. And it turned a lot of heads, not always in the most helpful ways. Some visiting Americans became ever more convinced that their own left-wing party back home was destined to become the vanguard that would bring revolution to North America. Some became more rojinegro (red and black, the colors of the FSLN’s flag) than the Sandinistas themselves and would hear no criticism of the party or its leaders. Others simply lived for the day when they could abandon the United States, with its hopeless, politically backward population, and make the permanent move to Nicaragua, and its highly conscious (or in today’s language, “woke”) people.

And some of us reluctantly acknowledged that, much as we loved Nicaragua’s brilliant green mountains, our real work lay in our own country. We came home believing that if we could not find a way to love the United States, despite its maddening intransigence, we would never find a way to change it.

Trouble in Paradise

Like everything in Nicaragua, its post-1990 history has proven complicated indeed. As a start, some of the elements in the FSLN most committed to popular democracy left to form smaller Sandinista-style parties, but without significant success at the ballot box. Meanwhile, in the months between the election and the transfer of power, many Sandinistas took part in the Piñata — a wholesale appropriation of state-owned property, companies, vehicles, and cash. In the process, Daniel Ortega, his wife Rosario Murillo, and other high-ranking party members began amassing personal fortunes and rebuilding their political power. The couple even underwent a well-publicized conversion to a charismatic form of Roman Catholicism (which helps explain why Nicaragua today has one of the world’s harshest anti-abortion laws).

By 1999, Ortega had made a pact with the notorious right-wing politician and then-president, Arnoldo Alemán. He and his PLC party, which drew its support from the oligarchic class that once supported Samoza, had beaten Violeta Chamorro in the 1996 election. Alemán was later convicted of corruption on a grand scale and sentenced to years of house arrest.

In 2006, with his wife Murillo as his running mate, Daniel Ortega was again elected president. Having himself weathered a number of personal scandals, including his stepdaughter Zoilamerica’s credible accusations of years of sexual abuse, he would gradually grant Alemán complete clemency.

In the 12 years since his second election, Ortega has consolidated his own power, placed family members in important (and lucrative) positions, and achieved full control of the FSLN party apparatus. He engineered constitutional changes that now permit him to serve an unlimited number of terms; that is, he granted himself a potential presidency for life.

In spite of the increasingly autocratic nature of his rule, Nicaragua has seen substantial economic development in the last decade, from which many have benefitted. Ortega’s is an authoritarian government that has nonetheless provided real material benefits to Nicaraguans. Furthermore, whether because of a lingering esprit de corps in the police and army or thanks to Ortega’s mano dura (harsh hand), or a combination of the two, the country is not suffering the plague of drugs and government-by-cartel that has terrorized the peoples of much of the rest of Central America and Mexico.

Today, the United States is once again Nicaragua’s largest trading partner and the Ortega government is on good terms with international lending agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

At the Crossroads

In towns and urban neighborhoods across the country, people have once again built barricades, as Sandinista supporters did in the 1979 insurrection against Somoza. Once again, they are pulling up the concrete paving blocks once produced in Somoza’s own factory — this time to prevent the Sandinista police from entering their towns and neighborhoods.

Envío, a digital magazine put out by the University of Central America in Managua, calls this uprising an unarmed revolution. “Unarmed” is a modest exaggeration, since defenders at many of the barricades have used homemade mortars (steel tubes which hold hemp fuses attached to bags of gunpowder), but the demonstrators are massively outgunned by the government’s regular army and the police, as well as the turbas — organized gangs of thugs.

For longtime Nicaragua-watchers, it has been strange to see COSEP, the country’s private industry council and inveterate Sandinista opponent, joining with university students and campesinos to create a Civil Alliance for Justice and Democracy. In late May, leaders of the Alliance agreed to a dialogue with the government, mediated by the country’s council of Catholic bishops. The talks have been on-again, off-again ever since.

Although leftists around the world hailed Ortega’s return to power, his is not the revolutionary government of the 1980s. Perhaps because they wish it were, some Ortega supporters here and elsewhere are treating the present uprisings as if they were a reprise of the Contra war, a right-wing coup attempt orchestrated in Washington. I don’t think that’s true, although I have Nicaraguan friends who disagree with me.

To blame everything that happens in the country on puppet masters in Washington denies Nicaraguans their own agency. As student leader Madelaine Caracas told the German news network Deutsche Welle:

“It’s us Nicaraguans who are in the streets. Not a political party, not liberals, not conservatives, not the CIA. It’s an awakening, an exhaustion with seeing our brothers murdered.”

Y Ahora, Qué? (Now What?)

When Somoza left power, the FSLN was waiting, ready to govern. As far as I can tell, today there is no such organized force on the left that could fill the vacuum left by Ortega, for example, by successfully campaigning in any new elections. If, however, Ortega refuses to leave office, the alternatives are at least as painful to consider: his successful repression of a genuine uprising of popular anger through yet more killings, beatings, and jailings (with the continuation of an autocratic government into the unknown future), or a turn from a largely unarmed and, when armed, defensive, resistance to a full-scale civil war, with all the horrors that entails.

The only thing I am sure of is that Nicaragua always does better when the United States is looking elsewhere. So let’s hope Trump keeps his focus on infuriating his allies and courting his enemies in other parts of the world.

Many years ago, I sat in a hotel room — really more of a cot in a shed — in the tiny town of San Juan de Bocay, talking with my Witness for Peace travelling companion and a young Sandinista soldier. The soldier’s pet chipmunk sat on the windowsill chewing sunflower seeds. We discussed what the revolution meant to him and his country, and his hopes as well as ours that Nicaragua’s seeds of liberation would spread through the Americas. In that warm, dim light, revolution almost seemed possible.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to the chipmunk’s name. It was Napoleon.

Was It Wrong to Refuse Sarah Huckabee Sanders Service?

Sarah Huckabee Sanders complained on Twitter about not being served at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. WaPo reports that the owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, insisted that patrons uphold standards of honesty and compassion, and that Sanders flacks for an “inhumane and unethical” administration, defending Trump’s “cruelest policies.”

Wilkinson’s grounds for not serving the White House spokesperson amounted to personal indecency. It is important to underline that this is what social scientists call an “achieved” status. The grounds had to do with Sanders’ own record of behavior and character, not with anything arbitrary about her.

In contrast, to achieved status, you have ascribed status. The latter is determined by things people think about your inherited characteristics. Being Black or Latino is an ascribed status. Or your family religion as a Catholic or Jew would be in this category of ascribed. It has to do not with your personal standards of character but with what prejudices people might have toward a whole group, of which you are part by virtue typically of inheritance. Even if you converted to Catholicism, e.g., you are not responsible for what all Catholics might have done or for what fanatic Protestants think about Catholicism.

It is wrong to shun people because of their ascribed status. It isn’t wrong to refuse to associate people because of their achieved status.

Sanders achieved her status as pariah in many quarters by lying assiduously on television for a living– by saying things she knew were wrong and/or untrue.

In contrast, Sanders is an advocate for allowing restaurateurs to discriminate on truly objectionable grounds, of ascribed status.

Last December, this report about her appeared in The Advocate:

“President Trump’s press secretary said her boss would have no problem with businesses hanging antigay signs that explicitly state they don’t serve LGBT customers. Hours after oral arguments concluded in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case — where a Colorado baker argued to the Supreme Court that his religion allows him to refuse service to gay people — press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was confronted on legalized discrimination during today’s White House press briefing.”

So she thinks businesses are allowed not only to refuse to serve gay, Lesbia, bi- and Trans customers, but are actually allowed to libel and denigrate them in print outside their establishments! (By the way, the Supreme Court decision did not actually allow this; it only concluded that the backer had not gotten a fair trial.)

She also defended Trump’s decision to ban transgendered people from serving in the US military, lying that it was a military rather than a political decision (no military commanders asked for it and some actively resisted it).

When Trump complained about sanctuary cities having a “ridiculous,” “crime-infested and breeding concept,” Sanders was unfazed, telling a reporter whether the term “breeding” wasn’t a racist dog whistle: “Certainly I think it could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But the president is talking about a growing problem.”

Or there is her insistence that the national epidemic of police shootings of unarmed, innocent black people in the U.S. is “a local matter.”

Nobody excluded Sanders from anything because she was born into a racist and Islamophobic family, or because she is a Christian, or because she is white, or because she is hetero. She wasn’t served because she has chosen to lie for a living and to use one of the nation’s most powerful platforms to put down beleaguered minorities.

The Soldier’s Tale

The troops live under

The cannon’s thunder

From Sind to Cooch Behar

Moving from place to place

When they come face to face

With a different breed of fellow

Whose skins are black or yellow

They quick as winking chop him into

Beefsteak tartar

—“The Cannon Song” from “The Threepenny Opera”

The soldier’s tale is as old as war. It is told and then forgotten. There are always young men and women ardent for glory, seduced by the power to inflict violence and naive enough to die for the merchants of death. The soldier’s tale is the same, war after war, generation after generation. It is Spenser Rapone’s turn now. The second lieutenant was given an “other than honorable” discharge June 18 after an Army investigation determined that he “went online to promote a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers” and thereby had engaged in “conduct unbecoming an officer.” Rapone laid bare the lie, although the lie often seems unassailable. We must honor those like him who have the moral courage to speak the truth about war, even if the tidal waves of patriotic propaganda that flood the culture overwhelm the voices of the just.

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The West Point Soldier Who Called It as He Saw It



by Spenser Rapone















After Pat's Birthday



by Kevin Tillman

Rapone enlisted in the Army in 2010. He attended basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. He graduated from airborne school in February 2011 and became an Army Ranger. He watched as those around him swiftly fetishized their weapons.

“The rifle is the reification of what it means to be infantrymen,” he said when I reached him by phone in Watertown, N.Y. “You’re taught that the rifle is an extension of you. It is your life. You have to carry it at all times. The rifle made us warriors dedicated to destroying the enemy in close personal combat. At first, it was almost gleeful. We were a bunch of 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds. We had this instrument of death in our hands. We had power. We could do what 99 percent of our countrymen could not. The weapon changes you. You want to prove yourself. You want to be tested in combat. You want to deliver death. It draws you in, as much as life in the Army sucks. You start executing tactical maneuvers and battle drills. You get a certain high. It’s seductive. The military beats empathy out of you. It makes you callous.”

He was disturbed by what was happening around him and to him.

“When you get to RASP [the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program], you’re told you not only have to understand Ranger culture and history, you have to adopt what’s called an airborne Ranger in the sky,” he said. “They make you go online and look at Rangers who were killed in action. You have to learn about this person and print out a copy of their obituary. It’s really unsettling, the whole process. This was a class leader acting on behalf of the cadre, he said something to the effect of ‘I’ll give you a hint, don’t pick Pat Tillman.’ ”

Rapone began to read about Pat Tillman, the professional football player who joined the Rangers and was killed in 2004 in Afghanistan by friendly fire, a fact that senior military officials, including Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who at the time was the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, covered up and replaced with a fictitious Hollywood version of death in combat with the enemy. Rapone watched the 2010 documentary “The Tillman Story” and would later read the 2006 Truthdig essay “After Pat’s Birthday,” written by Pat’s brother Kevin, who was in the Rangers with Pat. Pat Tillman, who had been in contact with Noam Chomsky, had become a critic of the war. In addition to lying to the Tillman family about Pat’s death, the Army did not return, and probably destroyed, Pat’s papers and diary.

“Pat Tillman showed me I could resist the indoctrination,” he said. “I did not have to let the military dehumanize me and turn me into something monstrous. When I learned how his death was covered up to sell the war, it was shocking. The military wasn’t interested in preserving freedom or democracy. It was only interested in protecting the profits of those in power and expanding the U.S. hegemony. I was not a Hollywood freedom fighter. I was a cog in the imperialist machine. I preyed on the poorest, most exploited people on the planet.”

“We were told to ‘shoot, move, and communicate,’ ” he said of his Ranger training. “This became our entire existence. We did not need to understand why or the larger implications. These things did not concern us.”

By July 2011 he was in Khost province in Afghanistan. He was 19 years old. He was an assistant machine gunner on an Mk-48, an 18-pound weapon that is mounted on a tripod and has a fire rate of 500 to 625 rounds per minute. He carried the spare barrel, along with the ammunition, which he fed into the gun. When his fellow Rangers cleared dwellings at night he set up a blocking position. He watched as the Rangers separated terrified men, women and children, treating them “as if they were animals.” The Rangers spoke of the Afghans as subhumans, dismissing them as “hajjis” and “ragheads.”

“A lot of the guys would say, ‘I want to go out every night and kill people,’ ” he told me. “The Rangers are about hyper-masculinity, misogyny, racism, and a hatred of other cultures.”

His platoon sergeant had the hammer of Thor, a popular symbol among white supremacists, tattooed on his arm. The sergeant told new Rangers that if they saw something that upset them and wanted to speak out about it they were “in the wrong fucking place.”

Rapone left the Rangers to attend West Point in 2012. Maybe, as an officer, he could make a difference, infuse some humanity into his squads of killers. But he had his doubts.

“When I started West Point in July 2012 I encountered a lot of similar themes I noticed in the Ranger regiment,” he said. “Officers and NCOs relished the idea of being able to kill people with impunity. It’s Rudyard Kipling. It’s the young British soldier mentality we’ve seen for hundreds of years. Its hyper-masculine. Even female cadets have to assimilate themselves. Any display of femininity is considered weakness. This is combined with the structural racism. They still honor [Confederate Gen.] Robert E. Lee at West Point. There’s a barracks named after him. There’s a portrait of him in the library in his Confederate uniform. In the bottom right of the portrait, in the background, is a slave.”

Rapone watched with growing anger as black cadets were kicked out for infractions that did not lead to the expulsion of white cadets.

He majored in history. But he read outside of the curriculum, including authors such as Howard Zinn and Stan Goff, a former Special Forces master sergeant who had been in Vietnam, Haiti, Panama, Colombia and Somalia and who wrote “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti.”

“I realized we are the muscle for those with wealth and status,” Rapone said. “I also realized I was a socialist. It was jarring.”

His outspokenness and criticism saw him reprimanded.

“I almost got kicked out my senior year at West Point,” he said. “At that point, I was a socialist. When you study political economy, when you study critical theory, it informs your analysis and your work. It started off as an academic position. But I thought there has to be more to this. There has to be some kind of an action to back up my theories.”

He was derided as the “communist cadet.” He sought out those at the military academy who suffered from discrimination there, including people of color, women and Muslims. He joined the Muslim Cadet Association, although he is not Muslim.

“I wanted to help Muslim cadets find a platform,” he said. “I wanted them to know they were not forgotten. At West Point, there weren’t too many people who understood or appreciated Islam or how the U.S. has ripped Islamic countries to shreds.”

He helped organize an effort to provide Muslims at the academy with a proper prayer space, something that led him into heated arguments with senior administrative officials.

One professor confronted him: “I’ve been watching you for the past three, four years—you think you can do whatever you want.” “Yes, sir,” Rapone answered, a response that resulted in his being written up for speaking back to an officer.

The professor examined his social media accounts and found Rapone was posting articles from socialist publications and criticizing U.S. policy on Syrian refugees. The teacher sent a file on Rapone to the Criminal Investigations Division and G2, or military intelligence. Rapone was interrogated by senior officers. He was issued a “punishment tour” lasting 100 hours. He was forced to walk back and forth in the central square at West Point in his full dress uniform each week until the required hours were fulfilled. “It looked like something out of a Monty Python sketch,” he said.

He was stripped of his privileges for 60 days. His spring break was canceled. He spent spring break doing landscaping and other menial tasks to “pay off” his punishment debt. He was required to train cadets who had not passed a required event.

“At West Point, they’ll maintain that hazing doesn’t exist,” he said, “at least the kind that was around in the ’50s or ’60s. But it’s still hazing. You’re considered a plebe when you first get to West Point. You take out upper classmen’s trash every night. You’re not allowed to talk when you’re outside as a plebe. You have to keep your hands balled up and walk in position of attention. If you’re caught talking to a classmate, you’ll get in trouble. The worst part is that those who move on from their plebe year enforce the same dehumanizing behavior, which they despised, on the new plebes.”

He had experienced hazing in the Rangers, too. New Rangers were forced to fight each other and do numerous push-ups or were hogtied and their stomachs were smacked repeatedly.

“The hazing weeds out people who won’t embrace it,” he said. “To resist total assimilation, a lot of people create an ironic detachment. But this ironic detachment is really another form of assimilation. It runs pretty deep. There was a guy in a leadership position who tried to kill himself when I was overseas. There were cadets who committed suicide when I was at West Point and others who tried to commit suicide. I spent eight years in the Army. Suicide was a very tangible reality. A lot of suicides were the result of the combination of hazing and military culture, which in a sense is a form of hazing. Your drill instructor can’t beat the shit out of you the way he used to, but the military still has methods to torture you emotionally.”

When he graduated from West Point he was sent back to Fort Benning, where he had been a young recruit six years earlier.

“Every other Friday a basic training class graduates,” he said. “I would see these buzzed-cut teenaged boys, who had barely progressed out of puberty, being sent into the meat grinder. It was unsettling. I was being trained to lead these guys, to tell them the mission we were doing was just and right. I could not in good conscience do that. I searched for an opening. I looked for ways to leave or speak out. When the whole national anthem thing was starting up with Colin Kaepernick, putting his skin in the game, risking himself to fight against systemic racism, I thought I could at least do my part.”

He posted a picture of himself in uniform with the hashtag #VeteransForKaepernick.

“Everything snowballed from there,” he said. “Colin Kaepernick, for me, was linked to Pat Tillman. He too was willing to risk himself and his status to speak truth to power.”

His public support of Kaepernick—along with his social media posts of photos of himself at his 2016 graduation at West Point wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt under his uniform and holding up his fist as he showed the words “Communism will win” on the inside of his cap—led to an investigation. Afterward, the Army’s 10th Mountain Division accept his resignation.

“The United States is almost religious about its patriotism,” he said. “Military personnel are seen as infallible. You have someone like [Secretary of Defense] James Mattis, who is a bona fide war criminal. He dropped bombs on a wedding ceremony in Iraq. He’s responsible for overseeing many different massacres in Iraq. Or [general and former national security adviser] H.R. McMaster. These people can’t do any wrong because they’ve served. This reverence for the military is priming the population to accept military rule and a form of fascism or protofascism. That’s why I felt even more compelled to get out.”

“The public doesn’t understand how regressive and toxic military culture is,” he went on. “The military’s inherent function is the abuse and degradation of other people. It is designed to be a vehicle of destruction. It’s fundamental to the system. Without that, it would collapse. You can’t convert the military into a humanitarian force even when you use the military in humanitarian ways, such as in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The military trains soldiers to see other human beings, particularly brown and black human beings, as an imminent threat.”

“Of course, the military prides itself on being apolitical, which is oxymoronic,” he said. “The military is the political muscle of the state. There are few things more dangerous than a soldier who thinks he or she doesn’t have a political function.”

“I want to implore other soldiers and military personnel, there’s more to being a soldier than knowing how to fire a weapon,” Rapone said. “You can take a lot of what you’ve learned into society and actually help. At West Point, they say they teach you to be a leader of character. They talk to you about moral fortitude. But what do we see in the military? I was blindly following orders. I was inflicting violence on the poorest people on earth. How is there any morality in that?”

Turkey’s Erdogan Claims Presidential Election Victory

ISTANBUL—Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared victory after unofficial election returns Sunday showed him with enough votes to serve another term that carries new executive powers.

“The nation has entrusted to me the responsibility of the presidency and the executive duty,” Erdogan said in televised remarks from Istanbul after a near-complete count carried by the state-run news agency gave him the majority needed to avoid a runoff.

The presidential election and a parliamentary election also held Sunday, both more than a year early, complete NATO-member Turkey’s transition from a parliamentary system of government to a strong presidential system. Voters approved the change in a referendum last year.

Erdogan, 64, insisted before the election that the expanded powers — which include the authority to impose states of emergency and to issue decrees — would bring prosperity and stability to Turkey, especially after a failed military coup attempt in 2016. A state of emergency has been in place since the coup.

The president’s critics, however, warned that Erdogan’s re-election would cement the grip on power of a leader who they accuse of showing increasingly autocratic tendencies.

Official results were to be declared by the country’s electoral board.

Results carried by the state-run Anadolu news agency with more than 96 percent of ballot boxes counted showed Erdogan winning an outright majority of 52.6 percent, far ahead of the 30.75 percent for his main contender, the secular Muharrem Ince.

Kurdish candidate Selahattin Demirtas, who ran his campaign from prison where he is being held pending trial on terrorism-related charges, was garnering 8.1 percent. He has called the charges trumped-up and politically motivated.

However, Ince said the results carried on Anadolu were not a true reflection of the official vote count by the country’s electoral board. In a tweet earlier in the evening, he said only 37 percent of ballot boxes had actually been counted, as opposed to the more than nearly 90 percent Anadolu was reporting at the time. He accused the agency of “manipulation” of the results.

Erdogan also declared victory for the People’s Alliance, an electoral coalition between his ruling Justice and Development Party and the small Nationalist Movement Party, saying they had a “parliamentary majority” in the 600-member assembly.

The unofficial results for the parliamentary election showed Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, losing its majority, with 293 seats in the 600-seat legislature. However, the small nationalist party the AKP was allied with garnered 49 seats.

“Even though we could not reach out goal in parliament, God willing we will be working to solve that with all our efforts in the People’s Alliance,” Erdogan told cheering supporters outside his official residence in Istanbul.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, was passing the 10 percent threshold required to enter parliament with 11.2 percent. Managing to get into parliament would be significant for HDP, since nine of its lawmakers, including Demirtas, and thousands of party members were jailed during the campaign.

The party said more than 350 of its election workers have been detained since April 28.

Ince, speaking just after polls closed, warned civil servants involved in the vote count to do their jobs “abiding by the law” and without fear, suggesting they were under pressure by the government. He asked all Turks to be vigilant at polls and not be “demoralized” by what he called the possible manipulation of news.

Erdogan, who has been in power since 2003, had faced a more robust, united opposition than ever before. Opposition candidates had vowed to return Turkey to a parliamentary democracy with strong checks and balances and have decried what they call Erdogan’s “one-man rule.”

Erdogan is the most powerful leader since the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He remains popular in the conservative and pious heartland, having empowered previously disenfranchised groups.

From a modest background himself, he has presided over an infrastructure boom that has modernized Turkey and lifted many out of poverty while also raising Islam’s profile, for instance by lifting a ban on Islamic headscarves in schools and public offices.

But critics say he has become increasingly intolerant of dissent and opposition. The election campaign was heavily skewed in his favor, with opposition candidates struggling to get their speeches aired on television. Erdogan directly or indirectly controls most of Turkey’s media.

Ince, a 54-year-old former physics teacher, was backed by the center-left opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP. He wooed crowds with an unexpectedly engaging campaign, drawing massive numbers at his rallies in Turkey’s three main cities of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

More than 59 million Turkish citizens, including 3 million expatriates, were eligible to vote. Erdogan called the election more than a year early amid signs the country could be heading toward an economic downturn.

The head of Turkey’s electoral commission said authorities had taken action following reports of irregularities at voting stations in southeastern Turkey. Videos posted on social media appeared to show people voting in bulk at a ballot box in the town of Suruc in Sanliurfa province.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was monitoring the elections with over 350 observers. Election monitors criticized Turkey for denying entry to two monitors who Turkey accused of political bias.

Peter Osusky, head of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly delegation, told The Associated Press all observers “are strongly adhering to so-called code of conduct” regardless of their political opinions.

Recent changes to electoral laws allow civil servants to lead ballot box committees. Ballot papers that don’t bear the official stamps will still be considered valid — a measure that led to allegations of fraud in last year’s referendum.

Citing security reasons, authorities have relocated thousands of polling stations in predominantly Kurdish provinces, forcing some 144,000 voters to travel further to cast their ballots. Some will even have to pass through security checkpoints to vote.

The vote took place under a state of emergency declared after the failed coup attempt, which allows the government to curtail civil rights. Some 50,000 people have been arrested and 110,000 civil servants have been fired under the emergency powers, which opposition lawmakers say Erdogan is using to stifle dissent.

__

Fraser reported from Ankara. Mehmet Guzel in Ankara contributed.

Kushner: Mideast Peace Plan Due Soon, With or Without Abbas

JERUSALEM—President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser said in an interview published Sunday that the administration will soon present its Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, with or without input from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

In an interview published in the Arabic language Al-Quds newspaper, Jared Kushner appealed directly to Palestinians and criticized Abbas, who has shunned the Trump team over its alleged pro-Israel bias, particularly on the fate of contested Jerusalem.

The interview came out after a weeklong trip around the region by Kushner and Mideast envoy Jason Greenblatt. The team met with leaders of Israel, Jordan, Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to discuss the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza and the administration’s proposals for a peace deal.

The Palestinians refused to meet with Kushner, and leaders have criticized the Trump negotiating team in recent days.

Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat accused Kushner and Greenblatt on Saturday of trying to topple the Abbas-led West Bank autonomy government and dismantle the U.N. aid agency for Palestinian refugees. On Sunday, Erekat doubled down on his criticism, telling Israel’s Channel 10 that the American negotiators are “not neutral” and predicting their peace plan would fail.

Any peace plan would face major obstacles, including the increasingly dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, internal Palestinian divisions, and recent cross-border violence between Gaza’s Hamas rulers and Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Cabinet on Sunday that he met twice with Kushner and Greenblatt this weekend and discussed “how to solve the humanitarian situation in Gaza without strengthening Hamas.”

It remains unclear how the Trump administration would proceed with a peace plan without Palestinian cooperation.

Kushner said the plan is “almost done,” but offered scant details aside from the promise of economic prosperity. He made no mention of a Palestinian state arising alongside Israel, though he acknowledged that Arab partners support that goal.

The Palestinians seek the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza — territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and two years later, Hamas seized control of Gaza from Abbas’ forces. Abbas now governs only small autonomous zones in the West Bank.

Kushner cast doubt on Abbas’ ability to make a deal, alleging that the Palestinian leadership is “scared we will release our peace plan and the Palestinian people will actually like it” because it would offer them a better life.

“The global community is getting frustrated with Palestinian leadership and not seeing many actions that are constructive toward achieving peace,” Kushner said. “There are a lot of sharp statements and condemnations, but no ideas or efforts with prospects of success.”

Palestinian leaders have refused to meet with the Trump team since the president recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December. Jerusalem is an emotional issue at the epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel captured the city’s eastern half, home to holy sites for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed it. The annexation is not internationally recognized. Palestinians seek east Jerusalem as capital of a future state.

“If President Abbas is willing to come back to the table, we are ready to engage; if he is not, we will likely air the plan publicly,” Kushner said.

Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rdeneh responded to Kushner’s interview by restating that American efforts will yield no result if they bypass the Palestinian leadership, and if they are not aimed at an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.

Later in the day Israel’s military said its aircraft carried out several strikes in Gaza in response to Palestinians launching “arson and explosive balloons.”

Gaza’s Health Ministry said three people were wounded. Local media and witnesses in Gaza said the injured were members of Hamas forces.

For weeks, Israel has been struggling to combat large fires caused by kites and balloons rigged with incendiary devices launched by Palestinians in Gaza that have destroyed forests, burned crops and killed wildlife and livestock.

The military said that Hamas is now orchestrating the flying fire bomb attacks and “will bear the consequences for its actions.”

No Timeline in New U.S. Plan to Reunite Immigrant Families

Trump administration officials say the U.S. government knows the location of all children in its custody after separating them from their families at the border and is working to reunite them.

A fact sheet on “zero-tolerance prosecution and family reunification” released Saturday night by the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies involved in the separations also says a parent must request that their child be deported with them. In the past, the agency says, many parents elected to be deported without their children. That may be a reflection of violence or persecution they face in their home countries.

The fact sheet doesn’t state how long it might take to reunite families. The Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Texas has been set up as the staging ground for the families to be reunited prior to deportation.

The latest actions come after President Donald Trump’s order last week to stop separating migrant children from their parents. The executive order signed Wednesday immediately spread confusion along the border, with officials sending conflicting signals about the state of the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. Some parents said they did not even know where their children were.

How the government would reunite families has been unclear because the families are first stopped by Customs and Border Patrol, with children taken into custody by the Department of Health and Human Services and adults detained through Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Children have been sent to far-flung shelters around the country, raising alarm that parents might never know where their children can be found.

As of last Wednesday, 2,053 minors who were separated at the border were being cared for in HHS-funded facilities, the fact sheet said.

Since Trump’s order, protests have erupted around the country over the separations and the future of families arriving to the U.S. illegally.

The fact sheet states that ICE has: implemented an identification mechanism to ensure on-going tracking of linked family members throughout the detention and removal process; designated detention locations for separated parents and will enhance current processes to ensure communication with children in HHS custody; worked closely with foreign consulates to ensure that travel documents are issued for both the parent and child at time of removal; and coordinated with HHS for the reuniting of the child prior to the parents’ departure from the U.S.

As part of the effort, ICE officials have posted notices in all its facilities advising detained parents who are trying to find or communicate with their children to call a hotline staffed 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday.

A parent or guardian trying to determine if a child is in the custody of HHS should contact the Office of Refugee Resettlement National Call Center at 1-800-203-7001, or via email information@ORRNCC.com. Information will be collected and sent to an HHS-funded facility where a minor is located.

But it’s unclear whether detained parents have access to computers to send an email, or how their phone systems work to call out. Attorneys at the border have said they have been frantically trying to locate information about the children on behalf of their clients.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said it had reunited 522 children and that some were never taken into custody by Health and Human Services because their parents’ criminal cases were processed too quickly. Officials have said as many as 2,300 children had been separated from the time the policy began until June 9. It’s not clear if any of the 2,000 remaining children were taken into custody after June 9.

The “zero-tolerance policy” of criminally prosecuting anyone caught illegally crossing the border remains in effect, officials have said, despite confusion on the ground on how to carry out Trump’s order. Justice Department officials asked a federal judge to amend a class-action settlement that governs how children are treated in immigration custody. Right now, children can only be detained with their families for 20 days; Trump officials are seeking to detain them together indefinitely as their cases progress. Advocates say family detention does not solve the problem.

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Online:

HHS zero-tolerance prosecution and family reunification fact sheet.

Office of Refugee Resettlement National Call Center.

In About-Face, Iraq’s Muqtada al-Sadr Moves Closer to Iran

BAGHDAD — Muqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shiite cleric who emerged as the main winner in Iraq’s parliamentary elections last month, campaigned on a platform to end sectarian politics and replace it with a government that puts Iraqis first.

Instead, he has forged a postelection coalition with a rival Shiite bloc that includes some of the most powerful militias operating in Iraq — groups that get their funding and support from Tehran.

The deal underscores the active role Iran is taking in shaping the next government of Iraq, sending key military and spiritual advisers to revive a grand coalition of Shiite parties as a conduit for its influence in Baghdad. It also illustrates how Iran has gained sway over al-Sadr, who once called for booting foreign influence from Iraq.

Two Shiite politicians with inside knowledge of the party talks told The Associated Press that the new coalition between al-Sadr’s Sa’eroun bloc and Hadi al-Amiri’s Fatah bloc came on the heels of intensive Iranian lobbying, including visits by the influential Gen. Qassem Soleimani and the highly respected son of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who met with al-Sadr earlier this month.

They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

For Iraqi voters, after delivering what was supposed to be a pivotal election result that looked beyond religious affiliation, the coalition means a dispiriting return to business as usual.

“This coalition is a product of Iran’s desire to influence internal forces in Iraq,” said Wathiq al-Hashimi of the Iraqi Group for Strategic Studies. “But besides the Shiite National Alliance, there will be a Sunni alliance and a Kurdish alliance, and a return of sectarianism among all the armed blocs and factions… This is the most dangerous thing in Iraq right now.”

With no single party winning the majority of seats, the various blocs need to form coalition in order to name a new government.

On Saturday, al-Sadr struck a separate deal with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, another Shiite leader, whose bloc came third in the election. Al-Abadi had campaigned on a cross-sectarian platform and included Sunni politicians in his bloc. But the bulk of the winning candidates on his list were Shiites, and al-Abadi is the chairman of Islamic Dawa, a Shiite Islamist party that formed the core of the governing Shiite coalitions of 2006 and 2010.

The alignment paves the way for a return to sectarian-based government where Shiite parties come together to form a grand coalition which doubles as a patronage network that dispenses jobs to supporters.

Last month’s elections were Iraq’s fourth since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. But voter turnout was the lowest in 15 years due to widespread anger at the dysfunctional political class. Allegations of widespread fraud and irregularities have further complicated the postelection scene, sparking calls for a recount and fresh elections.

Al-Sadr did not seek a seat himself, but Sa’eroun took 54 seats of the 329-seat body, followed by Fatah with 47.

The cleric, who once led a militia in the insurgency against American forces, directed mass protests in recent years that included calls to end foreign interference in Iraqi affairs. He would single out Iran and Iran-backed Shiite militias that were widely accused of human rights violations against Sunnis while fighting IS.

When the results were announced, his followers poured into Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, chanting: “Iran, out, out.”

But now it appears the 44-year-old leader, constrained by his slim margin of victory, has little choice but to cut deals with Iran-backed factions and other Shiite blocs. Al-Sadr’s coalition with the Fatah bloc gives them 101 seats in Parliament — still short of the 165 needed to name a new government — though with the remaining three Shiite blocs they would have 188.

“The reality after the elections is what motivated the alliance between Sa’eroun and Fatah as the two top winners with major seats,” said Jaafar al-Mousawi, a politician linked to al-Sadr.

The Iranian role was further highlighted by indirect discussions between al-Sadr and al-Amiri overseen by Tehran that lasted for ten days, said a third Shiite politician who took part in the discussions. After a five-hour meeting in al-Sadr’s house in Najaf on June 12, the two leaders announced their deal in a surprise press conference after midnight.

“Today’s announcement is a prelude for the National Alliance,” declared al-Amiri.

It followed a deadly blast in al-Sadr’s electoral stronghold in eastern Baghdad and a mysterious fire in warehouse believed to store ballots from the same area. No one has claimed responsibility for either incident.

It was just months ago that al-Sadr derided a short-lived alliance between al-Amiri and al-Abadi as “repugnant.” Now, he has joined in a coalition with both.

The new grouping is already rallying Iraq’s Sunni minority to close ranks and speak with one voice, said Parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri, a Sunni.

“It will be a catalyst to expedite forming the new government, and it will spur others to arrange their papers ahead of formal discussions,” he said, referring to Sunnis and Kurds.

Al-Amiri, who spent more than two decades in Iran and enjoys close ties with its Revolutionary Guard, leads the powerful Badr Organization, one of the main state-sanctioned militias that fought the Islamic State group.

He is said to have his eyes on the position of prime minister.

A politician close to al-Abadi, who also requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media, said the “Iranian will” was behind the “alliance of the militias.” He added that Iran “has sent a message to America that it still has a major role and influence in Iraq.”