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Hezbollah

commander and key Israel target killed in Syria

The groundbreaking memoir of a current Guantánamo inmate that lays bare the harrowing details of the US rendition and torture programme from the perspective of one of its victims is to be published next week after a six-year battle for the manuscript to be declassified.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi describes a world tour of torture and humiliation that began in his native Mauritania more than 13 years ago and progressed through Jordan and Afghanistan before he was consigned to US detention in Guantánamo, Cuba, in August 2002 as prisoner number 760.

The journal, which Slahi handwrote in English, details how he was subjected to sleep deprivation, death threats, sexual humiliation and intimations that his torturers would go after his mother.

Witold Pilecki, an officer in the Polish resistance to the Nazi regime, deliberately let himself be captured by the Germans in 1940 so that he could gather information about Hitler’s concentration camps. Inside Auschwitz, he set up resistance cells — even as he almost died of starvation, torture and disease.

Then Pilecki helped build a radio transmitter, and, in 1942, he broadcast to the outside world accounts of atrocities inside Auschwitz — as the Nazis frantically searched the camp looking for the transmitter. He worked to expose the Nazi gas chambers, brutal sexual experiments and savage camp punishments, in hopes that the world would act.

Finally, in April 1943, he escaped from Auschwitz, bullets flying after him, and wrote an eyewitness report laying out the horror of the extermination camps. He then campaigned unsuccessfully for an attack on Auschwitz.

Let me put this as baldly as I can. The US fought two long, brutal wars in its response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. We lost both of them – revealing the biggest military machine in the history of the planet as essentially useless in advancing American objectives through war and occupation. Attempts to quash Islamist extremism through democracy were complete failures. The Taliban still has enormous sway in Afghanistan and the only way to prevent the entire Potemkin democracy from imploding is a permanent US troop presence. In Iraq, we are now confronting the very same Sunni insurgency the invasion created in 2003 – just even more murderous. The Jihadism there has only become more extreme under a democratic veneer. And in all this, the U.S. didn’t just lose the wars; it lost the moral high-ground as well. The <img class="alignright wp-image-138319" src="https://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/troopsjoeraedlegetty1.jpg?w=398&h=265" alt="" width="398" height="265" />president himself unleashed brutal torture across all theaters of war – effectively ending any moral authority the US has in international human rights.

These are difficult truths to handle. They reveal that so many brave men and women died for nothing. And so we have to construct myths or bury facts to ensure that we maintain face. But these myths and amnesia have a consequence: they only serve to encourage Washington to make exactly the same mistakes again

This is not just a Republican fixation. It’s a function of the hegemony reflexively sought by liberal internationalists as well.

Activist Israel Kaunatjike journeyed from Namibia to Germany, only to discover a forgotten past that has connections to his own family tree

Black and white people shared a country, yet they weren't allowed to live in the same neighborhoods or patronize the same businesses. That, says Kaunatjike, was verboten.

A few decades after German immigrants staked their claim over South-West Africa in the late 19th century, the region came under the administration of the South African government, thanks to a provision of the League of Nations charter.

And they do. Inmates describe being ambushed by guards and beaten, taunted with racial slurs, and kept out of sight, in solitary confinement, until the injuries inflicted on them have healed enough to avoid arousing suspicion.

Leonard Strickland was a prisoner with schizophrenia who got into an argument with guards, and ended up dead.

In the inmates’ telling, the guards got away with murder, ganging up on Mr. Strickland and beating him so viciously that he could barely move. The guards deny this, saying they acted only in self-defense and did what was necessary to subdue an out-of-control prisoner.

Spain’s decision will cause reflection well beyond its borders too. For it is a reminder, if one is needed, of the never-ending importance – and sensitivity – of historical memory in the continuing evolution of every modern nation state, including Britain.

there is no getting away from the facts concerning Franco. The war he launched against a democratically elected government in 1936 was intended, as a fellow general said, to eliminate “without scruple or hesitation those who do not think as we do”. The civil war killed some 200,000 combatants, with at least a further 200,000 murdered extra-judicially or after sham trials. At least 20,000 Republicans were killed after the war ended, while many others died in prisons and in slave labour.

this decision is not just about bringing justice to the families of those who suffered under and because of Franco, important though that it is. It is about asserting the vibrancy of a more pluralist Spain in a more pluralist Europe. It is about the present, not the past.

“It took an animal to stab a man 100 times and decapitate him and rip his heart out,” Sanders said, referring to the case of an unidentified man killed in the Washington, D.C., suburbs in 2017. “Frankly I think the term ‘animal’ doesn’t go far enough, and I think that the president should continue to use his platform and everything he can do under the law to stop these types of horrible, horrible disgusting people.”

There’s a certain moral clarity to these kinds of comments that allows them to be wielded as incredibly effective weapons, both in mobilizing support and in kneecapping opponents.

People who oppose this straightforward moral assessment are cast as either misconstruing the speaker or choosing to defend monsters. In this brutally simplistic worldview, one must either side with the “animals” or the humans sent to contain them.

Peter Harf, who joined the company in 1981 and became chairman this year, and whose own father was a Nazi, said he never really bought the idea that the organization had nothing to hide.“I knew the stories they told,” he said. “It didn’t smell right.”

12, as JAB was acquiring high-profile coffee brands and drawing global attention, Mr. Harf pressed the family to open its archives to an independent scholar. By 2016, Paul Erker, an economic historian at the University of Munich, took on the task.

Only now, 74 years after World War II, are the family and the company grappling with their dark and complicated history.

The write-up in the Richmond Times-Dispatch says Turner is “seen as a freedom fighter by many and a mass murderer by others.” The simple truth is that he was unquestionably both. That is how slave revolts work.

sometime in the last year or so, I saw a photo collection of anti-slavery monuments and statues from across the Americas. Most are symbolized statues of a slave breaking chains, like this photograph of the monument to Bussa, the leader of a slave revolt in Barbados in 1816. I’m sure they exist somewhere. But this kind of memorialization is almost totally absent in the US.

public memorials – ones created under the auspices of governments – about slavery itself or monuments to resistance to slavery are rare.

"Nazi Germany and its overtly exterminationist imperial project of the later 1930s and and early 1940s owed much to the logic of ethnic conflict and irredentism created by the Great War and the redrawing of borders in 1918-19."

while there are many roots of Nazism - ideological, historical, national - it was in many ways the fruition of the aftermath of World War I. Ad hoc and impulsive meldings of revanchist ideologies and mass murder, often haphazard in nature, were refined, systemized and after a period of gestation organized into what we might call the total quality genocide of the Final Solution.

The generally peaceful world we have all grown up in is not normal or pre-ordained. It was built by design, a great deal of work and sacrifice and on the experience of and in response to almost unimaginable destruction

As the post-9/11 Afghanistan conflict dragged deep into its second decade, with persistent rumours alleging impropriety, brutality, and even possible war crimes swirling among Australia’s tight-knit defence community, Dr Samantha Crompvoets, a civilian sociologist, was commissioned to investigate alleged cultural failings within its special forces.

Roberts-Smith, a former SAS corporal, is suing the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Canberra Times over a series of 2018 articles he claims defamed him because they portrayed him as committing war crimes while on deployment in Afghanistan. He strenuously denies all allegations and has previously rejected them as malicious and deeply troubling.

US soldiers were convicted over the deaths of two unarmed Afghan civilians on Bagram airbase in 2002. Two soldiers from a self-declared “kill team” pleaded guilty to murder while deployed, while Staff Sergeant Robert Bales pleaded guilty to the murder of 16 Afghan civilians during a shooting spree in Kandahar province in 2012. Members of the storied Seal Team 6 have been accused of war crimes, including beheading and mutilating slain enemies.

Not the people who, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to Jews,” according to a witness, assaulted Jewish diners at a Los Angeles sushi restaurant. Not the people who threw fireworks in New York’s diamond district. Not the people who brutally beat up a man wearing a yarmulke in Times Square. Not the people who drove through London slurring Jews and yelling, “Rape their daughters.” Not the people who gathered outside a synagogue in Germany shouting slurs. Not the people who, at a protest in Brussels, chanted, “Jews, remember Khaybar. The army of Muhammad is returning.”

Apparently, these hashtags count as legitimate political speech at Twitter, a company whose objections to bigotry are otherwise so strong that it once banned a Canadian feminist for the sin of tweeting remarks about transgender women like “men aren’t women.”

It’s a curious silence. In the land of inclusiveness, Jews are denied inclusion.

On the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre — in which a thriving Black neighborhood was burned to the ground and hundreds of residents were killed by an angry white mob — local and national leaders find themselves grappling with the lasting effects of racial injustice and violence.

The centennial comes just a week after the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, an event that sparked nationwide Black Lives Matter protests calling for an end to police brutality and systemic racism.

In 1921, Greenwood was a bastion of Black wealth at a time when Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan hamstrung and terrorized Black Americans in the South.

When Patty Murray joined the Senate in 1993, one of the first bills she worked on was the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guaranteed 12 weeks of unpaid family leave for people who worked at companies with 50 or more employees.

It was pretty modest, especially compared to the family benefits available in most developed countries, but Murray said passing it was a hard fight. In a floor speech at the time, she described a friend of hers, the mother of a 16-year-old who was dying of leukemia, whose job was threatened because she wanted to take time off to be with her son in his final months. Afterward, Murray told me, another senator approached her and said, “We don’t tell personal stories on the floor of the United States Senate.”

There are several reasons our domestic policy has long been uniquely hostile to parents, but two big ones are racism and religious fundamentalism. Essentially, it’s been politically radioactive for the federal government to support Black women who want to stay home with their kids, and white women who want to work.

After Twitter and Facebook kicked President Trump off their platforms, and his supporters began comparing his social media muzzling to Chinese censorship, the president won support from an unexpected source: China.

Mr. Trump’s expulsion from American social media for spurring the violent crowd at the Capitol last week has consumed the Chinese internet, one of the most harshly censored forums on earth. Overwhelmingly, people who face prison for what they write are condemning what they regard as censorship elsewhere.

Much of the condemnation is being driven by China’s propaganda arms. By highlighting the decisions by Twitter and Facebook, they believe they are reinforcing their message to the Chinese people that nobody in the world truly enjoys freedom of speech. That gives the party greater moral authority to crack down on Chinese speech.

cancel culture is not new. A brief accounting of the illustrious and venerable ranks of blocked and dragged Americans encompasses Sarah Good, Elijah Lovejoy, Ida B. Wells, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Robeson and the Dixie Chicks.

What was the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, but the cancellation of the black South?

any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it

Four hundred years have passed since captured Africans were forced across these waves on their way to bondage in the New World and now, standing at the edge of this violent water, startled by my own anxiety, I feel something deep and old and terrifying.

Four hundred years have passed since captured Africans were forced across these waves on their way to bondage in the New World

Its many caves still showed signs of the Shai people of the Ga-Adangbe ethnic group, some of Ghana’s earliest inhabitants.