In fact, the suffering of the activists pales in comparison with what is being done to the Palestinians. A recent exposé in the New York Times reveals systematic sexual abuse, including the use of specially trained dogs to rape prisoners. This sadistic method surpasses the “achievements” of the otherwise sophisticated Nazi torturers in humiliating their victims.

Minister Ben-Gvir performed in Hebrew and posted his video for all to see. The targeted audience was regular Israelis. The country is gearing up for an election, and the episode was broadcast to gain him votes. The hundreds of clips that Israeli military personnel posted of themselves gloating and chanting as they blow up houses, hospitals, and schools in Gaza clearly suggest that they expected admiration rather than opprobrium from their society.

As usual, Israel and its vassals treated this as a public relations problem. The Israeli ambassador in Washington called it a sledgehammer blow to Israel’s diplomatic efforts to burnish its deteriorating reputation. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Saar also criticized Ben-Gvir’s performance. Even the U.S. ambassador, Reverend Huckabee — who is often more pro-Israeli than Israel — chimed in. These damage-control measures focus on the episode itself and, predictably, ignore its context and purpose.

A few years ago, Ben-Gvir ran for election under the slogan “Nobody is to the Right of Me,” and he came out triumphant. He is often portrayed in mainstream Western media as a regrettable outlier. But he is anything but. The minister of national security knows his society and embodies its dominant trends. This is why he shows how tough he is not only with the Palestinians but also with their supporters from abroad. Cruelty and vindictiveness are winning cards in Israel.

He never misses an opportunity to display these qualities. Ben-Gvir was one of the sponsors of the recent law authorizing the death sentence by hanging for Palestinians. The law was approved by the Israeli parliament, which, thanks to the proportional voting system, fairly reflects the country’s public opinion. Ben-Gvir celebrated this democratic achievement with champagne brought into the hallowed parliamentary chambers, and — needless to say — the entire scene of jubilation was in full view of the public.

But that was not the end. Soon thereafter, the honorable member of the legislature was celebrating his 50th birthday. His wife offered him a birthday cake decorated with a noose, and this too was broadcast for all to see. There is no record of Frau Himmler offering her husband, the head of the SS, a birthday cake in the shape of a crematorium. In fact, the Nazis tried to hide the genocide they were committing. They were afraid the German citizenry might not approve. Israeli leaders have no such fear.

Al Jazeera English: “Several nations summon Israeli envoys as Ben-Gvir taunts flotilla activists”

[This post contains video, click to play]

Finally, a few words about Western reactions. Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States — all complicit in the genocide in Gaza — deplored the Israeli mistreatment of the activists in stronger terms than they ever reacted to Israel’s torture and slaughter of Palestinians. This showed once again the racist hypocrisy of their commitment to human rights. Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, and other “less white” peoples do not deserve the same human rights as Europeans and their descendants settled elsewhere, usually by means of perpetrating their own genocide against the local inhabitants.

One can only admire the perspicacity of the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire, who wrote in 1955 in his Discourse on Colonialism: “What he [the white man] does not forgive Hitler is not the crime itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man in himself, it is the crime against the white man, it is the humiliation of the white man, and for having applied to Europe colonialist procedures hitherto only applied to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the negroes of Africa.”

Photo of Gaza by khalid kwaik on Unsplash

Anticolonial sentiment briefly prevailed during the few decades of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had long supported anti-colonial struggle, and the West did not want to “lose Africa to the Russians.” The times have changed. Significantly, it was during the twilight of the USSR that the U.N. General Assembly revoked its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism. Later on, a French president called on his compatriots to be proud of the achievements that France brought to its former colonies. And at the recent security conference in Munich, the U.S. Secretary of State Rubio praised the European colonization of America as “a sacred inheritance.” He also called on Europeans to be “unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance.”

No wonder that Israel’s settler colonial project continues to enjoy impunity from most Western governments. These democratic regimes continue to sell arms to Israel and allow overflight of American transport planes carrying bombs to kill Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians. After all, this state terrorizing everyone around is “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Democracy has never been an obstacle to racist terror.

(The Conversation) – The US-Israel war with Iran was predicted to cause the worst energy crisis in history, according to the International Energy Agency.

Around 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) and 25% of its seaborne oil supplies were affected. The impact should have eclipsed the oil shocks of the 1970s.

But despite early panic, the crisis hasn’t been as widespread as anticipated. Oil prices have dropped, even though the Strait of Hormuz hasn’t fully reopened.

Why? Four reasons. First, oil markets are behaving as if the conflict will be over soon. Second, other oil producers have seized the opportunity. Third, demand for oil has fallen. And fourth, nations have been burning through their oil reserves.

Is the crisis over? No. Oil reserves in many countries are now running low. The United States, the world’s top user of oil, is about to enter peak driving season from this weekend. If the Iran war drags on, as seems likely, a true global crisis will be hard to avoid.

1: Oil markets have been subdued

This year’s rise in global LNG prices look like a blip compared with the meteoric rises seen after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

The effect on oil has been more pronounced. Prices of Brent crude futures – the global oil benchmark – have risen 72% since January, from US$61 to around US$105 a barrel (A$85 to A$153) as of May 21.

That’s a sharp rise. But it’s nowhere near the US$200 (A$281) forecast by some analysts in the war’s early days. Other analysts expected oil prices to approach the record levels of around US$147 a barrel (A$206) reached in 2008, a few months before the global financial crisis began.

In reality, prices have yet to pass the high point of US$120 a barrel (A$168) seen in 2022.

Oil traders look to be acting in the hope the conflict will be over soon and normal oil shipments will resume.

Before the war, the world had a major oil surplus. Fracking has turned the US from major oil importer into the world’s biggest producer and turned Argentina into an oil exporter.

Over the first ten months of 2025, global oil stocks rose an average of 1.2 million barrels a day. China was almost entirely responsible, adding around 1.1 million barrels a day to its stockpiles.

Before the war began in February, both Iran and Russia were looking for buyers of their sanctioned oil.

2: Different oil producers have boosted exports

Oil producers in the Middle East extract about 30% of the world’s oil. The war has removed some of this supply.

In response, other oil-producing nations have ramped up exports.

US sanctions on Russian oil have been temporarily lifted, boosting global oil supply. But Russia’s oil facilities have been repeatedly hit by Ukrainian drone strikes this year.

In the Americas, the US, Argentina, Brazil and Guyana have all upped output to partially fill the supply gap.

3: Demand for oil has dropped

Many nations are working to reduce demand for oil. Global demand for oil is expected to fall more than 2% this quarter. The drop is mainly in developing countries in Asia, the region most dependent on Middle Eastern oil.

Alongside the natural drop in demand from high prices, 76 countries have introduced emergency measures to cut oil demand further.

Australia has used energy diplomacy, securing more fuel supplies with deals to sell its gas and coal. These efforts have bolstered stockpiles of diesel, petrol and jet fuel.

To date, the only drop in Australian demand is jet fuel. In March, demand fell 18% below the previous month. Diesel use actually rose 4% that month.

4: Stockpiles are being used up

In March, the IEA brokered the largest releases of global oil stockpiles on record.

This move has probably done most to filling the supply gap.

China, the world’s largest oil importer, has dipped into its enormous 1.4 billion barrel stockpile and cut oil buying.

Even so, global demand for oil is still outstripping supply. Global stockpiles are being used up at record rates and are now close to their lowest level in eight years.

At the start of the war 12 weeks ago, China had around 82 days’ worth of supply. Given China uses around 17 million barrels of oil each day, its reserves would shrink to almost nothing within 11 weeks if not replenished.

As the northern hemisphere moves into summer, demand will rise in key nations. In the US, the Memorial Day long weekend traditionally marks the start of the peak driving season. While the US now produces much of its own oil, a spike in domestic consumption could make less available for export.

Photo by Sara Gault on Unsplash

Slow-moving crisis?

Until now, this year’s energy crisis has been felt most acutely in developing nations, where long queues for petrol and diesel have become common.

Richer countries have been able to insulate themselves better. But these measures have limits. The crisis is by no means over.

Oil supplies in rich countries could tighten further by early June, according to forecasts by JP Morgan Chase analysts. By September, reserves could fall to levels low enough to put real strain on economies. History suggests nations would slash demand for oil products before it got that bad.

If the conflict drags on and Middle Eastern oil remains off the market, rich countries will no longer be able to ride it out.

Kevin Morrison, Industry Fellow, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Having taught courses on “conflict resolution” concerning the Sudan, DRC Congo, Cameroon and Nigeria, it was clear to me that almost all African nations share a similar history of having been colonized by Europeans with the primary intention of resource extraction. The Congo was the most notorious in this respect, led by Belgium’s King Leopold between 1885 to 1909, a man who made a pretense of being humanitarian while extracting wealth in the form of rubber during the “rubber boom”.  Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” explored some of the themes of European imperialism and racism prevailing at that time, while Irish born Roger Casement, a British Consul, revealed in published articles, the pillaging by Leopold’s agents and his private mercenary army’s systemic brutality 

In a similar vein Sudan suffered from an 1898 invasion of Khartoum by a joint British-Egyptian force under General Kitchener. The British colonizers favored South Sudan by encouraging Christian missionary endeavors while allowing the north Sudanese to be governed by an Arab-Muslim elite.

Britain’s method of control of Sudan followed their colonial policy of encouraging division among indigenous groups in order to maintain control, thus exacerbating civil unrest between north and south Sudan. When they departed in 1956 the British left a deeply divided country with South Sudan eventually separating from north Sudan.  We now see the consequences of these divisions with the two Sudans devastated by a series of armed conflicts, recently described as the “world’s largest displacement of indigenous people with an inevitable hunger crisis.” 

In terms of the Sahel region, other causes of conflict include control of gold mines, the extraction of fossil fuels, and newly developed lithium deposits, as well as climate change throughout the Sahel, a  savannah stretching from Senegal to Sudan. This has turned marginal areas into sparse grazing for nomadic livestock herders, while outsiders, such as the UAE Emirates and Russia have been supplying military equipment to favored factions, thus increasing the violence in conflict areas.  

More beneficial assistance has come from China, which has provided much-needed infrastructure, offering loans and humanitarian assistance in exchange for access to mining and resource extraction. In the AES Alliance in West Africa, they have begun investing heavily in Lithium mining.  

The Sahel nations of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso (AES) share some of same the extreme conditions experienced by Sudan and the Congo in terms of European colonization. In 1960 they declared Independence from France and in 2022-2024 the military juntas of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) rejected U.S. and France’s military aid in favor of military aid from Russia, China, Turkey and the UAE. But terrorism and poorly planned trade agreements have brought serious difficulties.  Having survived  the Mali War and Boko Haram insurgency, the  AES states have expelled not only the French military presence but also U.S. drone facilities. It has also pledged to suspend military rule and return to civilian rule, 

The  U.S. has several thousand personnel in East Africa under U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and up to 30 bases in Africa carrying out “security, surveillance and counterinsurgency missions”. Up until recently, one of the most beneficial organizations for aid in Africa has been  USAID, which provided economic and security support, so its loss, following the U.S. “Shutdown” of health and humanitarian aid programs, has resulted in the rise of insurgencies and the increase of regional violence.

What the Sahel Alliance (AES) is facing beyond internal problems and insurgencies is desertification. Prolonged droughts are endemic in the Sahel savanna, a 600 mile-wide swath of northern Africa. The Sahel reaches to Northwest Cameroon and includes Lake Chad which has been a main provider of water to indigenous people for generations, but now has lost 90% of its capacity due to climate change and over-grazing. 

There are serious attempts at re-invigorating the Sahel with the “UNCCD Great Green Wall Initiative” which spans 22 African countries. This international project uses traditional as well as newly applied forestry & farming practices and has raised $14 billion to “support a target of completion by 2030. There are numerous localized success stories as it continues to expand to a projected 8,000 km x 15 km wide strip extending across Africa. Already 30 million hectares of land have been rehabilitated and 350,000 “green jobs” created.

Africa is a vast continent with 54 nations and a population of 1.5 billion inhabitants in an area that could fit Canada, the U.S., China, India and Europe, with room to spare. It is all too easy for American media to misunderstand the larger context and to focus only on civil wars and other forms of conflict while distorting  the nature of a resource- rich continent where many highly-motivated people have survived centuries of brutal colonization.

In Nigeria alone fossil fuel extraction provides a major part of its economy. It also has the largest seminary in the world, with many of its graduates serving in Europe, the U.S. and Canada. Nigeria has been humorously described as having an “edifice complex” with very large churches and mosques built for its 100 million Christians in the South and 100 million Muslims in the north.

Photo of Sudan by MIGUEL BAIXAULI on Unsplash

There are over thirty nations investing in Africa who are benefiting from its rich resources. Some, under pressure from humanitarian organizations, provide educational opportunities as well as healthcare benefits. Canadian mining corporations, for instance, have invested $40 billion in Africa, but have had to face civil lawsuits before being compelled to be more accountable and to provide help to families of miners.

Africa can find its way to conflict resolution if only those who foment violence would stop providing weapons to extremists and to the “grievance culture” that divides small countries such as Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso into militant factions. It would be more helpful if Western media focused on the more positive side of indigenous cultures and the high levels of optimism and aspirations that motivate the youth of Africa.

What much of the reporting ignores, however, is how necessary the aid flotilla still is, since the Israelis have gone back to blockading key foodstuffs, medicine and fuel, and continue to shell and bomb people in Gaza. In other words, the genocide continues under the cover of the Hormuz crisis.

IMEMC reports that on Wednesday the Israeli military launched numerous assaults on the Gaza Strip, despite the supposed ceasefire enacted last October.

In the north of the Strip as well as in the center shelling was heard, “with explosions heard near Gaza City and in the areas surrounding the Al‑Bureij and Al‑Maghazi refugee camps, in central Gaza.”

The Gaza Ministry of Health said Israeli attacks had killed one Palestinian whose body was taken to a hospital, and had wounded sixteen others.

Families that came under fire in the north had to flee to central Gaza but had no place to take refuge, huddling in the debris of former schools or apartment buildings. These internally displaced families lack sewage or reliable potable water, putting them at risk of disease.

Rescue teams could not reach several of these areas because the Israelis had destroyed the roads and the rubble proved an obstacle to ambulances. Since the rescue workers could not reach the bombed sites, they could not ensure that people trapped under the destroyed buildings would be extracted.

IMEMC writes, “Humanitarian agencies reported that several neighborhoods in Gaza City and Khan Younis have gone more than ten days without running water. With pumping stations unable to operate due to fuel shortages and damaged infrastructure, sewage overflow has been recorded in multiple districts.”

Surgeons had to put off performing operations. They appear not even to have had alcohol or other antiseptics, so they could not establish a sterile field around patients. They also lacked other essential medicines.

IMEMC continues, regarding health care, “Hospitals across the Strip continued to report severe shortages. Medical teams at the Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza and the European Gaza Hospital said they were running critically low on anesthesia, antibiotics, blood products, and basic surgical supplies.”

Many areas in the strip get only 4 hours a day of electricity, since the Israeli military has damaged power lines and prevents enough fuel from getting into the besieged Strip to run generators. That goes for hospitals, too.

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

Insecurity Insight reports that in the wake of the ceasefire concluded with Iran on April 8, 2026, the Israeli military has increased its assaults in such a way as to harm health facilities and to decrease the ability of patients to get treatment throughout Gaza. I.I. gathered credible information on seven such incidents from April 8 to April 24, whereas in the previous two weeks, when Israeli was bombing Iran, there were four such reported Israeli attacks in Gaza on or near health care facilities.

Israeli troops have been shelling targets near hospitals and at one point directed live fire at a United Nations-administered health center. I.I. writes, on 11 April, a hospital was forced to shut down one of its main generators due to fuel shortages, leaving vital departments dependent on lower-capacity backup generators operating only for limited hours.

Gaza has also seen a steep fall in bread production as the Israeli government has interfered with flour imports since early April.

—

Re: IMEMC quotes above: unless otherwise specified, all IMEMC content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attr-NonCom 4.0 International License.

The Middle East Studies Association’s (MESA) Task Force on Civil and Human Rights expresses our deep concern regarding the Trump administration’s targeting of visa and green card holders from Iran, including Iranian academics and students, based on their familial ties and political views. While immigration-based targeting of Iranians, including professors and students, began in 2025, these efforts have accelerated since the start of 2026 and especially since the Israel/ U.S. war against Iran began in late February.

Among the most prominent cases, in early April, the State Department terminated the permanent residency of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, an assistant professor at Emory University’s medical school, because her then-deceased father, Ali Larijani, had been a high-ranking Iranian official. The State Department also detained and revoked the green card of Eissa Hashemi, an adjunct professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, because his mother, Masoumeh Ebtekar, had been involved in the student takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Later in April, the administration detained Yousuf Azizi, a PhD candidate at the Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs, and sought to deport him from the country. While the administration raised various visa-related pretexts for detaining Azizi, it is widely believed he was targeted because of his outspoken and widely-publicized opposition to the war on Iran.

This repressive campaign against Iranian academics and students is part and parcel of the Trump administration’s long-standing draconian immigration policies, which have involved targeting students and academics for their First Amendment-protected views as well as their familial associations. In a recent case brought by MESA, a federal judge made clear that the First Amendment applies to citizens and non-citizens alike. Targeting Iranian visa and green card holders solely for their protected speech and familial ties flies in the face of this basic principle: that noncitizens present in the United States have the same speech and associational rights as citizens.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, MESA publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,600 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

As long as the Trump administration continues to target academics and students who work on or are from the Middle East for their views and associational relationships, MESA will continue to support and defend those individuals against the government’s repressive and unconstitutional policies.

As is true of so much with this administration, every accusation is also a confession.

U.S. troops have been shooting Somalis since the early 1990s, after lame duck President George H. W. Bush launched an ostensibly humanitarian intervention there that would be embraced by his successor, Bill Clinton. By June 1993, U.S. and U.N. troops had begun attacking various targets in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, linked to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who had helped overthrow dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

The next month, in a major escalation, U.S. helicopter gunships attacked a house in that city where a group of Somali clan leaders was meeting. The International Committee of the Red Cross said 54 people were killed and 161 wounded. Aidid claimed that 73 Somalis had died, including women and children, and more than 200 had been wounded. U.S. forces suffered no casualties whatsoever.

And it wasn’t long before — in the early 2000s, under Bush’s son, George W., as part of what became known as the Global War on Terror — American troops began slaughtering Somalis again. In addition to major conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush, the younger, launched early drone wars from Pakistan to Yemen, including in Somalia. His successor, President Barack Obama, upped the Forever War ante, becoming an assassin-in-chief in Somalia and beyond. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, continued the drone war there, too, when he entered the White House.

However, for all those years of slaughter in Somalia, no American president has ever attacked Somalis with the persistence and at the rate of President Donald J. Trump, especially in his second term in office.

The second Bush administration conducted 11 airstrikes in Somalia, killing as many as 144 people — including possibly 55 civilians, according to the think tank New America. Obama presided over 48 strikes during his eight years in office that killed as many as 553 people. Trump’s first term saw a massive escalation in such drone strikes. Over his first four years, Trump carried out 219 attacks, a 271% increase over the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies. But even that spike has paled in comparison to the relentless rate of attacks during Trump’s second term in office. While Biden exceeded Obama’s total in half the time — 51 strikes in four years — Trump is already set to eclipse his own infamous first-term record in less than a year and a half. He has presided over at least 190, if not more, air strikes in Somalia.

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Trump’s killing spree in Somalia is just a small part of his wider war on the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that he has the U.S. military “run[ning] around shooting” people on an epic scale. During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations — including air strikes, commando raids, proxy conflicts, so-called 127e programs, and full-scale wars — in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean. His second term has, in fact been a furious blitz of global war-making, only half-noticed by the American news media. In March, for example, the United States made war on three continents during just three days, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the U.S. also struck a civilian boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Less than a year and a half into Trump’s second term, the U.S. has already killed more than 2,000 civilians from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” said Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, a British-based organization that tracks civilian harm globally. She also pointed to attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the eastern Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

A War on Children

Since the U.S. began conducting air strikes in Somalia back in 2007, as many as 170 civilians have been killed, according to Airwars. The U.S. military has, however, only admitted to six of those deaths and 11 other injuries — and has never publicly apologized to any families of the victims or those who survived its attacks.

In one April 2018 attack in Somalia during Trump’s first term, a U.S. drone strike killed at least three (and possibly five) civilians. A woman and child were among the dead, according to formerly secret U.S. military investigation documents, but the same report concluded that their identities might never be known. A 2023 investigation I undertook for The Intercept, however, exposed the details of that disastrous attack. The woman and child — 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse — survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, said of the Americans who killed his sister and niece: “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable.”

More recently, President Trump has been responsible for the slaughter of scores, if not hundreds, of children in his war of choice in Iran. “U.S.-Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team, told this reporter and other journalists during a recent press briefing. The deaths include more than 150 children killed in a Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in southern Iran. The preliminary findings of a U.S. military investigation into that attack acknowledged that the United States was indeed responsible, contradicting assertions by President Trump that Iran struck the school. Publicly, however, the Pentagon continues to evade responsibility. “This incident is currently under investigation,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently told lawmakers, refusing to answer questions about the attack during testimony on Capitol Hill.

The administration has also been responsible for a steady drumbeat of attacks on civilians in the waters surrounding Latin America. Under Operation Southern Spear, the Trump administration has conducted around 60 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing close to 200 civilians since last September. Trump officials have insisted that the victims are members of one of at least 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties insist that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

Trump has also killed and wounded many people in Yemen, including dozens of Ethiopian civilians killed in an attack on an immigrant detention center there last year. “The Trump administration’s Yemen campaign, and this attack in particular, should have set off alarm bells for anyone invested in how the U.S. military operates, and the amount of care or disdain it shows for civilian life,” Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said recently. “One year on, not only has there been no discernible progress towards justice and reparation, but we’re still lacking basic information about what happened in the Yemen attack, why it happened and what steps if any the U.S. military has taken to address it.”

In the spring of 2025, Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes (codenamed Operation Rough Rider) against that country’s Houthi government. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at a minimum of 238 civilians, with another 467 civilians injured.

Such deaths are just part of a long butcher’s bill in Yemen stretching back to the very beginning of Trump’s first term. A report by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights examined 12 U.S. attacks in Yemen between January 2017 and January 2019, 10 of them “counterterrorism airstrikes.” The authors found that at least 38 Yemeni civilians — 19 men, six women, and 13 children — were killed and seven others injured in the attacks. Among them was a raid by Navy SEALs on a Yemeni village just days after Trump took office for the first time in which women and children died. A year later, the U.S. fired a missile into a sports utility vehicle near the village of Al Uqla. Three of the men inside were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. The only survivor, Adel Al Manthari, was gravely wounded and forced to turn to a GoFundMe campaign in 2022 to save his life.

“The Attack Was Horrible and Their Response Was Horrible. I Lost a Wife and a Child”

“It’s a horrible place,” Trump said of Somalia during that same racist rant. “Everything is horrible over there.”

Horrible is a word I also recall from my trip to Somalia to meet the family of Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse in 2023.

The U.S. attack that killed the mother and daughter was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed, imprecise targeting by a Special Operations strike cell whose members, according to the military investigation conducted later, considered themselves inexperienced. That inquiry led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias (a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information confirming their preexisting beliefs). Despite that, the investigation exonerated the team involved.

“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” according to that investigation. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, was stunned as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told me. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”

Trump had, in fact, secretly issued loosened rules for counterterrorism “direct action” operations, including for drone strikes in places like Somalia, according to a partially redacted copy of the document. By the end of March 2017, the number of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia had skyrocketed. “The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” retired Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, recalled. During the Obama administration, by contrast, strikes required high-level approval, according to a drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed. “Giving strike authority down to a ground commander was a massive difference,” he explained. “It had a big effect.” Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump once again relaxed targeting principles and (all too predictably) U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across multiple U.S. war zones spiked.

“They have nothing but crime,” President Trump — himself a convicted felon 34 times over — said of Somalia, as he raged on about that country.

To date, no one has ever been held accountable for the deaths of Luul or Mariam – or any other civilians killed in Trump’s war in Somalia. Nor has anyone been held responsible for those killed in the strike in Yemen that gravely wounded Adel Al Manthari. Or those slain in the raid on a Yemeni village by Navy SEALs. Or the innocents who died in the attack on an immigrant detention center in that country. Or in the strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean Sea. Or for the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Iran.

Some of those attacks could well have been categorized as crimes of war. Others are certainly extrajudicial killings — or, simply put, outright murders. Those deaths and so many others can be traced back to Donald Trump and his contempt for the lives of people across this planet.

“It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty,” Trump said of Somalia, but in truth, that’s a more apt description for the soul of the country that exports slaughter, year after year, and is led by a man who revels in it. “It’s a horrible place,” he continued about Somalia.

And once again, every accusation of his should be considered a confession, too.

Copyright 2026 Nick Turse

Via Tomidispatch.com

Former Turkish Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s proposal to establish a joint maritime security force—composed of Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Turkey—to secure and temporarily administer the waterway offers this alternative precisely. By leveraging the unique reservoir of political trust these specific nations enjoy across Washington, Tehran, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) capitals, this formula provides a pragmatic, honor-saving way out of the current quagmire.

The primary viability of this proposal rests on the unique diplomatic currency possessed by its core triadic pillars: Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Crucially, these three nations enjoy a rare commodity in modern foreign policy: the explicit trust of the Trump administration. Washington has consistently identified Ankara, Islamabad, and Jakarta as vital, reliable anchors for regional stabilization and international burden-sharing. For an American administration that operates heavily on personal diplomatic trust and high-impact deal-making, a security architecture spearheaded by these three trusted partners satisfies Washington’s strategic demands without requiring direct U.S. military entanglements. It appeals directly to the administration’s preference for bold, disruptive, yet reliable ally-led frameworks.

Equally critical is that this coalition has impeccable bilateral equity with the key regional antagonists. Unlike Western powers, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia maintain highly functional, respectful, and historic relationships with Iran. Tehran does not view these prominent Muslim-majority democracies through the adversarial lens of imperial encirclement. Concurrently, these four nations enjoy deep economic, security, and diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia and the broader GCC block. This dual-acceptability is a rare geopolitical asset. Because both sides of the Persian Gulf trust these countries, their joint presence in the Strait of Hormuz cannot be misinterpreted as a hostile vanguard, transforming a volatile maritime choke point into a neutral, stabilized zone of shared stewardship.

File photo. Strait of Hormuz. Public Domain. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Indra Beaufort). Via Picryl.

Furthermore, the international standing of the proposal’s architect, Ahmet Davutoglu, lends immense intellectual and diplomatic weight to the initiative. As a highly respected scholar-statesman, Davutoglu commands a remarkably positive image in international politics, recognized for his deep conceptual understanding of regional equilibrium and institutional diplomacy. His involvement elevates the proposal from a reactionary tactical deployment to a sophisticated, legitimate blueprint for systemic peace. His reputation ensures that the plan arrives on the international stage with immediate intellectual credibility, making it an easier sell to the United Nations Security Council and the broader global community.

Ultimately, Davutoglu’s Hormuz plan succeeds because it builds a bridge over the region’s deep political divides using the mortar of established trust. By designating Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia as guarantors of transit through the Strait, the international community can secure a vital global economic artery within a framework built on mutual respect and operational excellence. It offers Iran a dignified exit from economic isolation, guarantees the GCC’s security, satisfies Washington’s mandate for reliable ally-led solutions, and establishes the foundational muscle memory for a permanent, inclusive Regional Security Forum. In an era defined by polarized deadlocks, this trust-broker formula provides the most viable path toward sustainable maritime and regional stability.

By Alexander Korolev, UNSW Sydney

(The Conversation) – It’s been quite a week for Beijing, with back-to-back visits by the leaders of the United States and Russia. Chinese President Xi Jinping has had his hands full with hosting duties, gun salutes, photo opportunities and high-level talks.

Each visit was important in its own way. US President Donald Trump’s state visit was his first to Beijing since 2017. It came at a moment of strained China-US relations, with the US at war in the Middle East and its foreign policy undergoing a massive transformation under Trump.

For Putin, it was his 25th official visit to China. The trip was intended to further consolidate the China–Russia strategic alignment amid global uncertainty. Putin was also keen to secure China’s continued economic lifeline and diplomatic cover as its war with Ukraine grinds on.

And while the timing of the back-to-back visits should not be over-interpreted – Moscow says there was “no connection” between the two – they do reveal a deeper structural shift in global politics.

Beijing’s rising confidence

First, the United States is clearly no longer the most important country in China’s strategic worldview – and Beijing is increasingly willing to show it.

This was visible in Xi’s posturing and negotiating style with Trump. From his rather distant handshake to his dominant body language throughout their meeting, Xi
sent a message: Washington has a limited ability to influence Beijing anymore.

The modest outcomes of their summit reinforced this dynamic. Trump left China without a formal deal, a press conference or a joint communiqué. Nor was there a breakthrough on either Iran or Taiwan.

Putin, meanwhile, met his “good and old friend” Xi and took home some 20 agreements ranging from trade to technology.

The most striking, if not unsettling, moment was Xi’s invocation of the “Thucydides Trap” during his meeting with Trump. This is the idea that a rising power inevitably threatens an established one, risking war.

Xi asked a pointed question:

Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?

Xi has used this concept before, but his directness this time sent a warning: the US risks creating a major crisis if it continues to rely on a containment strategy to counter China’s rise.

In short, Beijing used the Trump visit to signal confidence, autonomy and the fact that Washington is not the only capital that matters to China.

Russia has new usefulness to Beijing

Second, the China–Russia alignment has become less equal, but it has gained greater strategic depth. And Beijing is now using it to put pressure on the US leadership.

During a private garden stroll through the highly secretive Zhongnanhai leadership compound last week, Trump asked whether Xi often brings other world leaders there. Xi replied that such visits are “extremely rare,” but added that “Putin has been here”.

The innocent reading of this exchange is that Xi was simply noting the depth of his personal rapport with Putin. But in the current geopolitical context, it also served as a subtle reminder to Trump that China’s “no limits” partnership with Russia is not rhetorical. Beijing was signalling Moscow remains a privileged strategic partner – and that China has options.

The deeper message is this: if Washington seeks to isolate China, Beijing can lean even more heavily on its relationship with Moscow.

China does not need to help Russia “win” in Ukraine to make this point. What matters is that Beijing has the ability – if it chooses – to bolster Russia’s war effort through economic, diplomatic and long-term technological and energy cooperation. Beijing’s influence now extends well beyond the Indo-Pacific and reaches into Europe in ways Washington cannot ignore.

Xi didn’t give Putin everything he sought during his meeting, though.

With the turmoil in the Middle East cutting off China’s access to Middle Eastern oil and gas, Moscow sensed an opportunity to push ahead on a new pipeline, called the Power of Siberia-2, to bring Russian gas to China.

While Putin and Xi came to a “general understanding on the parameters” of the project, however, no final deal was signed.

China is now in the driver’s seat

Third, China now sees itself as the central node of great-power politics.

For many decades, the United States sat at the apex of the “great triangle”, balancing between China and the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Today, the geometry has flipped. Both Trump and Putin felt compelled to come to Beijing – for stabilisation, reassurance and strategic signalling – even as they confront each other elsewhere.

China is not playing triangular diplomacy in the classic sense. It is not trying to pit Washington and Moscow against each other. Instead, it is positioning itself as the system’s centre: the place where major-power diplomacy must pass, even if the outcomes are uncertain.

China is not at the apex of this arrangement because it is the strongest militarily or economically, but because it has the confidence to engage the US and Russia on its own terms.

File Photo, detail. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin. Public Domain. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) Via Picryl

In this new geometry, great-power politics does not revolve around Washington. Increasingly, it runs through Beijing.

Alexander Korolev, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article was originally published by Truthout

Perhaps some things should never be spoken — for, when they are, they leave us aghast, in a state of horror. Think here of the ghostly figure in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” During the height of the war on Iran, Donald Trump threatened: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Those are words that elicit something frightening, terrifying. Let’s be frank. The words, which clearly constitute a genocidal threat, are atrocious and should make all of us want to scream. 

That threat came after Trump also threatened the Iranian government to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Not only is this not “presidential,” but it’s characteristic of someone who has a warped moral compass; it is indicative of someone who has failed to understand the dignity and preciousness of human life. 

Even if never carried out, the threats — and the ones he’s issued since then — speak to the fundamental and despicable depravity and horror of the threat. There are over 93 million people in Iran, which means that Trump is fantasizing about their total annihilation. This is inhuman and ruthless. It is evil. 

To address the issue of Trump’s inept moral compass, I conducted this exclusive interview with Norman Solomon, who is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. Solomon insightfully argues that there is a larger existential issue at stake that speaks to the history of U.S. militarism and its terror spread around the world. Within this context, Trump, who is himself unfit for office, is a symptom of a deeper and unchecked form of U.S. military power.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

George Yancy: What manner of man is Trump?

Norman Solomon: The beyond-huge problem is that he’s president of the United States, and that is what’s so mind-blowing and extremely dangerous about “what manner of man” he is. The fact that Trump can be president — for the second time yet — with control over two branches of the U.S. government and dominance of the Supreme Court, points us urgently to questions about how the fascistic political movement that he leads can be defeated. And a key question is, “What manner of country is the United States?”

Our current crises are in many ways the most extreme and dangerous to human survival in any lifetimes because Trump has shamelessly intensified and boosted the proclivities of all nuclear-age presidents while bottom-feeding and spewing the toxic layers of U.S. society with flagrant racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and contempt for those who are not white rich males. It doesn’t in the slightest lessen the enormity of Trump’s huge guilt in committing crimes against humanity to point out that many of his predecessors have also been guilty of terrible war crimes, including what the Nuremberg tribunal called the “supreme international crime” — a war of aggression. In this century, four presidents have given orders that qualify them to stand in the dock at The Hague to face war crimes charges.

Last summer and this year, Trump launched a completely unprovoked war of aggression against Iran.

President Joe Biden was a direct accomplice in the Gaza genocide as he insisted on sending billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel.

President Barack Obama, who expanded warfare with drones that were experienced by so many people under them as airborne instruments of terror, tripled up to 100,000 the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

President George W. Bush launched and continued a so-called “war on terror” that, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University, has directly resulted in close to 1 million deaths and, including indirect results, has killed at least 4.5 million people.

Yes, Trump is clearly unfit, and that in and of itself is a humungous 24/7 problem for the United States and the rest of the world as long as he’s president. At the same time, his regime would be impossible without its ability to gain and retain near-dictatorial power in many respects because of a dire shortage of democracy in the United States — a shortage that, while severely worsening in the past 15 months, has always been present, no matter what civics textbooks told us.

In your book, War Made Invisible, you open with two quotes by writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley. One quote reads, “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” I know about the history of white supremacist propaganda, both in the U.S. and abroad, and how it worked to dehumanize Black people and how white folk internalized that propaganda. This is what made it so easy within the U.S. for many whites to participate in the lynching of Black bodies, treating the gruesome spectacle as a “picnic.” Or think here of the Berlin Conference in the 1880s, in which 14 European nations and the U.S. laid claim to the domination and control of Africa, dividing the continent up among themselves. I would argue that the conceptualization of such a violent colonial project was inextricably linked to the egregious belief that Black people could not govern themselves, that they were “inferior” and lacked true political agency. Talk about Trump’s use of propaganda vis-à-vis his war of choice in Iran, or even, if you like, the propaganda of the military war machine that is the U.S.

Racism and racialist views of humanity, along with pernicious “Western” ethnocentrism, were inherent and implicit in the “war on terror” from the outset. Nearly 25 years later, what Trump has been doing is in many ways an extension of that continuous warfare of aggression, resolutely repackaged as defensive operations.

The U.S. military didn’t bomb Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya or other countries because their residents were people of color. However, the fact that they were people of color made it easier for the U.S. to launch and sustain those wars; easier because of the racial, religious, cultural, and ethnic biases of U.S. news media, elected officials, institutions, and much of the public.

Amid all the differences in how Trump has behaved publicly compared to Biden or Obama or Bush, it’s too easy to forget that the results for huge numbers of people on the other end of Pentagon firepower have been essentially the same. What was done to Afghanistan and Iraq, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, can be forgotten or downplayed only with the aid of varieties of individual biases and structural forgetting that lets the essence of U.S. foreign policy — and much of U.S. society — off the hook. Likewise absolved is the actual overall U.S. role in the world.

I was well into writing War Made Invisible a few years ago before I realized a key reality that has been hidden in plain sight: Virtually everyone killed by the U.S. military during the “war on terror” has been a person of color. To point out that reality seems to be a tacit taboo in U.S. mainstream media and politics. And that implicit taboo goes some distance toward explaining how the dynamics described in that quote from Huxley are operative, rendering it all too easy “to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

That’s a core task of the warmakers who appear at news conferences and give ballyhooed speeches and get interviewed with inordinate deference by U.S. corporate media. Euphemisms and nationalistic blather mask the human realities of mass killing. This simple and momentous systematic distortion of language — twisting and strangling a human language until it’s bent into shape to serve inhuman purposes — goes a long way toward explaining how the dynamics described in that Huxley quote are operative.

While we’re suitably aghast at how Donald Trump or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deploy words from their propaganda arsenals, the much smoother — and for most people, much less disturbing — rhetoric that came from say Biden or his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin often served much the same desensitizing and euphemistic purposes. 

The U.S. war machinery has been in various settings of high gears for several decades. After the mass horrors of the U.S. wars on Southeast Asia, a kind of hiatus set in during the last half of the 1970s. But a gear-up took place during the 1980s, with warm-up sessions for aggression against Grenada and then Panama.

Whatever lessons had been learned or at least observed about the Vietnam War were cast aside in the jingoistic zealotry of 1991 with the U.S. triumph of the Gulf War against Iraq. At that point, immediately and memorably foreshadowing decades of a hyper-warfare state to come, President George H.W. Bush declared with evident great emotion: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” That was 35 years ago. 

Since then, the list of countries that the U.S. bombed with impunity has gotten longer and longer. Since early last year, Trump has ordered the bombing of seven countries, aside from boats in international waters. Along the way, he has blazed new demagogic trails with candor. His virulent, unapologetic racism, not even bothering to cloak his allegiance to white supremacy, has become normalized.

In my last question, I used the expression “war of choice.” Do you accept this as a legitimate interpretation of the current war in Iran? 

I’m not fond of the phrase “war of choice,” partly because what it’s supposed to mean seems so squirrely. Every U.S. war in the last 80 years has involved a choice from the top of the American government that shouldn’t have been made — that was aggressive and not defensive — routinely based on lies, as I documented with painful details in my book War Made Easy. That book was published in 2005, and the repetition compulsion has remained undisrupted since then.

Presidents have made choices to wage aggressive war, and in that historic context, the phrases “U.S. wars” and “wars of aggression” are redundant. The United States is the world’s preeminent warfare state, by dubious virtue of being not only the most militarily powerful by far, but also by being willing to wantonly use that military might to attack so many countries so often and with such unrelenting violence.

There is a great deal of disagreement regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s influence over Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. I really want to say: instigated the war with Iran. I say this because if attacking Iran was about Iranians soon acquiring a nuclear bomb, there are experts who have contested that claim, suggesting that “there was no evidence that Iran was close to a nuclear weapon.” 

Israel has at least several dozen nuclear weapons, a fact hardly ever mentioned in U.S. media, and it’s difficult to think of a country that has shown less restraint in the last years. Israel has been literally terrorizing people in Iran and Lebanon lately, and for years — decades really — it has terrorized Palestinian people in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank.

In all the talk about nuclear weapons, rarely do we hear clarity about the agreement that the U.S. and Iran entered into in 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The agreement was possible because Iran and the Obama administration made it possible. The deal was working quite well with rigorous and successful inspections, and if it had remained in place, there could have been no doubt about foreclosing Iran’s developing nuclear weapons. But Trump killed the JCPOA in his first term in 2018, and Biden failed to resuscitate it.

Netanyahu is in many ways a grotesque matched set with Trump — completely self-focused and all too eager to cause massive death and suffering. A lot of people who are pro-Israel want to believe that the main problem with Israel is that its prime minister is Netanyahu. I think that’s a convenient illusion. The main problem is the implemented ideology of “Israelism” and its commitment to Jewish supremacy within the country’s ever-expanding de facto borders. A horrific consequence is the ongoing genocidal treatment of Palestinian people.

As you know, on January 27 of this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which keeps track of the Doomsday Clock, said that the world is at 85 seconds to midnight, where midnight means that we are getting closer to a global event that will leave our planet uninhabitable. That is the stuff of nightmares. I know that you don’t possess a magical crystal ball, but where are we headed?

Photo by Farid Karimi on Unsplash

The nuclear arms race is out of control, while nine countries already have nuclear weapons. The United States has led the world toward Armageddon by dismantling arms-control agreements while plunging ahead with a massive nuclear-weapons “modernization” program. Unless we can put a stop to the swiftly escalating U.S. militarism, the Doomsday Clock will keep ticking toward a midnight so horrific that none of us can fully grasp what it would mean.

I was lucky enough to get to know the antiwar and human rights activist Fred Branfman before he died in 2014. More than anyone else, he effectively challenged the mass-murdering U.S. bombardment of the Plain of Jars in Laos during the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

When I asked about hope, he said: “When I looked more deeply at my own life, I noticed that my life was not now and never had been built around ‘hope.’ Laos was an example. I went there, I learned to love the peasants, the bombing shocked my psyche and soul to the core, and I responded — not because I was hopeful or hopeless, but because I was alive.”

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