RAMIN MAZAHERI—When I got home a colleague sent me this video. It’s of a young man named Sam Mena, a photojournalist for a local CBS-affiliated media in Arizona. The commotion was because he had set his left arm on fire in protest. Stunning. Adding to the this was the fact that he was screaming, “We spread the misinformation.” This wasn’t just a protest of Washington’s complicity in the Gaza genocide – it was also a protest against the US mainstream media’s coverage of it by a US mainstream media journalist. It’s a shocking scene, and it’s not easy to watch. This is probably the best video of it out there.
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ROGER BOYD—You would expect some substance from a person that could be a heart beat away from being president of the United States, but then we have J. D. Vance. He was born in Middletown Ohio in 1984, and he has written that his childhood was one of poverty, abuse and his mother’s drug addiction; being raised mainly by his maternal grandparents. In 2003, after graduating from high school, he joined the US Marine Corp in the non-combat role of military journalist, including six months in Iraq in 2005. Working to all intents and purposes in the public affairs section of the US Marine Corp, Vance would have become experienced in how to put stories together that hide much of the truth and weave stories that humanize what is an elite killing machine.
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FEMI AKOLAFE—o, we are not Russian bots and are not persuaded by Russian propaganda, even though I feel entitled to be swayed by whatever I choose.
It is the 500+ years of unremitting violence and destruction that people of the European Stock have inflicted on the rest of humanity that makes some of us cheer Putin as he struggles to end the hegemonic domination of the World by Westerners.
I am no expert on biology, much less on genetics, so I cannot offer opinions on what exactly makes people of European extraction find it impossible to live and let live. Why do they have an insatiable desire to dominate and control?
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BRUCE LERRO—In the 19thcentury when liberalism really took hold as a political ideology, liberals were not interested in democracy, and considered it “mob rule”. Most industrialized countries did not have the right to vote at the end of the 19th century. Back then farmer populist parties and socialist parties took their democracy seriously, bringing economics into it. The result was a “substantive democracy” championed by Charles Merriman and Charles Beard in the 1930s. But the rise of fascism and communism had shaken liberal confidence in the natural sympathy between democracy and capitalism. So in the 1940s Joseph Schumpeter introduced a weakened form of democracy as simply the circulation of elite politicians that people choose between. The procedural democracy of Robert Dahl of the 1950s involved choosing between these elites through voting. There was nothing about economics.
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EDITORS—For the past 10 months, Gaza’s Palestinians have faced what can be described as a war of extermination, with the Israeli occupation targeting all facets of Palestinian life and systematically eliminating resistance leaders both domestically and abroad.
Thus, the announcement of Yahya Sinwar’s election as Haniyeh’s successor in Gaza was both a surprise to the Israeli occupation and a cause for celebration among Palestinians and their factions.
