#U.S. Peace Council

[enyementv]

The Chairman of the Leadership Council stated that the Houthi militia's surrender to the U.S. confirms that force is the best path to peace.

President Rashad Alimi Affirms Russia’s Support for Yemen In a recent interview with Russia Today, President Dr. Rashad Mohammed Alimi, head of the Presidential Leadership Council, expressed confidence in Russia’s ongoing collaboration with the international community. He emphasized the need to support the Yemeni people’s aspirations to restore state institutions, end the Houthi militia’s…

[afloweroutofstone]

The Trump administration accidentally included the conservative editor of The Atlantic in a group chat where they were discussing, in great detail, the US bombing campaign in Yemen

In all, 18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials; Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and someone identified only as “S M,” which I took to stand for Stephen Miller. I appeared on my own screen only as “JG.”

...I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president...

At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”...

At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”...

The account identified as “JD Vance” addressed a message at 8:45 to @Pete Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” (The administration has argued that America’s European allies benefit economically from the U.S. Navy’s protection of international shipping lanes.)

It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.

[t-jfh]

COMMUNITY WARNING - GRAPHIC CONTENT: The following ABC News article, ‘Mothers in Gaza are watching their children slowly starve to death and are unable to stop it’, contains graphic pictures and descriptions of war that some viewers may find distressing.

Watin has lost half her body weight in the past five months — from 14 kilograms down to 7kg. (Photo: ABC News)

Khouloud al-Aswad says it took 10 years to finally have a baby and now she fears little Watin is slipping away from her. (Photo: ABC News)

Mothers in Gaza are watching their children slowly starve to death and are unable to stop it

Since the war started after the October 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, the country has increased its siege on Gaza, and it largely controls the entry of goods — including food, water, medical supplies and fuel.

Internal food sources have been depleted in the enclave and more than 2 million Palestinians inside are largely reliant on humanitarian aid to survive.

But for months, the supplies reaching the enclave have been a fraction of what is needed.

UN officials have cited Israeli inspections, Israeli strikes on aid convoys and the killing of Gazan policemen (who were escorting aid deliveries) by Israel as some of the obstacles to effective aid delivery.

By Middle East correspondent Allyson Horn in Jerusalem and ABC staff in Gaza

ABC News - 20 March 2024

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To survive, families in Gaza have been making bread from animal feed. (Photo: ABC News)

Young children are growing up in the shadow of war. (Photo: ABC News)

Maazize Nabhan's children sit gathered around a fire among the ruins of their home in northern Gaza. (Photo: ABC News)

To curb their hunger, the children gather sticks to mix into their tea. (Photo: ABC News)

Cherihan Chaher Askar makes "soup" out of water and weeds pulled from the ground. (Photo: ABC News)

The weeds Cherihan's husband picks with his son are used to make soup. (Photo: ABC News)

Inside Gaza, this family is forced to eat bread made from animal feed and tea made from sticks

Maazize Nabhan's young children hold what appears to be crumbly pieces of bread in their small hands as they sit around a fire in Gaza.

But the flat, palm-sized discs are actually ground up animal food, clumped together and shaped to look like an everyday meal.

It's the only nourishment the mother has to offer her desperately hungry children as starvation inside parts of Gaza reaches catastrophic levels.

Since the attack by Hamas on October 7, Israel has imposed a siege on Gaza, where it controls the entry of nearly all the goods, including essential aid such as food.

Large areas of agricultural land have been destroyed during the war, so most families are relying on humanitarian supplies.

At the fire, Maazize is also boiling some tea flavoured with sticks and leaves her family scavenged off the ground.

By Middle East correspondent Allyson Horn in Jerusalem and ABC staff in Gaza

ABC News - 23 February 2024

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The UN resolution passed after the United States abstained from voting.

(Photo: Reuters: Andrew Kelly)

Relations between Netanyahu and Biden are at an all-time low. (Photo: AP / Evan Vucci)

America has said to Israel that enough is enough. But how far is Benjamin Netanyahu willing to push the friendship?

Washington's decision to allow a vote at the United Nations Security Council that Israel did not want indicates a new low between the United States and Israel.

It further isolates Israel. The US, its strongest supporter, has finally said enough is enough.

The US has been trying for months to get Israel to change the way it's been prosecuting the war in Gaza.

US officials have made clear that Israel has been killing too many civilians since the war began after Hamas' atrocities in southern Israel on October 7.

Months ago, President Joe Biden described Israel's bombing of Gaza as "indiscriminate" – a damning description of this tactic in one of the most densely-populated places on Earth.

By global affairs editor John Lyons

ABC News - 26 March 2024

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[sayruq]

AHEAD OF THE United Nations Security Council action to consider the Palestinian Authority’s application to become a full member of the international body, the United States is lobbying nations to reject such membership, hoping to avoid an overt “veto” by Washington. The lobbying effort, revealed in copies of unclassified State Department cables obtained by The Intercept, is at odds with the Biden administration’s pledge to fully support a two-state solution. In 2012, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution granting Palestine the status of a non-member observer state. The diplomatic cables detail pressure being applied to members of the Security Council, including Malta, the rotating president of the council this month. Ecuador in particular is being asked to lobby Malta and other nations, including France, to oppose U.N. recognition. The State Department’s justification is that normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states is the fastest and most effective way to achieve an enduring and productive statehood. While clarifying that President Joe Biden has worked vigorously to support “Palestinian aspirations for statehood” within the context “of a comprehensive peace that would resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a diplomatic cable dated April 12 details U.S. talking points against a U.N. vote for Palestinian statehood. The cable says that Security Council members must be persuaded to reject any proposal for Palestinian statehood — and thereby its recognition as a sovereign nation — before the council’s open debate on the Middle East, scheduled for April 18. “It remains the U.S. view that the most expeditious path toward a political horizon for the Palestinian people is in the context of a normalization agreement between Israel and its neighbors,” the cable reads. “We believe this approach can tangibly advance Palestinian goals in a meaningful and enduring way.” “We therefore urge you not to support any potential Security Council resolution recommending the admission of ‘Palestine’ as a U.N. member state, should such a resolution be presented to the Security Council for a decision in the coming days and weeks.”

[historyandmemes]

Sunday, Dec. 25, 2023 — Another day, another horrific massacre of innocent Palestinians by Israel. The US and the international community must force Israel to STOP the carnage, STOP the war crimes, STOP the depravity.

The world continues to watch as the rogue state of Israel inflicts unthinkable crimes against humanity. The complicity is sickening, the inaction despicable. Palestinians deserve better, we've failed them.

At least 70 killed in Israeli strike on refugee camp in central Gaza, health ministry says — (Source: The Guardian) Guardian staff and agencies | Sun 24 Dec 2023 18.04 EST

An Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp in central Gaza has killed at least 70 people, Palestinian health officials have said as they warned the toll was likely to rise and the strikes that began hours before midnight continued into Christmas Day. The Palestinian health ministry spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qidra, said the death toll was likely to climb. “What is happening at the Maghazi camp is a massacre that is being committed on a crowded residential square,” he told Reuters.

Israel strikes 2 homes, killing more than 90 Palestinians. Biden says he didn’t request a cease-fire — (Source: Associated Press) BY NAJIB JOBAIN AND SAMY MAGDY | Updated 4:12 PM EST, December 23, 2023

U.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday, calling it a long and private conversation a day after the Biden administration again shielded Israel in the diplomatic arena. On Friday, the U.N. Security Council adopted a watered-down resolution that calls for immediately speeding up aid deliveries to desperate civilians in Gaza, but not for a cease-fire. “I did not ask for a cease-fire,” Biden said of the call. Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister “made clear that Israel would continue the war until achieving all its goals.”

Netanyahu vows to fight on in Gaza; Islamic Jihad joins Cairo talks — (Source: Reuters) By Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Dan Williams | December 24, 2023 2:58 PM EST

CAIRO/JERUSALEM, Dec 24 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Sunday to fight deeper into Gaza after his troops endured one of the worst days of losses of their ground war, while militant group Islamic Jihad joined talks in Cairo, a sign diplomacy was still alive. ... The militant groups have so far said they will not discuss any release of hostages unless Israel ends its war in Gaza, while the Israelis say they are willing to discuss only a temporary pause in fighting.

DON'T LOOK AWAY. KEEP UP PUBLIC PRESSURE. PUSH FOR PEACE.

[mariacallous]

Dozens of Jewish organizations have signed an open letter to President Donald Trump protesting his planned mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

The letter, published on Jan. 27, demonstrates that as Trump retakes office, a range of major Jewish organizations intend to continue to be vocal in opposing his policies on immigration. The signatories include a range of centrist and liberal Jewish groups with a national presence, including the leadership of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist religious movements. Dozens of local Jewish groups and institutions also signed.

“[W]e write in opposition to your Administration’s plans to launch mass deportations, build massive detention camps, and conduct sweeping raids,” the letter says. “We urge you to chart a different course and change your stated plans for widespread persecution of immigrants. America has long prided itself on being a place of refuge, a beacon of hope for those fleeing persecution and seeking a better life.”

The letter comes as the Trump administration has begun immigration arrests in Chicago and is conscripting the military to deport migrants.

Immigration has historically been an issue of concern for American Jews, many of whom are descended from families that arrived in the United States around the turn of the 20th century, if not later. The letter notes that American Jewry has historically been supportive of immigrant rights.

“Jewish families — past and present, here and elsewhere — know what it is to live in fear for the immediate and long-term safety of our families,” the letter says. “We have been forced to flee, denied access to safety, scapegoated, detained, and exploited. This history and our Jewish values make immigration policy – including ensuring a functioning and welcoming refugee program and protection of the right to seek asylum – deeply personal to the Jewish community.”

When Trump began his first term in 2017, immigration was an animating, and relatively unifying, issue for many U.S. Jewish groups. Groups representing all four major Jewish religious movements opposed his travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries as well as his policy of separating families detained at the border. Jewish groups challenged immigration actions in court, protested at immigration facilities and volunteered and fundraised to aid migrants.

Since then, some major Jewish groups that spoke out during Trump’s first term have become less vocal about immigration. A number of major Jewish groups declined to comment on President Joe Biden’s order last June that effectively shut down the U.S.-Mexico border. Many of those groups also did not sign Monday’s letter.

The letter also opposed a Trump order last week allowing immigration officers to make arrests at houses of worship. “Proposed changes to the immigration policy, including allowing immigration authorities to enter sacred spaces, only serve to exacerbate feelings of fear, panic, and insecurity. People should be able to come together in peace and worship without fear of deportation, detention, or harassment,” it said.

Other signatories included the progressive group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, the Chicago Board of Rabbis, the Jewish refugee aid group HIAS, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Jewish Women International, the liberal Israel lobby J Street, the Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet, National Council of Jewish Women and the liberal rabbinic human rights group T’ruah. Jewish Community Relations Councils in eight cities also signed.

[dostoyevsky-official]

A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity.

[...] “Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

[...] Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it.

[...] Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

[...] Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the agency’s top Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

[...] Grappling with the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many across the U.S. government have become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.

“This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” one senior diplomat told me. “I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”

“The State Department has a whole raft of highly paid, very good lawyers to explain, ‘Actually this is not illegal,’ when in fact it is,” said Ari Tolany, an arms trade authority and director at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “Rules for thee and not for me.”

[...] Several experts told me international law is effectively discretionary for some countries. “American policy ignores it when it’s inconvenient and adheres to it when it is convenient,” said Aaron Miller, a career State Department diplomat who worked for decades under both Democratic and Republican presidents as an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations. “The U.S. does not leverage or bring sustainable, credible, serious pressure to bear on any of its allies and partners,” he added, “not just Israel.”

[...] Immediately after the ICJ’s order about the Rafah invasion, officials in the State Department’s Middle East and communications divisions drafted a list of proposed public statements to acknowledge the importance of the court and express concern over civilians in the city. But Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, nixed almost all of them. He told the officials in a May 24 email that those on the White House’s National Security Council “aren’t going to clear” any recognition of the ruling or criticism of Israel.

[...] Current and former diplomats told me that U.S. leaders are fundamentally unwilling to follow through on the Leahy law and cut off units from American-funded weapons. Instead, they have created multiple processes that give the appearance of accountability while simultaneously undermining any potential results, the experts said.

[...] On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

[mitchipedia]

The Republican wrecking ball is already battering San Diego

Trump and his Republican cronies are already inflicting pain on San Diego County, damaging veterans, education, public health, business, the homeless, migrants and more.

I recently started bookmarking articles chronicling the damage that Trump and his Republican lackeys are doing to us and our neighbors here in the county. Not hypothetical damage, or harm done elsewhere in the U.S. — I was looking for concrete financial, physical and emotional damage that Trump and his Republican supporters are doing here and now.

I had no trouble finding examples. Very soon, I found myself with 50 open tabs, and my browser crashed.

This article compiles all the information I’ve been able to find. It is a looooooooong article. I’ve broken everything up into sections for easier reading. Even as long as this article is, I’m sure I missed a lot.

I originally planned to headline this article “The Trump wrecking ball…. " But this isn’t just about Trump. The entire Republican party is complicit in the damage being done to the U.S. Sadly, that includes your nice Republican city council candidate who comes to all the PTA meetings. The Republican Party has demonstrated universal obedience to Trump. Local Republicans may have been able to resist quietly, for now, in some matters, but if Trump is allowed to continue, local Republicans will soon be brought to heel.

How Republicans are hurting San Diego veterans

Local veterans, healthcare providers, and Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Mike Levin (Democrats) are speaking out against proposed cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Nurses from the VA Medical Center in La Jolla, along with veterans, patients and other union members, rallied in April to protest cuts.

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“Every position is mission critical,” Andrea Johnson, a nurse there, told the crowd. “Eliminating housekeeping, dietary, transportation, respiratory therapists and lab technicians will lead to delays in admissions and delays in care, which can and will result in negative patient outcomes.”

Republicans plan to cut about 80,000 jobs, or about 15% of the VA workforce. The VA serves 15.8 million veterans, nearly 200,000 of whom are in San Diego.

San Diego veterans are afraid the cuts will hurt their care. “I didn’t think Trump would brutalize the government like he is. His efforts have surpassed my darkest images,” said David Cochran, who suffers from emphysema and traumatic brain injury resulting from his U.S. Army service. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is the former Army major’s sole health provider.

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“It really seems like all of the things I was promised as a citizen of this fine country are very quickly either evaporating or intentionally being dismantled and taken apart,” said Ian Mooney, the president of the San Diego chapter of Veterans for Peace.

Republicans are singling out transgender veterans for punishment, which will lead to higher rates of depression and suicide. Levin said the move fits with the party’s attacks on transgender people.

“Anybody who puts on the uniform, who serves our nation voluntarily, who puts their lives at stake in order to defend our freedom and our institutions and our country — we should take care of them,” Levin told the U-T.

How Republicans are hurting San Diego education

Students, parents and educators are raising the alarm over funding cuts to schools and research. As of mid-April, about 40 grant awards have been impacted by disruption notices, including stop work orders, terminations and funding freezes, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) told the San Diego Union-Tribune. The total value of these grants is $59 million.

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The cuts are already leading students to consider leaving research, and even leaving the U.S. “In the past couple of months, I have absolutely considered moving out of academia and looking for other options, even in other countries,” said Sutanay Bhattacharya, who is pursuing a PhD in mathematics. “This has been a devastating time for me.”

UCSD can’t guarantee the first-year grad students will get full stipends and tuition, leading to job insecurity.

Cuts will especially hurt special education and disadvantaged students, starving public schools that provide a leadership role supporting many students with disabilities. San Diego Unified schools have seen Title I funding, which supports high-poverty schools, delayed by over a month. Republicans are holding those funds hostage as part of their fight against diversity, equity and inclusion.

“[San Diego Unified School Board President Cody Petterson] said that because California residents and businesses pay far more in federal taxes than they get in federal spending, Title I funding is California taxpayers’ money returning home,” the U-T reported.

UCSD is bracing for possible $500 million in annual cuts and shelving some building plans.

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Republican cuts are hitting research into HIV, domestic violence, and homicide against pregnant women and more. Research into an HIV vaccine has stopped, along with support for transgender people and autism research. The National Institutes of Health justifies the cuts with handwaving about equity.

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As of mid-April, the Republican-led federal government had revoked visas for 35 international students at UC San Diego and one student at the University of San Diego. Faculty members at UCSD are concerned that international students could be discouraged from attending. The school has nearly 7,200 international students, many crucial to UCSD research, particularly in health, medicine and engineering. International students pay more than $40,000 annually in tuition and fees, about double the rate for California residents.

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Republican budget cuts threaten funding for San Diego museums, libraries and zoos.

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San Diego college faculty and students fear the Republican plan to investigate UC San Diego and other universities, deporting student activists and asserting control over academic programs.

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“This is what fascist regimes do, and it’s kind of a code red for our universities,” said Adam Aron, a psychology professor at UC San Diego who is Jewish. “This is maybe the beginning if we don’t stand up and oppose this.”

Jewish faculty and students around the country, including in San Diego, Republicans are using antisemitism as a pretext to deport people for exercising their rights and crack down on academic freedom.

How Republicans are hurting San Diego’s public health

A nationwide clawback of federal public health funds is leading to the shutdown of the county’s wastewater testing system at the San Diego Epidemiology and Research for COVID Health program (SEARCH), jointly run by UCSD, Scripps Research Institute and the genomics program at Rady Children’s Hospital. The program started testing COVID-19 and expanded to include MPOX. Research is underway to detect influenza, hepatitis, measles and other pathogens.

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The cuts will make it harder to detect infectious diseases and jeopardize all of our health.

How Republicans are hurting San Diego businesses

San Diego and Baja California business leaders and elected officials went on a lobbying mission to Washington, D.C., this month to attempt to mitigate damage to the cross-border economy caused by tariffs. San Diego’s economy is closely linked to Mexico’s, and tariffs will hit us particularly hard.

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In one example, a San Diego small business owner is suing the Republican White House administration over a new financial reporting requirement that the administration claims is cracking down on money laundering by Mexican cartels. Esperanza Gomez Escobar, the owner and manager of Novedades y Servicios Plus, a money services business in San Diego’s Southcrest neighborhood, says the law will financially ruin businesses like hers, violate the Fourth Amendment, and do nothing to combat money laundering.

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These businesses provide check cashing, money transmitting, and foreign currency exchanges, and are already required to report transactions of $10,000 or more. The new rule requires those businesses in 30 targeted California and Texas ZIP codes, including seven in San Diego County, to report all transactions of $200 and over.

Business owners say that would essentially mean submitting costly reports for every transaction and requiring customers to turn over sensitive information such as their names and Social Security numbers, raising concerns that Republicans could use that information in their immigration crackdown.

And criminals will just go to another ZIP code.

“This is a family business … and we’ll have to close if this (order is enacted),” Gomez said.

Additionally, federal agents raided a family-owned business in unincorporated El Cajon, the San Diego Powder & Protective Coatings company, on allegations that the company knowingly employs undocumented immigrants. The company regularly contracts with the U.S. military.

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How Republicans are hurting San Diego’s homeless

Father Joe’s Villages planned to break ground this year on affordable housing complexes downtown that would each hold more than 100 apartments, paid for in part by a multimillion-dollar federal grant. But now Father Joe’s is waiting until at least next year.

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As of late March, some $44 million in funding that local homeless service organizations had been promised had been frozen.

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How Republicans are hurting migrants

As the border tightens, desperate migrants are turning to dangerous human smuggling by sea.

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Migrant shelters around the county and in Tijuana are shutting their doors, following the cutoff in federal funds and immigration crackdowns.

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And it’s not just migrants — Lucas Sielaff, a German national visiting Mexico from Las Vegas, was handcuffed and shackled and spent 16 days in a crowded detention center before being allowed to fly home to Germany. His fiancée, Lennon Tyler, an American citizen, was chained to a bench. Another German tourist, Jessica Brösche, spent over six weeks locked up, including over a week in solitary confinement. The incidents are part of an unprecedented crackdown that includes visitors from Western Europe and Canada, longtime U.S. allies.

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Anecdotally, I’m hearing from friends and business associates in Europe who are canceling trips to the U.S. One friend who lives in the U.K., has visited the U.S. several times but now says he does not expect to visit again in his lifetime (my friend is 60), even though much of his income comes from U.S. business.

San Diego’s tourism economy is at risk if the U.S. comes to be perceived as a dangerous place for non-Americans to visit.

Local Japanese-Americans warn that the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which Republicans are using to persecute migrants today, is the same law used to justify the U.S.’s shameful internment of Japanese-Americans — about two-thirds of whom were American citizens — during World War II.

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Kay Ochi, president of the Japanese-American Historical Society of San Diego, notes that her parents, then 21 and 22, were born in San Diego. They were forced to leave the county and taken to an incarceration camp in the desert of Poston, Arizona.

“That was three years of pure hell,” she said.

About 2,000 people of Japanese descent lived in San Diego County at the time, and San Diego authorities applauded the incarceration, with measures approved by the City Council, County Board of Supervisors, and Chamber of Commerce. The city council, led by then-Council President Sean Elo-Rivera, a Democrat, formally apologized in 2022 and revoked the resolution. Elo-Rivera is still a council member.

What can we do?

A lot. We can demonstrate, we can support Democrats locally and around the country, we can donate and volunteer to our favorite causes and build community ties.

Supervisor Terra-Lawson Remer, a Democrat, laid out an ambitious plan in her recent State of the County Address to bolster services for vulnerable residents and shield the county from looming federal cuts.

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The county is scrambling to address a $40 million hit to public health programs. Funding for Medicaid — which helps the county expand its behavioral health and substance-use treatment services — is also at risk after Congressional Republicans proposed cutting $880 billion over the next 10 years.

Lawson-Remer proposes a local tax ballot measure to offset federal cuts and boost services.

“We can raise the money ourselves, right here at home,” she said, “not by waiting, or begging for D.C. to do its job, but by taking the wheel of our own destiny and steering our own San Diego County ship through this storm.”

But we won’t be able to cushion Republican blows against San Diego if Republicans win a majority of the county Board of Supervisors — and that’s a distinct possibility. The board is now split evenly, 2-2, between Republicans and Democrats, with one vacant seat, in District 1. A special election to fill that seat is scheduled for July 1, pitting a popular Republican against Democrat and Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre. If you live in District 1, please vote for Paloma to help build a firewall against Republican damage, and regardless of where you live, please support her candidacy and get the word out to your friends and family in District 1 to vote.

www.paloma-aguirre.com

Ongoing Republican-led policies are causing tangible harm to San Diego across multiple critical sectors — from veterans’ healthcare and education to public health, local businesses, homelessness, and migrant communities. These cuts and crackdowns are not abstract or distant issues; they actively undermine the well-being and stability of San Diego’s residents and institutions. By supporting local leadership committed to protecting vulnerable populations and advocating for equitable funding and humane policies, San Diegans can work to mitigate these damages and steer the community toward a more just and sustainable future. The stakes are high, but so is the potential for meaningful change if the community unites and acts decisively.

Mitch Wagner is a member at large of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club Board. He lives in La Mesa, a short walk from Lake Murray, with his wife, dog and cats. Contact Mitch at mitch@mitchwagner.com and find his social media links at mitchwagner.com.

[my-cages-were-mental]

important: pls read / share

president trump may be on the brink of war with iran—and if it happens, this won’t just be a few missiles. iran will strike back, and when they do, the consequences will go far beyond american borders. if iran attacks american soil, it won’t just be the united states responding. NATO—a powerful alliance of 32 countries—will likely be drawn in, making this a global conflict, not just an american one.

for those of you unaware, NATO's principle of collective defense, enshrined in article 5 of the borth atlantic treaty, kicks in when an armed attack occurs against one or more of its members. this means that an attack on one member is considered an attack on all members, and they are obligated to assist the attacked member. while article 5 has only been invoked once, in response to the 9/11 attacks, the principle of collective defense remains a cornerstone of NATO's security commitment.

the countries in NATO are as follows: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Türkiye, United Kingdom, and the United States.

if iran were to launch an attack on american soil, NATO could and likely would respond under article 5 of the north atlantic treaty. while such an attack could lead to collective defense measures, the actual response would depend on the nature of the attack, the clarity of attribution, and the political will of NATO allies. it would not automatically mean a declaration of war by NATO, but it could trigger a serious collective response depending on the circumstances. if iran bombed american soil—with clear evidence of responsibility and intent—it would almost certainly be classified as an armed attack, and the U.S. could invoke article 5 of the NATO treaty. this would prompt an emergency meeting of NATO’s north atlantic council, where all 32 members would consult on a collective response. if article 5 were officially invoked, NATO members would be expected to assist the U.S.—though each country decides individually how to contribute.

so would an attack on american soil likely would invoke NATO? yes. however because each country decides how they would like to contribute, this does not mean your country will be at war and at risk of an attack. there are many ways a country can assist another NATO member, including through military force, intelligence, cyber support, or other means.

is this a scary time? yes. do you have the right to be nervous? 100%. however, fear doesn’t mean panic—and uncertainty doesn’t mean chaos. the world has been through tense moments before, and what matters most now is staying informed, calm, and clear-headed. leaders across NATO will be weighing every option carefully, and no decision will be made lightly. this isn’t about jumping into war—it’s about defending peace, protecting allies, and deterring further violence. in times like these, it’s important to separate emotion from fact and speculation from reality. stay grounded, stay aware, and remember: even in uncertain times, diplomacy, dialogue, and strategic restraint remain powerful tools.

stay safe everyone, and stay informed <3

[reality-detective]

9 Little Known Facts about US History 👇

1. The Revolutionary War was a fraud. The "United States" did not actually declare Independence from Great Britain or the King.

America has always been a British Colony. The “UNITED STATES” is a corporation, not a land-mass, that existed before the Revolutionary War. [Articles of Association, October 20th, 1774].

2. British Triops did not completely leave the 13 American colonies until 1796 [Respublica v. Sweers 1 Dallas 43, Treaty of Commerce 8 Stat 116, The Society for Propagating the Gospel, &c. V. New Haven 8 Wheat 464, Treaty of Peace 8 Stat 80, IRS Publication 6209]

3. The King of England financed both sides of the Revolutionary War [Treaty at Versailles. July 16, 1782, Treaty of Peace 8 Stat 80.]

4. The gold fringe, symbolic of Royalty, which is attached to the border of every U.S. flag hanging in every courtroom across America symbolizes America being ruled, to this day, by Great Britain under International Maritime Admiralty Law.

5. There are no judicial courts in America and there has not been since 1789. Judges do not enforce Statutes and Codes. Executive Administrators enforce Statutes and Codes. There have not been any judges in America since 1789. [FRC V. GE 281 US 464, Keller v. PE 261 US 428, 1 Stat. 138-178].



6. The most powerful court in America is not the United States Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. (42 Pa.C.S.A. 502)



7. If you are of legal age and retain legal counsel in your defense, you are automatically assumed by the court to be a mentally incompetent ward, and can therefore be remanded indefinitely to any mental institution of the court's choosing.

8. You can not use the U.S. Constitution to defend yourself in admiralty court, because you are not a “Party” to it. (Padelford Fay & Co. v. The Mayor and Alderman of The City of Savannah, 14 Georgia 438, 520.)

9. The legal definition of “The People" under the Constitution does not include you and me. (Barron v. Mayor & City Council of Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243)

Interesting... Don't You Think? Or don't you think? 🤔

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of #Iran concerning the #UnitedStates military aggression against Iran's peaceful nuclear facilities

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran condemns in the strongest possible terms, the United States’ brutal military aggression against Iran’s peaceful nuclear facilities—a grave and unprecedented violation of the fundamental principles of the Charter of the United Nations and the international law. The war-mongering and lawless regime of the United States of America is held fully responsible for the dangerous consequences and far-reaching implications of this egregious act of aggression and heinous crime.

The U.S. military aggression against the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of a UN member state—carried out in collusion with the genocidal Israeli regime—once again laid bare the depth of depravity that governs American foreign policy and revealed the extent of hostility harbored by the U.S. ruling establishment against the peace-seeking and independence-loving people of Iran.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is resolved to defend Iran's territory, sovereignty, security and people by all force and means against the United States' criminal aggression.

The U.S. unlawful attack on Iran’s peaceful nuclear facilities, which occurred in the early hours of the 10th day of Israel’s military aggression against Iran, has unequivocally exposed Washington’s criminal complicity with the Zionist regime in orchestrating and waging a war against Iran. This act of aggression, perpetrated by a permanent member of the Security Council, against Iran’s peaceful nuclear facilities constitutes not only a flagrant breach of the UN Charter—especially the prohibition of the use of force under Article 2(4) and the obligation to respect states' territorial integrity and sovereignty—but also a violation of the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 and a devastating blow to the global non-proliferation regime.Silence in the face of such blatant aggression would plunge the world into an unprecedented level of danger and chaos.

The Islamic Republic of Iran reminds the #UnitedNations, the Security Council, the UN Secretary-General, the International Atomic Energy Agency (#IAEA), and other relevant international bodies of their responsibilities to take urgent and decisive action in response to this appalling breach of international law. As a founding member of the United Nations, the Islamic Republic of Iran calls on the Organization and its responsible member states to fulfill their responsibilities in the face of the United States’ blatant unlawful unilateral acts against Iran. We urge the UN Security Council to convene an emergency session to unequivocally condemn this criminal act of aggression by the United States against Iran and to hold the United States accountable for its egregious violation of the fundamental principles of United Nations Charter and of the norms of international law.

The responsibility of the IAEA and its Director General—who, through evident bias in favor of warmongering parties, paved the way for this recent catastrophe—is now clearer than ever. We call on the IAEA Board of Governors to immediately convene and carry out its legal responsibility in response to this dangerous U.S. attack on Iran’s peaceful nuclear facilities, all of which have been under the Agency’s full safeguards and monitoring.

The world must not forget that it was the United States that, in the midst of a diplomatic process, betrayed diplomacy by supporting the genocidal and lawbreaking Israeli regime to impose a war of aggression on the Iranian nation. Now, in completion of that regime’s unlawful and criminal acts, the United States itself has launched a dangerous war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It has now become abundantly clear to all that the very regime which enjoys permanent membership in the Security Council is beholden to no principle or morality and will stop at no illegality or crime to serve the aims of a genocidal, occupying regime.

June 22, 2025

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

History Repeating Itself 💔

Joe Biden’s Role in the Yom Kippur War

Joe Biden had his first meeting with an Israeli leader, Golda Meir, on the eve of the Yom Kippur war, right after meeting with officials in Cairo. During the then junior senator’s meeting with Meir, Biden suggested that Israel make a unilateral withdrawal from settlements for peace, criticizing the settlement policies of the Labor Party, and suggesting they represent a form of “creeping annexation.” Though Biden assured Meir that Egyptian officials were convinced of Israel’s military superiority, 40 days later, Sadat initiated a surprise attack against Israel.

This is the gist of a bombshell tweet from Israel’s Channel 13 reporter Nadav Eyal containing excerpts from a classified memo from an Israeli official who attended that fateful meeting. While it may have been the first meeting between Biden and an Israeli prime minister, it was certainly not the last. In subsequent meetings with Israeli prime ministers, Biden threatened Menachem Begin with withholding U.S. aid, and publicly upbraided Benyamin Netanyahu because it had been announced in a town council meeting that 1600 homes were to be built in future in the Jewish Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo (more about this here).   

Joe Biden paints that early meeting with Golda as something precious that cemented in his mind how important Israel is to the Jewish people. It is clear, however, that Joe Biden has always been against the Jewish people settling their indigenous territory. The very thought of Jews planning to build homes in Jerusalem makes him furious. Therefore, contrary to the love fest with Golda he has often described, Biden used the first chance he had to meet with an Israeli prime minister to broach the subject of unilateral concessions.

One wonders how much clout the young senator wielded at that time. Not to mention the timing of subsequent events, with the surprise attack on Israel by Egypt occurring just 40 days after Biden’s meeting with Meir. Is it possible that Golda Meir incurred wider U.S. displeasure by refusing to entertain Biden’s suggestion of unilateral concessions? Was Egypt perhaps emboldened by this state of affairs to attack Israel without fear of American intervention?

During its years in office, Israel fought the 1956 Sinai War, the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. Labor agreed to UN Resolution 242 and the notion of trading land for peace. Nevertheless, successive Labor governments established settlements in the disputed territories and refrained from dismantling illegal settlements, such as those established in 1968 at Qiryat Arba in Hebron by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, and others set up by Gush Emunim. By 1976, more than thirty settlements had been established on the West Bank; however, their population was fewer than 10,000.

"TODAY’S BLOG:

Joe Biden’s Role in the Yom Kippur War

In January 1973, Joe Biden was sworn in as Senator from Delaware.

September of that year found him in the Middle East on a trip to Egypt. Shortly thereafter, Biden was in Israel in a meeting with Israeli PM Golda Meir.

In that meeting, Biden convinced Meir that Egypt would not attack Israel by convincing her that Egypt thought that Israel had absolute military superiority.

The meeting was documented on October 2, 1973 in a secret letter (below) written by Israel Foreign Ministry official Gideon Jordan. Four days later Egypt attacked Israel.

Foreign Ministry official Gideon Jordan summed up Biden’s words as follows: “Of all the personalities (in Egypt) he (Biden) met, he heard that there was not one of them who disbelieved in Israel’s perfect military superiority and therefore stated that it is not possible for Egypt to go to war against Israel now. According to the people he spoke to Egyptians, time will take its course and when God wills, he will find the solution.”

What this letter calls into question is Joe Biden’s extreme misreading of Arab “personalities” and their intentions. His misreading–and that of Israeli intelligence–had disastrous consequences in the Yom Kippur War. One cannot help but think of similar Biden misreadings when it comes to Iran, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

Gideon Jordan later notes in the secret document that Biden was interested in more than Egypt: “The senator repeatedly said that Israel should do a unilateral act, that is to withdraw from some territories, of course not from those territories of strategic importance such as the Golan Heights, Sharm el-Sheikh and the Gaza Strip–but to withdraw without even any negotiations or an agreement with the Arabs.”

Jordan remarks that Meir immediately disagreed with Biden about unilateral withdrawals without achieving true peace. Again, one cannot help but think about the disastrous Biden unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the unilateral concessions that the U.S. has demanded from Israel in the current Lebanon “agreement” talks.

The secret letter is below for those of you who read Hebrew:

When Biden met Meir: Joe Biden advised Jewish PM to trade land for peace - The Jerusalem Post

 Biden meeting between Joe Biden and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, described in a memo published by Israeli reporter Nadav Eyal, sheds light on the former Vice President's thought process at that time, and what he believed Israel should do shortly before the Yom Kippur war broke out. The meeting took place following his return from Egypt where he discussed with Saadat several things, roughly 40 days before the surprise attack that would turn into the Yom Kippur war.

https://www.jpost.com/us-elections/when-biden-met-meir-joe-biden-advised-jewish-pm-to-trade-land-for-peace-646732

[odinsblog]

AHEAD OF THE United Nations Security Council action to consider the Palestinian Authority’s application to become a full member of the international body, the United States is lobbying nations to reject such membership, hoping to avoid an overt “veto” by Washington. The lobbying effort, revealed in copies of unclassified State Department cables obtained by The Intercept, is at odds with the Biden administration’s pledge to fully support a two-state solution.

The diplomatic cables detail pressure being applied to members of the Security Council, including Malta, the rotating president of the council this month. Ecuador in particular is being asked to lobby Malta and other nations, including France, to oppose U.N. recognition. The State Department’s justification is that normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states is the fastest and most effective way to achieve an enduring and productive statehood.

While clarifying that President Joe Biden has worked vigorously to support “Palestinian aspirations for statehood” within the context “of a comprehensive peace that would resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a diplomatic cable dated April 12 details U.S. talking points against a U.N. vote for Palestinian statehood. The cable says that Security Council members must be persuaded to reject any proposal for Palestinian statehood — and thereby its recognition as a sovereign nation — before the council’s open debate on the Middle East, scheduled for April 18.

“It remains the U.S. view that the most expeditious path toward a political horizon for the Palestinian people is in the context of a normalization agreement between Israel and its neighbors,” the cable reads. “We believe this approach can tangibly advance Palestinian goals in a meaningful and enduring way.”

“We therefore urge you not to support any potential Security Council resolution recommending the admission of ‘Palestine’ as a U.N. member state, should such a resolution be presented to the Security Council for a decision in the coming days and weeks.”

(continue reading)

[palms-upturned]

For US unions like the UAW — which has thousands of members in weapons factories making the bombs, missiles, and aircraft used by Israel, as well in university departments doing research linked to the Israeli military — the Palestinian trade union call to action is particularly relevant. When the UAW’s national leadership came out in support of a cease-fire on December 1, they also voted to establish a “Divestment and Just Transition Working Group.” The stated purpose of the working group is to study the UAW’s own economic ties to Israel and explore ways to convert war-related industries to production for peaceful purposes while ensuring a just transition for weapons workers.

Members of UAW Labor for Palestine say they have started making visits to a Colt factory in Connecticut, which holds a contract to supply rifles to the Israeli military, to talk with their fellow union members about Palestine, a cease-fire, and a just transition. They want to see the union’s leadership support such organizing activity.

“If UAW leaders decided to, they could, tomorrow, form a national organizing campaign to educate and mobilize rank-and-file towards the UAW’s own ceasefire and just transition call,” UAW Labor for Palestine members said in a statement. “They could hold weapons shop town halls in every region; they could connect their small cadre of volunteer organizers — like us — to the people we are so keen to organize with; they could even send some of their staff to help with this work.”

On January 21, the membership of UAW Local 551, which represents 4,600 autoworkers at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant (who were part of last year’s historic stand-up strike) endorsed the Palestinian trade unions’ call to not cooperate in the production and transportation of arms for Israel. Ten days later, UAW Locals 2865 and 5810, representing around forty-seven thousand academic workers at the University of California, passed a measure urging the union’s national leaders to ensure that the envisioned Divestment and Just Transition Working Group “has the needed resources to execute its mission, and that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim workers whose communities are disproportionately affected by U.S.-backed wars are well-represented on the committee.”

Members of UAW Locals 2865 and 5810 at UC Santa Cruz’s Astronomy Department have pledged to withhold any labor that supports militarism and to refuse research collaboration with military institutions and arms companies. In December, unionized academic workers from multiple universities formed Researchers Against War (RAW) to expose and cut ties between their research and warfare, and to organize in their labs and departments for more transparency about where the funding for their work comes from and more control over what their labor is used for. RAW, which was formed after a series of discussions by union members first convened by US Labor Against Racism and War last fall, hosted a national teach-in and planning meeting on February 12.

Meanwhile, public sector workers in New York City have begun their own campaign to divest their pension money from Israel. On January 25, rank-and-file members of AFSCME District Council (DC) 37 launched a petition calling on the New York City Employees’ Retirement System to divest the $115 million it holds in Israeli securities. The investments include $30 million in bonds that directly fund the Israeli military and its activities. “As rank-and-file members of DC 37 who contribute to and benefit from the New York City Employees’ Retirement System and care about the lives of working people everywhere, we refuse to support the Israeli government and the corporations that extract profit from the killing of innocent civilians,” the petition states.

In an election year when President Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates will depend heavily on organized labor for donations and especially get-out-the-vote efforts, rank and filers are also trying to push their unions to exert leverage on the president by getting him to firmly stand against the ongoing massacre in Gaza. NEA members with Educators for Palestine are calling on their union’s leaders to withdraw their support for Biden’s reelection campaign until he stops “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel,” marching from AFT headquarters to NEA headquarters in Washington, DC on February 10 to assert their demand. Similarly, after the UAW International Executive Board endorsed Biden last month — a decision that sparked intense division within the union — UAW Labor for Palestine is demanding the endorsement be revoked “until [Biden] calls for a permanent ceasefire and stops sending weapons to Israel.”

[historyandmemes]

South Africa files ICJ case accusing Israel of 'genocidal acts' - (29th December 2023, 04:19 EST | Source: BBC)

Following its application to the ICJ, South Africa's presidency said in a statement that the country was obliged "to prevent genocide from occurring". "South Africa is gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants," it said. >> Access the full case here.

TODAY (Jan 3, 2024) — U.S. White House National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby Calls South Africa's Suit "Meritless, Counterproductive, and Completely Without Basis in Fact" (Source: C-SPAN, PBS)

The White House's response is blatant gaslighting and displays a callous disregard for human life.

DON'T LOOK AWAY. Read the full case/evidence for yourself. PUSH FOR PEACE.

[mariacallous]

Glad people are finally finding out that these Pro Palestine protestors are ratfuckers-by-design at best (and Republicans at worst) and that's why they support Trump:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/08/dnc-palestinian-gaza-protests/679524/

One month ago, an NBC News headline reported:

Protesters made a tiny footprint at the RNC in Milwaukee. Other than a modest daytime march on Monday afternoon, the first day of the Republican National Convention, there were virtually no protests over the event’s four days and nights.

Obviously, the story from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago is already proving different.

This is part of a pattern. Gather any large number of Democrats together, in almost any city or state, whether at rallies, fundraisers, or presidential appearances, and pro-Palestinian protesters will try to wreck the event. These actions have been building to threats of outright violence. Pro-Trump and Republican events, meanwhile, are almost always left in peace.

Of the two big parties, the Democrats are more emotionally sympathetic to Palestinian suffering. The Biden administration is working to negotiate the cease-fire that the pro-Palestinian camp claims to want. The administration has provided hundreds of millions of dollars of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. President Joe Biden’s terms for ending the fighting in Gaza envision a rapid movement to full Palestinian statehood.

By contrast, former President Donald Trump uses Palestinian as an insult. His administration moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. In 2016, Trump campaigned on a complete shutdown of travel by Muslims into the United States; Trump now speaks of deporting campus anti-Israel protesters. He has pledged to block Gaza refugees from entering the United States.

Trump wants to tell the story that he and his party will enforce public order. He alleges that Democrats cannot or will not protect Americans against chaos spread by extremist elements. The pro-Palestinian movement works every day to create images that support Trump’s argument. As a visibly annoyed Vice President Kamala Harris asked protesters in Detroit earlier this month: Do they want to elect Donald Trump?

Not all pro-Palestinian demonstrators are thinking about the election. Many seem driven by moral outrage or ideological passion. But for those who are thinking strategically, the answer is obvious: Yes, they want to elect Trump. Of course they want to elect Trump. Electing Trump is their best—and maybe only—hope.

To understand why, cast your mind back a quarter century.

In the election of 2000, Vice President Al Gore faced Texas Governor George W. Bush. Gore probably would have won in a straight two-way contest. But that same year, the progressive advocate Ralph Nader entered the race as a third-party challenger—and he pulled just enough of the vote to tip the Electoral College and the presidency toward Bush.

Nader later professed regret for running as a third-party candidate. But at the time, Nader understood exactly what he was doing. Defeating Gore and electing Bush was the intended and declared purpose of Nader’s candidacy. Nader detailed his logic in many speeches, including this one to the summer-2000 convention of the NAACP:

If you ever wondered why the right wing and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party has so much more power over that party than the progressive wing, it’s because the right wing and the corporate wing have somewhere to go: It’s called the Republican Party. And so they’re catered to and they’re regaled—like the Democratic Leadership Council, they’re catered to and they’re regaled. But if you look at the progressive wing … they have nowhere to go. And you know when you’re told that you have nowhere to go, you get taken for granted. And when you get taken for granted, you get taken.

To paraphrase his argument even more bluntly: If progressives caused the Democrats to lose the presidency in the election of 2000, then Democrats would take progressives more seriously in all the elections that followed.

Nader’s logic was not altogether wrong. In many ways, the post-2000 Democratic Party has shifted well to the left of where the party was in the 1980s and ’90s. But catering to the party’s left has cost Democrats winnable races, and with them, key priorities: The Iraq War and 20 years of inaction on climate change head the list of progressive disappointments since the 2000 election, and the list extends from there. Whether or not the shift was worth the price, Nader was neither ignorant nor deceived. He identified his goal and willingly accepted the risks for himself and his movement.

So it is now with the pro-Palestinian demonstrators of 2024.

They start with a fundamental political problem: Their cause is not popular. Solid majorities of Americans accept Israel’s war in Gaza as valid and fiercely condemn the Hamas terrorist attacks as unacceptable. The exact margin varies from poll to poll depending on how the question is asked, but when presented with a binary choice between Israel and the Palestinians, Americans prefer Israel by a factor of at least two to one.

The brute fact of those numbers makes it very difficult for pro-Palestinian activists to win elections. In this cycle, despite all the emotion stirred by the Gaza war, two of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress lost their primaries to pro-Israel challengers.

From the point of view of any practical politician: If a cause is so unpopular that it cannot help its friends, why listen to its advocates?

The only answer to that question, again from the practical point of view, is the message of the protesters in Chicago: Maybe we can’t help you if you do listen to us, but we can hurt you if you don’t!

Think of it another way. Since the bloody attack by Hamas on October 7 and the Israeli response, pro-Palestinian protesters have marched and agitated all over the United States. They have occupied college campuses. They have impeded access to Jewish schools, businesses, and places of worship. They have posted impassioned words and images on social media.

Yet all of their militant action has barely budged U.S. policy. Arms, intelligence, and economic assistance continue to flow from the United States to Israel. U.S. military forces cooperate with Israel against Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Yemen. Although the U.S. has imposed restraint on some Israeli operations, Israel has mostly been allowed to fight its own war in its own way.

These were President Biden’s decisions, not Vice President Harris’s. But she was the second-highest-ranking member of the administration. If Biden’s deputy inherits Biden’s office, the message is clear: His administration’s record of support for Israel carried no meaningful political price. All of those street demonstrations and campus occupations will have amounted to so much empty noise. All of those articles arguing that Gaza explained Biden’s troubles with young voters would be exposed as ideological wishcasting.

If Harris wins, the pro-Palestinian movement will have lost.

If Harris loses, however, pro-Palestinian protesters can claim that they were responsible for her defeat. That claim might not be true—in fact it probably would not be true—but try disproving it. The pro-Palestinian movement would have at least some basis to argue: You lost because you alienated us.

If Harris wins, she may want to do something about the pro-Palestinian cause—for humanitarian reasons, for reasons of diplomacy and geopolitics, for reasons of Democratic-constituency management in particular congressional districts. But she won’t have to do it. She’ll know that the protesters tried to beat her, and they failed.

If Harris loses, however, future Democratic candidates will tread more carefully on Israeli-Palestinian terrain. Even if they privately doubt that the party’s position on Gaza explains anything truly important, they will be worried by advisers and donors who will believe it or who will want to believe it.

But what about Trump? Why aren’t the pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Chicago more fearful of Trump’s possible return to the presidency?

Although the pro-Palestine cause attracts support from progressives, it is not exactly a progressive cause. Americans associate progressivism with secularism, feminism, and gay-rights advocacy, among other causes. The Palestinian national movement, especially now that Hamas has effectively replaced the Palestine Liberation Organization as leader of “the resistance,” has become markedly religious, patriarchal, and socially reactionary. But it is also a movement fiercely opposed to American global hegemony—and that is its “anti-imperialist” appeal to Western progressives.

If you oppose American global hegemony, Trump is your candidate (as a long list of anti-American dictators have already figured out). Trump fiercely opposes the alliances and trade agreements that magnify American power and make the U.S. the center of a huge network of democratic, market-oriented countries. Trump’s “America First” bluster is actually a pathway to American isolation and weakness that will further remove American power from the world.

If you wish America ill, of course you wish Trump well. The far left and far right of U.S. politics may disagree on much, but they agree on that.

The protesters in the streets of Chicago are not acting aimlessly or randomly. The people on the receiving end of their protests would benefit from equal clarity. The protesters want chaos and even violence in order to defeat Harris and elect Trump. They are not ill-informed or excessively idealistic or sadly misled. They are not overzealous allies. They are purposeful adversaries.

The Chicago-convention delegates should recognize that truth, and act accordingly.