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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

The Heritage Foundation’s Christian nationalist effort that claims to combat antisemitism

The Heritage Foundation’s Christian nationalist effort that claims to combat antisemitism

The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, created by the Heritage Foundation and spearheading Project Esther, is a group dominated by right-wing Christians. The ongoing assault by the Trump regime targeting Harvard University, along with other colleges and universities across America is at the core of NTFCA’s mission. Shortly before the November presidential election, Religion Dispatches reported: Following a time-honored Israel advocacy tradition, Project Esther frames its McCarthyist crusade as an effort to ensure the safety of Jews. But as Jewish Insider reported,…

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Netanyahu accused of slander after criticising Macron, Carney and Starmer

Netanyahu accused of slander after criticising Macron, Carney and Starmer

The Guardian reports: Benjamin Netanyahu was accused of slander and pursuing a war without end after he claimed the leaders of France, Canada and the UK were stoking antisemitism and siding with Hamas by demanding he end the two-month blockade of food and aid into Gaza. In what has become an extraordinary standoff with some of Israel’s closest allies, Netanyahu appeared to deliberately raise the stakes on Thursday night by accusing his western critics of abandoning Israel in a war…

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As key Israel allies threaten action over Gaza catastrophe, Washington is largely unmoved

As key Israel allies threaten action over Gaza catastrophe, Washington is largely unmoved

The Guardian reports: As Israel orders Palestinians to evacuate Khan Younis in advance of what it calls an “unprecedented attack” on Gaza, much of Washington remains largely unmoved, even as Canada and European countries threaten “concrete actions” if Israel does not scale back its offensive. Despite reports of growing pressure from the Trump administration to increase aid into Gaza, where widespread famine looms, the White House continues to publicly back Israel. National security council spokesperson James Hewitt told the Guardian…

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Sen. Chris Van Hollen: The U.S. is ‘complicit’ in starving the people of Gaza

Sen. Chris Van Hollen: The U.S. is ‘complicit’ in starving the people of Gaza

Rolling Stone reports: The vast majority of people in Gaza — 93 percent — are facing crisis levels of food insecurity, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen said that the United States is “complicit” in their hunger. When asked on CBS’s Face the Nation about photographs of starving children in Gaza, Van Hollen said, “It’s very hard to look at those pictures. And the United States has been complicit. President Trump was in the region and really did nothing, said virtually…

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Actors and filmmakers condemn film industry’s silence ‘while genocide is taking place in Gaza’

Actors and filmmakers condemn film industry’s silence ‘while genocide is taking place in Gaza’

Variety reports: Joaquin Phoenix, Juliette Binoche, Pedro Pascal, Riz Ahmed and Guillermo del Toro are among a group of figures to have added their names to a letter condemning the film industry for its “silence” over the ongoing and deadly impact of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The letter, published on the first day of Cannes and initially signed by more than 370 actors and filmmakers, also condemned Israel’s killing of Fatma Hassona, the protagonist of festival-bound doc “Put Your…

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My family experienced apartheid. I know Afrikaners aren’t refugees

My family experienced apartheid. I know Afrikaners aren’t refugees

The Rev. Nontombi Naomi Tutu writes: The combination of the Trump administration granting expedited refugee status to white South Africans and the Episcopal Church ending a 40-year partnership with the federal government rather than help resettle fake refugees leaves me with contradictory feelings. As an Episcopal priest and a dual citizen of the United States and South Africa, I am proud of the Episcopal Church for standing up and speaking out about the U.S. government’s lies of a white “genocide”…

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Ethnic cleansing: Trump administration plans to permanently transfer one million Palestinians to Libya

Ethnic cleansing: Trump administration plans to permanently transfer one million Palestinians to Libya

NBC News reports: The Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, five people with knowledge of the effort told NBC News. The plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership, two people with direct knowledge of the plans and a former U.S. official said. In exchange for the resettling of Palestinians, the administration would potentially release to Libya billions…

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U.S. aid cuts leave food for millions mouldering in storage

U.S. aid cuts leave food for millions mouldering in storage

Reuters reports: Food rations that could supply 3.5 million people for a month are mouldering in warehouses around the world because of U.S. aid cuts and risk becoming unusable, according to five people familiar with the situation. The food stocks have been stuck inside four U.S. government warehouses since the Trump administration’s decision in January to cut global aid programmes, according to three people who previously worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development and two sources from other aid…

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AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state

AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state

Adi Robertson writes: Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be understood by the machine. The Meta CEO has recently been pitching a future where his AI tools give people something that “knows them well,” not just as pals, but as professional help. “For people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist,” he told Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, “I think everyone will have an AI.” The jury is out on whether AI systems can make good therapists, but this future is already…

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Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation, some Israeli officials admit in private

Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation, some Israeli officials admit in private

The New York Times reports: Some Israeli military officials have privately concluded that Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation unless aid deliveries are restored within weeks, according to three Israeli defense officials familiar with conditions in the enclave. For months, Israel has maintained that its blockade on food and fuel to Gaza did not pose a major threat to civilian life in the territory, even as the United Nations and other aid agencies have said a famine was looming. But…

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Americans are losing interest in Gaza at the worst possible moment

Americans are losing interest in Gaza at the worst possible moment

Zack Beauchamp writes: Israel’s war in Gaza, which has long been a moral atrocity, is on the brink of becoming unimaginably worse. Earlier this month, Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “the concluding moves” of the war in Gaza. Called “Gideon’s Chariots,” the operation’s plan calls for the mass destruction of remaining buildings in Gaza and the “conquest” of much of the Strip by Israel. The more than 2 million Palestinian civilians would…

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Trump administration makes a mockery of refugee status by welcoming Afrikaners

Trump administration makes a mockery of refugee status by welcoming Afrikaners

Politico reports: President Donald Trump on Monday defended his decision to take in dozens of white South Africans who were granted refugee status as his administration limits refugee admissions for the rest of the world. A group of 49 Afrikaners claiming to face discrimination and economic hardship in their home country arrived to the U.S. on Monday morning after being awarded an expedited pathway into the country by the Trump administration under a new program established earlier this year. But…

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To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction

To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction

Mahmoud Khalil writes: Yaba Deen,* it has been two weeks since you were born, and these are my first words to you. In the early hours of 21 April, I waited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world. I listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line. During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept…

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Pope Leo XIV signals his commitment to social justice

Pope Leo XIV signals his commitment to social justice

John Nichols writes: Pope Leo XIII, the leader of the Catholic Church from 1878 to 1903, came to be known as ”The Pope of the Workers” because of his groundbreaking 1891 encyclical on the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, which provided the outline for modern Catholic social justice teaching. Taking its name, Rerum Novarum, from the Latin phrase for “of revolutionary change,” the encyclical recognized that a “remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing…

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Americans no longer live in a full democracy

Americans no longer live in a full democracy

Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt write: Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an…

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Family of Shireen Abu Akleh responds after Zeteo documentary names Israeli soldier who killed her

Family of Shireen Abu Akleh responds after Zeteo documentary names Israeli soldier who killed her

  As the Israeli military kills two more Palestinian journalists in Gaza, a new documentary by Zeteo has uncovered critical details about Israel’s killing three years ago of the acclaimed Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. The film identifies for the first time the Israeli soldier who allegedly shot Abu Akleh. We get response when we speak with two members of Abu Akleh’s family — her brother Anton and her niece Lina — as well as the documentary’s executive…

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