The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2803 this week, after permanent members Russia and China chose to abstain instead of using their veto power. In addition to giving a framework for Gaza that would put Israel and the U.S. in control, the language of the motion is extremely vague, and it gives no guarantee that there will be an end to the genocide.
Craig Mokhiber, an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations human rights official, noted that: “the ceasefire is a lie. The idea that there is a peace process is a lie. What we have here …
There is a reason that the Palestinians will never be defeated; they grow more beautiful every day — in our hearts and minds. At the November 14, 2025 Palestine Center conference, Palestinian-American Sereen Haddad displayed the magnificent radiance and steadfastness that has characterized the Palestinians. Ms. Haddad, recently graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, where my son also graduated, but not before she showed the completeness of the Palestinians and the emptiness of those who attempt to subdue their aspirations.
Her voice is eloquently available at the conference. Click arrow twice to start. Then move little circle at bottom left of screen …
Palestine, the Motherland, and the Legacy of Colonial Cartography
by Amel-Ba’al / November 20th, 2025
“Zionism as a reactionary ideology fitted exactly the ambitions of the British colonialism at that period and later on the American imperialism plans to the areas.”
“The Palestinian resistance movement is not a movement to liberate a geographical 26,000 square km; it is a historical movement which aims to liberate the Jews from zionism and the Arabs from reactionaries, and to establish the Socialist Democratic Palestine. The question of Palestine is the question of a clashing contradiction between the National Liberation movement of the Arabs, …
Nearly three years ago Dissident Voice published an article titled “Low Enrollment Plagues Many Charter Schools.” Since then countless news articles have documented low enrollment at many charter schools across the country, raising doubts about, among other things, so-called “long waiting lists” at many charter schools.
Low enrollment has always been one of the four main reasons charter schools close regularly, leaving many families and educators shocked and abandoned. The other three reasons include financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and poor academic performance. Such interrelated problems are intrinsic to school privatization schemes at home and abroad. Privatization typically increases corruption and inefficiency, …
While Indigenous land rights are under scrutiny at the COP 30 in Brazil, in the Sunday morning darkness on November 16, attackers descended on an Indigenous community far to the south of the country, opening fire — killing a Guarani Kaiowá leader and injuring four others.
Guns blazing, 20 attackers descended on Pyelito Kue, a community of Guarani Kaiowá people …
Although the world is experiencing severe global crises, there are new efforts underway to create a more effective means of coping with them.
The crises are clear enough. They include vast slaughter in horrific wars, worldwide climate catastrophe, massive population displacement, and deepening poverty.
Moreover, these disastrous situations are likely to worsen in coming years. Modern wars are fought with increasingly devastating weapons, and preparations for nuclear war have escalated to the level of global annihilation. Similarly, time is running out for saving the planet from an environmental cataclysm, which will surely lead to heightened displacement and poverty.
The fact that the outlandish and quackish Trump “peace” plan for the genocided Gaza was passed by the UN Security Council defines the end of every understanding of true peace.
by Jan Oberg / November 20th, 2025
“The Throne of Peace is Now Empty and the UN Cancelled” • AI-generated image by Jan Oberg
The UN Security Council adopted a U.S.-drafted resolution on November 17, 2025, endorsing Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. It authorised an International Stabilisation Force (ISF), backed a transitional governing body called the “Board of Peace”, and declared that conditions may now exist for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and eventual statehood. The vote passed 13–0, with Russia and China abstaining. This is UN SC Resolution 2803.
Ah, those were the days. The UN had been blocked by a worldwide popular movement from approving of a war on Iraq. British Prime Minister Tony Blair had dragged the UK along after secretly demanding that George W. Bush first attack Afghanistan, because Blair believed he would be better able to sell a war on Iraq once there was a war on Afghanistan. And once the destruction of Iraq was well underway, the UN crept out of some New York sewer pipe to support the occupation, er, excuse …
African blood flows freely through our veins. We shall defend Angola and Africa!
— Fidel Castro1Fidel Castro, speech at mass rally in Havana, December 1975, reprinted in Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own (Pathfinder Press, 2013).
History remembers wars and generals, but too often forgets healers. Cuba’s internationalist mission in Africa began not with weapons, but with medicine. In the 1960s and 70s, as newly independent nations struggled to build health systems, Cuba sent doctors, nurses, and medical brigades across the continent. Their work was not charity—it was solidarity.
Fidel Castro, speech at mass rally in Havana, December 1975, reprinted in Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own (Pathfinder Press, 2013).
We will build a city-owned bank — not to serve shareholders, but to serve you. A bank that invests in housing, in transit, in climate resilience. A bank that puts our money to work for our people. — Zohran Mamdani, Victory Speech, Nov. 4, 2025
New York City has elected a mayor who dares to challenge the status quo. Zohran Mamdani swept into office on a platform of affordability, municipal ownership and economic justice. But Mamdani’s plan to fund his reforms through $9 billion in new taxes on corporations and high earners is already bumping up against political and fiscal …
Powerful 'Third States' have helped US-Israel destroy the Palestinians and their homeland
by Stuart Littlewood / November 19th, 2025
A new report, ‘Situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’ by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and her team in accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 5/1, concludes that “the ongoing genocide in Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States” and is “facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation”.
It is not an opinion piece but a carefully researched, factual work. And it paints a sad picture of the depth of depravity to which ‘civilisation’ has sunk. The UN should have presented this …
This article unfolds from the wager that Prof. Asim Siddiqui’s book Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation (2025) contains, beneath its patient encyclopedic sweep, a set of conceptual provocations that the book itself states only in passing. Siddiqui’s method is descriptive, empirical, archivally wide, committed to cataloguing currents, genres, types, and exceptions across decades of Hindi cinema. Yet embedded within this encyclopedic ambition are moments of disorienting creativity, ideas introduced in a matter-of-fact tone that nevertheless gesture toward a far more radical rethinking of …
According to its website, the mission of Al-Majd Europe, yet another odd charity organisation operating in the mash and rubble of Gaza, is “dedicated to providing essential humanitarian aid, educational opportunities, and sustainable development projects to Palestinian communities.” Leaving little by way of information, the charity was clearly one of the anointed, permitted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to operate in the Gaza Strip. A short note from March 2024, for instance, announces the agency’s expansion of “emergency operations in Gaza and surrounding areas to reach more communities in urgent need, delivering critical supplies and …
The farce of Western regard for democracy has been revealed in several countries. Well known are the machinations of the Democratic National Commission to prevent the social democrat Bernie Sanders from becoming the leader of the so-called Democratic Party in the US. In the UK, there was the coalition of Labour Party insiders with Israeli Zionists who upended the elected party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Consider the Western support for the continuation of the corrupt government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy well past his democratic mandate; consider the abandonment of the presidential election …
We’re all connected to the deep sea. There is no line in the ocean that says to us, ‘below this, nothing matters.’ The ocean is all connected. It’s the largest …
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs . . . . My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori [It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country]
– Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est
On the morning of November 11, I was passing through Pittsfield, Massachusetts, heading north. The traffic was stopped as a Veteran’s Day parade headed south. It was a sight for a musing mind, so that …
“I always aim four-five inches away from the body. That way I know that I couldn’t not have possibly pump the lead into the poor bastard.”
“I aim at him but swing the muzzle to the right as I squeeze the trigger. If the lieutenant or the sergeant notice, I explain that I always flinch the moment the shot rings out.”
“When the lieutenant yells ‘Fire!’, I wait a second before shooting. With the body falling, my bullet will miss high.”
“By army regulation, one of the five carbines must be loaded with blank. I always fork over twenty bucks to the sergeant …
I am grateful for the invitation from The China Academy and its Thinkers’ Forum in Shanghai to shed light on the dark logic behind nuclear weapons—their possession, their use, their philosophy. (I know of no Western media that would extend such an invitation to me).
This creed of “nuclearism” is not a strategy; it’s a civilizational tragedy. So muddled is its reasoning that NATO, built on the threat of nuclear first-use—even against conventional attacks—is still called ‘defensive.’
Despite vast cultural divides, nuclear-armed states—NATO’s US, the UK, France and the countries that host nukes in …
So Trump suddenly threatens to sue the BBC for $1 billion for a misleading splice-up of video clips broadcast over a year ago. A BBC news editor — Raffi Berg — is suing journalist Owen Jones for exposing his biased judgement in reporting Gaza war news. And two top knobs at the BBC, Director-General Tim Davie and CEO of news Deborah Turness, jump before they’re pushed.
The British public are angry enough at having to pay the BBC’s extortionate TV licence fee only to have biased news beamed at them. If Trump were to win his $1 billion claim he’d be …
From the Zionist lobby’s media buyouts, to Christian-nationalism’s grudge match with Christian-Zionism, to Mamdani-envoked moral panic to “the Mar-a-Lago face.”
by Phil Rockstroh / November 17th, 2025
The face of last stage empire on display at a Mar-a-Lago event:
The human psyche’s lexicon is imagistic in nature. The psyche speaks in visual metaphors. At empire’s end, the psyche becomes an artist of the absurd. Hence, the nature of the zeitgeist will be limned by means of fashion, form, and feature into emblems of the era.
Pictured: “The Mar-a-Lago face” i.e., human beings transformed by Spiritus Mundi into (inadvertent) supernumeraries of a Gogolian theatre of the (cringe-inducing) grotesque.
In contrast, the type of image above brings me solace, because, now, when I …
The 27th Amendment rewrites Pakistan’s rules and hands its courts and army to the powerful few.
According to Santiago Canton, the ICJ Secretary General, the 27th amendment introduces changes that raise serious concern. He warns that these shifts could weaken the courts’ role in checking executive power and compromise the basic rights of people in Pakistan.
Parliament has created a new Federal Constitutional Court and moved many core powers from the Supreme Court to that new body, including original jurisdiction over constitutional disputes and the transfer of all pending constitutional appeals and suo …
It’s so silly as to be depraved. Two countries, hardly exemplary when it comes to their environmental credentials, vying for hosting rights to an event that does more to emit greenhouse gases than it resolves to limiting them. But this is exactly what Australia and Türkiye are doing regarding the Conference of Parties (COP) for 2026, school louts seeking to make themselves the most noticed in the playground of climate change politics.
The scale in terms of hosting these gatherings of anthropomorphic crowding is decidedly onerous and horrendously costly. The 30th UN climate conference being held in Belém, Brazil has 56,118 …
What makes up a marriage has been the subject of state, community, and tribal control since human society took some form. Who is to marry whom; the process of selecting the appropriate breeding partners; and the limits and penalties imposed on those partners in cases of transgression. Love did not necessarily have anything to do with it.
Traditionally, the content of such marriages has been anthropomorphic, with the perennial question of whether one should be suitably partnered with one or multiple beings. Then, the more unusual instances: human beings attempting to wed non-human entities. With a certain notoriety, a Swedish woman …
by Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom / November 15th, 2025
The prison rape scandal in Israel; is there a defect, an effect of this on domestic policy that Netanyahu’s administration refuses to condemn what every other government in the world condemns, the forcible race rape of a helpless victim? This is a this is a major domestic issue in Israel, a major domestic story.
The difference between people who supported the British Empire and people who support the US Empire is that those who supported the British Empire knew they were supporting an empire.
Someone who supported the British Empire’s acts of mass military slaughter around the world did so because they supported the Crown and wanted His Majesty to civilize the godless savages and turn the whole world into his royal subjects. Someone who supports the US empire’s warmongering thinks they are doing so because Saddam is an evil dictator, because Gaddafi is an evil dictator, because Maduro is an evil dictator, because Hamas …
The US, under Trump, is unapologetically an empire operating without pretense. International law is for losers. A newly minted War Department, deploying the most lethal killing machine in world history, need not hide behind the sham of promoting democracy.
Recall that in 2023, Trump boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil.” As CEO of the capitalist bloc, Trump’s mission is not about to be restrained by respect for sovereignty. There is only one inviolate global sovereign; all others are subalterns.
Following the publication in 2001 of his book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, John Mearsheimer’s notion of Offensive Realism (OR) has become widely regarded (in academe and in state policy circles) as a no-nonsense, pragmatic and now preeminent ‘theory’ of how and why it is that the so-called great powers of the world behave – and should behave – in the ways that they do.
Adherents to OR take the view, which can be inferred from the book’s title, that we may not like the way that it portrays the world, but that, unfortunately, is how things are.
