Text Originally posted May 21, 2024 Dust to Dust - by Mr. Fish The decision by the High Court in London to grant Julian Assange the right to appeal the order to extradite him to the United States may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. It does not mean Julian will elude extradition. It does not mean the court has ruled, as it should, that he is a journa…

Text Originally published May 08, 2024 Strangelove 2024 — by Mr. Fish University President Christopher Eisgruber met with the hunger strikers – the first meeting by school administrators with protesters since Oct. 7 – but dismissed their demands. “This is probably the most important thing I’ve done here,” says Areeq Hasan, a senior who is going to …

Text Originally Published May 08, 2024 Strangelove 2024 — by Mr. Fish NEW YORK CITY: I am sitting on a fire escape across the street from Columbia University with three organizers of the Columbia University Gaza protest. It is night. New York City Police, stationed inside and outside the gates of the campus, have placed the campus on lockdown. Ther…

Text originally published May 13, 2024 When You’re Smiling - by Mr. Fish Run, the Israelis demand, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will k…

Text Originally published April 28, 2024 Staying Power - by Mr. Fish In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are …

Text Originally published April 25, 2024 Where Have All the Flowers Gone - by Mr. Fish PRINCETON, N.J. — Achinthya Sivalingam, a graduate student in Public Affairs at Princeton University did not know when she woke up this morning that shortly after 7 a.m. she would join hundreds of students across the country who have been arrested, evicted and ba…

A talk at the benefit Iftar on April 6th to establish the Palestine Center for Public Policy. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribeChris Hedges による

The presidential election in November looks set to pit Donald Trump, who will most likely dismantle what is left of our decayed democracy, against Joe Biden, who is a full partner in the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Not, for most of us, a palatable choice. The two ruling parties, who have foisted these candidates on the public, have at the…

A small group of high-tech-savvy entrepreneurs who understand the velocity of technological innovation have harnessed this new power to establish predatory high-tech monopolies such as Uber or Amazon. They subvert labor laws, strip the state of its powers, gut regulation, ignore legal norms and amass personal fortunes in the hundreds of billions of…

Text originally published April 12, 2024 Requiem for The New York Times - by Mr. Fish NEW YORK: I am sitting in the auditorium at The New York Times. It is the first time I have been back in nearly two decades. It will be the last. The newspaper is a pale reflection of what it was when I worked there, beset by numerous journalistic fiascos, rudderl…

There was a decade of popular uprisings from 2010 until the global pandemic in 2020. These uprisings shook the foundations of the global order. They denounced corporate domination, austerity cuts and demanded economic justice and civil rights. The Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter mass demonstrations following the execution of George Fl…

Text originally published March 30, 2024 A Genocide Foretold - by Mr. Fish There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial project. This dispossession has had dramatic …

Text originally published April 3, 2024 Amr Abdallah On the morning Amr Abdallah was killed, he woke before dawn to say his Ramadan prayers with his father, mother, two younger brothers and aunt, in an open field in southern Gaza. “It is You we worship and You we ask for help,” they prayed. “Guide us to the straight path — the path of those upon wh…

The country’s major corporations, seeking to crush union organization, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights and oversees unionization efforts. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s have targeted the NLRB after it accused Amazon, Starb…

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed the lawsuit on behalf of the human rights organization, Defense for Children – Palestine; Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group based in the occupied West Bank; and eight Palestinians and US citizens with relatives in Gaza accusing President Joe Biden and other senior officials of being complicit in…

Text Originally published March 18, 2024 Israel’s Trojan Horse - by Mr. Fish Piers allow things to come in. They allow things to go out. And Israel, which has no intention of halting its murderous siege of Gaza, including its policy of enforced starvation, appears to have found a solution to its problem of where to expel the 2.3 million Palestinian…

Text originally posted on March 17, 2024 Onward Christian Fascism - by Mr. Fish Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and …

Israel, like all settler colonial projects, is built on lies – the lie that the land historically belongs to the colonizers, the lie that Palestinians have no national identity, the lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, the lie that a peaceful settlement is thwarted by the Palestinians rather than the Israelis. This mendacity is…

On May 2016 a monster wildfire engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in the Canadian province of Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of 88,000 people. The freakishly destructive conflagration, which tore into town with such speed that residents barely escaped in their cars as their houses flared and vaporized, is a harbin…

Text Originally published Feb 29, 2024 Divine Violence - by Mr. Fish Aaron Bushnell, when he placed his cell phone on the ground to set up a livestream and lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., resulting in his death, pitted divine violence against radical evil. As an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force, he wa…

The U.S. economy is being held hostage by a small cohort of financiers who run private equity firms --- Apollo, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. These equity firms buy up and plunder businesses, piling on debt, refusing to reinvest, slashing staff and often driving companies into bankruptcy. The object is not to sustain bu…

Has Zionism, especially Liberal Zionist, exhausted itself? The humanistic constructs of liberal Zionism, always in conflict with itself because of its refusal to grant Palestinians equal civil and political rights, has led many Israelis to embrace a far more chauvinistic and fanatic religious Zionism. What does this mean for Israel? And, as importa…

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Text originally published Feb. 18, 2024 Assange - by Mr. Fish LONDON — If Julian Assange is denied permission to appeal his extradition to the United States before a panel of two judges at the High Court in London this week, he will have no recourse left within the British legal system. His lawyers can ask the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)…

The media landscape in the U.S. is collapsing as journalism outlets at the national, state and local levels close or gut staff. One-third of the country’s newspapers have shut down and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists have lost jobs since 2005. An average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week in 2023, compared to two a week in 2022. The decimat…

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The Israeli attacks on Gaza has included systematic attacks on Gaza’s cultural and educational institutions. Israel has damaged or destroyed all 12 of Gaza’s universities. Some 280 government schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools have also been destroyed or damaged, often resulting in dozens of fatalities. About 133 remaining schools are used to shelter…

Text originally posted Feb 8, 2024 Let Them Eat Dirt - by Mr. Fish There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When …

Time and time again, the human rights attorney Noura Erakat writes, we see evidence of the law’s assumed insignificance in the dispossession of Palestinians. Great Britain remained committed to establishing a Jewish national homeland in Palestine despite its legal duties as the Mandatory Power to shepherd local Arab peoples to independence. The Per…

Text Originally posted Jan. 26, 2024 Red Ink - by Mr. Fish The International Court of Justice (ICJ) refused to implement the most crucial demand made by South African jurists: “the State of Israel shall immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.” But at the same time, it delivered a devastating blow to the foundational myth of…

Craig Mokhiber, director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights resigned on October 31, stating that “once again we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes and the organization we serve appears powerless to stop it.” He noted that the UN had failed to prevent previous genocides against the Tutsis in …

Text Originally published Jan 21, 2024 Blood Brothers - by Mr. Fish Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash …

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The cartoonist Joe Sacco invented nonfiction graphic journalism, marrying rigorous and detailed reporting with illustrations that leap off the page and give his stories a texture, depth and power that is hard for most writers to match. He pioneered this work with nine issues on the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation from 1993 to 1995. The…

The Israeli army, known as the Israel Defense Forces or IDF, is integral to understanding Israeli society. Nearly all Israelis do three years of military service. Most men continue to serve in the reserves until middle age. Its generals often retire to occupy senior positions in government an industry. The dominance of the military in Israeli socie…

“Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” warned Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of democracy. “Our situation will deterio…

Text Originally Published Dec 29, 2023 Never Again and Again and Again - by Mr. Fish Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industr…

Text Originally posted Dec 17, 2023 Birth of a New Nation - by Mr. Fish Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a st…

Few individuals did more to shape modern cinema than the actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin. One of the greatest of all comic mimes he also pioneered cinematic techniques and story-telling. His films, with his iconic role as the beleaguered little tramp with baggy trousers, moustache, cane and bowler hat, were not only comic masterpieces,…

Text originally published Dec 23, 2023 Bearing Witness - Mr. Fish Writing and photographing in wartime are acts of resistance, acts of faith. They affirm the belief that one day - a day the writers, journalists and photographers may never see - the words and images will evoke empathy, understanding, outrage and provide wisdom. They chronicle not on…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chrishedges.substack.com No single individual did more to shape modern cinema than the actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin. One of the greatest of all comic mimes he also pioneered cinematic techniques and story-telling. His films, with his iconic role as the beleaguered little …

Originally posted on Dec 8, 2023 Universal Misery - by Mr. Fish I knew Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the co-founder of Hamas, along with Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin. Al-Rantisi’s family were expelled to the Gaza Strip by Zionist militias from historic Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He did not fit the demonized image of a Hamas leader. He w…

Fifty years ago, the United States embarked on a path of mass incarceration that has led to a staggering increase in the prison population. Today, almost 2 million individuals – disproportionately Black Americans – are incarcerated in our nation’s prisons and jails. The prison population has grown 500% since 1973, the year America began to sharply …

The Palestinians are human laboratory rats to the Israeli military, intelligence services and arms and technology industries. Israel’s drones, surveillance technology — including spyware, facial recognition software and biometric gathering infrastructure — along with smart fences, experimental bombs and AI-controlled machine guns, are tried out on …

The conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, which has reached a terrifying crescendo with the savage obliteration of Gaza, is the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Jewish Zionists in Israel backed by major imperial powers, starting with the British and a century later with the United States. This century-long assault by Israel …

Trucks circling the campuses of Columbia University and Harvard University publicly list the names and show the faces of students who signed a letter calling on the university to cut ties with Israel. These trucks are now being parked in front of students’ homes. Another truck is at the University of Pennsylvania calling on university president Liz…

Text originally published Nov 12, 2023 Blood Meal - by Mr. Fish CAIRO, Egypt: Bassel al-Araj, a Palestinian resistance leader, shortly before Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza, laid down the fundamental rules for warfare against Israel. The rules by al-Araj, not a member of Hamas, provide the Palestinian lens for the incursion by Israeli forces in Gaz…

There is growing evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel on October 7, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them. Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, told the Israeli press, he set up a hotline to coordinate between…

Text Originally Published Nov. 11, 2023 The Executioner’s Song - by Mr. Fish DOHA, Qatar: I am in the studio of Al Jazeera’s Arabic service watching a live feed from Gaza City. The Al Jazeera reporter in northern Gaza, because of the intense Israeli shelling, was forced to evacuate to southern Gaza. He left his camera behind. He trained it on Al-Sh…

Democratic Reps. Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, André Carson, Summer Lee, and Delia Ramirez introduced a “Ceasefire Now” resolution on October 16th to halt the siege on Gaza. The resolution calls on the Biden administration to demand an end to the Israeli attacks and send humanitarian aid to Gaza. Eight other Democrats signed on as original co-sponsors,…