The following is a joint statement and appeal issued by the Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation and the Revolutionary Students Front.
--------------------
There is an alarming development in Pakistan-administrated Jammu Kashmir (officially called Azad Jammu Kashmir or AJK), where two young activists have been framed with frivolous charges of blasphemy—a grave offence in Pakistan and its held territories. 
Deputy Chief Organiser of Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation (JKNSF) Arslan Shani and a female activist of the organisation, Asma Batool, are being victimised by accusations of blasphemy, with the former on the run and the latter already under police arrest. Both activists have played leading roles in the recent <a href="https://www.marxistreview.asia/victorious-movement-in-jammu-kashmir-a-prelude-to-revolutionary-tremors-in-the-south-asian-sub-continent-ajk/">People’s Rights Movement</a>, which won the right to affordable electricity for the 4.5 million inhabitants of Pakistan-held Kashmir. 
It should be noted that Jammu Kashmir is a disputed territory divided between regional imperialist powers, Pakistan and India, with China also controlling some parts. The oppressed masses of Kashmir have been waging a courageous and determined struggle for emancipation from national oppression and class exploitation for decades, with the youth leading the way and making countless sacrifices.
In recent months, the state authorities—who were previously compelled to accept the demands of the aforementioned movement—are retaliating against activists who were at the forefront of the movement, seeking to punish them. They have hired the services of religious fundamentalists and criminal elements to file these baseless police cases. It should also be kept in mind that the blasphemy laws, in their current form, were introduced by the draconian military regime of Zia-ul-Haq, a dictator backed by US imperialism in order to crush the struggles of working masses and students in Pakistan, and, more importantly, to fight the counter-revolutionary imperialist war (the so-called Afghan Jihad) against the revolutionary government in Afghanistan. 
Innumerable people, mostly from already oppressed minorities, have fallen victim to these laws since their introduction in 1980s. Religious fundamentalists and other reactionary elements exploit allegations of blasphemy for their political objectives or, in many cases, simply to blackmail and settle personal scores. In almost all cases, the courts are either complicit or succumbing to the pressure from religious extremists. Victims are often denied the right to a fair trial, with no lawyers willing to represent them. Additionally, there have been numerous instances where the accused and their lawyers were shot dead either in court or even after acquittal. As a result, the lives of the accused are always in grave danger.
The context of the current incident is that Arslan Shani shared a piece of protest poetry on social media in response to the recent gruesome gang rape and murder of a female doctor in Kolkata, India. This post was later shared by Asma Batool—a socialist feminist and a fearless advocate for women’s rights on social media and elsewhere—from Arslan Shani’s Facebook account. 
The horrific rape in the Kolkata hospital and the subsequent mass protests and strikes have profoundly shaken Indian society, with effects felt in Pakistan and beyond. The comrades were expressing their outrage against gender violence and exploitation in the crisis-ridden societies in this part of the world. Notably, the same poetic verses have been widely shared across social media in the region, including Pakistan. Using a viral social media post as grounds for charging and arresting political activists demonstrates that the state’s true intention is to intimidate revolutionary youth and suppress any dissenting voices.
In this context, a joint statement previously issued by Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation and Revolutionary Students Front said:
If this (act of repression) is not resisted and stopped here, many more activists could fall victim to this campaign of intimidation by the state. We warn both the imperialists and the local ruling elite to exercise prudence and refrain from inciting public outrage, as they will be held fully responsible for any escalation in the situation. We demand that the state’s support and sponsorship of religious fundamentalist elements must be withdrawn, and the series of retaliatory actions against the revolutionary youth should end immediately. 
Otherwise, we will exercise our constitutional and democratic right to protest across the entire country, from Jammu Kashmir to Karachi. We will raise the issue internationally in front of the youth, workers and human rights forums. In the spirit of the class slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” we appeal to progressive organisations, trade unions and movements of resistance across the globe to express solidarity with the arrested comrades. Comrade Arslan Shani and others like him have already endured severe state repression and imprisonment during the recent movement, yet they remain steadfast in their revolutionary mission. The youth of the JKNSF and RSF will not be intimidated or coerced by such heinous tactics.
* Drop the false charges and police cases against Arslan Shani and Asma Batool
*Release Asma Batool 
*End state oppression
* Long live the class solidarity of the oppressed masses
* Down with capitalism and imperialism
Time is running out. Act now to condemn this vile act of oppression by the government of Azad Jammu Kashmir. Record your protest and express solidarity with the victims using the contact details of the authorities listed below, in order of importance:
Government of AJK
Email: info@ajk.gov.pk 
Website: <a href="https://ajk.gov.pk">https://ajk.gov.pk</a> 
Phone: +925822920136
Prime Minister AJK Anwar Ul Haq
Mobile: +923006292711
Prime Minister’s Office Islamabad, Pakistan
Email: info@pmo.gov.pk
Interior Minister Pakistan
Phone: +92519212026 
Phone: +92519215560
Public Information Officer Ministry of Interior Pakistan
Fax No: +92519204193 
Email: <a href="mailto:dslaw2@interior.gov.pk">dslaw2@interior.gov.pk</a>
Chief Secretary AJK
<a href="tel:+925822921034">Phone: +925822921034</a> 
<a href="mailto:csajkpk@hotmail.com">Email: csajkpk@hotmail.com</a>
<a href="tel:05822930810">Inspector General of Police</a>
<a href="tel:05822930810">Phone: +925822930810</a>
<a href="tel:05822930802">Additional Inspector General of Police</a>
<a href="tel:05822930802">Phone: +925822930802</a>
Station House Officer Abbaspur
Mobile: +923444488999
Registrar High Court Chaudhry Muhammad Fayyaz
Phone: +925822921068
Additional Registrar High Court Raja Muhammad Riaz Shafi
Phone: +925822924311 
Fax: +925822924312
<a href="tel:05824930000">Deputy Inspector General Police (Poonch Division)</a>
<a href="tel:05824930000">Phone: +925824930000</a>
Central Police Office AJK
Email: <a href="mailto:cpoajkmzd@ajk.gov.pk">cpoajkmzd@ajk.gov.pk</a>
Muhammad Sajjad Secretary Law
Phone: +925822921077 
Email: secretary@law.gok.pk
Home Department AJK
Phone: +925822921075
Additional Secretary Home AJK
Mobile: +923135736995
Ministry of Kashmir Affairs Pakistan
Fax: +92519201562 
Phone: +92519201563
Minister for Human Rights Pakistan Senator Azam Nazeer Tarar
Phone: +92519210563 
Fax: +92519214525

Activists under attack in Pakistani-administered Kashmir

The Democratic National Convention ended on 22 August, launching the newly minted Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket into a two-month-plus race to election day on 5 November. What did we learn from it?
1. The Democrats didn’t let genocide spoil their party 
The most contentious issue surrounding the convention, as well as the main motivator for protests outside of it, was the Biden/Harris administration’s support for Israel’s campaign of mass murder and destruction of all elements of a functioning society in Gaza. 
Thirty “uncommitted” delegates, chosen to represent a protest vote of 740,000 votes in the Democratic primaries, tried to win the party’s support for an arms embargo against Israel—a measure the United Nations <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/arms-exports-israel-must-stop-immediately-un-experts">called for six months ago</a>. Harris made clear that the current administration opposes an embargo and that, if elected, her administration would, too. 
The uncommitted delegates then proposed something that should have been uncontroversial: that party leaders allow a Palestinian speaker—who would endorse Harris while calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance to Gaza—to address the convention. A proposed speaker, Georgia state Representative Ruwa Romman, <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/dnc-speech-uncommitted-movement-harris-walz-ruwan-romman/">submitted for DNC approval a short speech that read in part:</a> 
“Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue—from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza. To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes we can—yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars.”
The party leaders’ answer, delivered by phone on the second to last night of the convention, was “no”. Out of options, some uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in in the car park outside of the convention. After months of negotiations that looked more like a concerted effort to string the uncommitted delegates along than a serious attempt by party leaders to address their concerns, the uncommitted movement left Chicago empty-handed. 
At this point, it’s unclear what impact the Democrats’ dismissal of Gaza will have on voters, even in the crucial swing state of Michigan. But the group Muslim Women for Harris, one of the Zoom-based rallying organisations like Black Women for Harris or White Dudes for Harris, announced that it was dissolving and withdrawing its support for the vice president’s White House campaign.
The Democrats’ swap of Harris for Biden generated hope among some uncommitted delegates—and among many rank-and-file Democrats opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza—that a Harris administration would adopt a less one-sided pro-Israel position on the war. Harris encouraged those hopes in a press conference after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 25 July. 
“To everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you”, Harris said at the time. Even during her nomination acceptance speech at the convention, she expressed a desire that “the Palestinian people can realise their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination”. 
But Harris’s approach to Gaza amounts only to a change of rhetoric for public relations purposes, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/killer-kamala-sending-bombs-killing-children-and-their-moms/">not a change in policy.</a> She has done nothing to break from the administration she still serves as vice president. The positions on a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance she has reiterated are the same ones <a href="https://twitter.com/1RobGunther/status/1826848501562581435">Biden has been promoting since May</a>. It should also be noted that “her people” were running the convention.
A commitment to arming Israel and providing it impunity to violate international law is a bipartisan pillar of US foreign policy. On that, Harris is and will be no different from her predecessors. But many ordinary Democrats and activists—including many on the protest marches outside the convention centre—will be encouraged to believe otherwise. And many who are completely clear-eyed about what Harris represents will still vote for her as a lesser evil to Trump. 
Even Abbas Alawieh, the main spokesperson for the Uncommitted National Movement, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/08/21/abbas-alawieh-delegate-gaza-dnc/">told the Washington Post</a>: “I know that the choice in November is a binary choice, and if I’m in the ballot box and it’s a choice between Trump and Harris, of course I’ll vote for Harris”. 
2. Democrats are courting conservatives 
It wasn’t just the “USA! USA!” chants and the sea of US flags filling the arena at strategic moments. Or that convention planners made room on the program for several conservative Republicans, but not one Palestinian speaker. Or the deployment of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz as archetypical Midwestern white guy/military veteran/Second Amendment supporter/football coach to balance the ticket with a biracial woman from “ultra-liberal” Berkeley/Oakland, California.
It was about what this stagecraft was meant to communicate. Some of it no doubt reflects a Democratic Party version of <a href="https://jacobin.com/2017/10/popular-front-communist-party-democrats">what used to be called Popular Front politics</a>, where everyone from “never-Trump” Republicans to “socialists” like Bernie Sanders is considered part of the anti-MAGA coalition. Another part of it is the Democrats’ obsession, since at least the Bill Clinton administration of 1993-2001, with inhabiting an imagined “centre” in US politics. In 1996, <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/clinton-and-obama-gave-us-trump">Republican candidate Bob Dole complained</a> that he lacked a unique platform to campaign on because President Clinton had adopted so much of the Republican agenda.
In 2024, “capturing the centre” means reviving the <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/08/barack-obama-dnc-speech">“technocratic liberalism”</a> that Barack Obama’s administration practised. Harris spent the first couple of weeks after she declared her candidacy repudiating her previous (and brief) support for free universal health care for all, pro-immigration policies, and Black Lives Matter demands for fundamental criminal justice reform. As she sketches out her positions, she touts an <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/behind-harriss-new-mantra-the-opportunity-economy-ac179e74">“opportunity economy”</a> perfectly aligned with the capitalist ideology of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. She doesn’t talk about making health care or childcare a “right”, but “affordable”. Meanwhile, she and surrogates like former CIA Director Leon Panetta champion the US armed forces’ lethality and their intention to challenge China.
Democrats made a big play on the concept of “freedom”, tied to promises to pass federal guarantees of reproductive rights and voting rights. If Harris/Walz win the election, they will have to overpower stiff Republican, conservative and even Supreme Court resistance to keep these promises. Will Harris/Walz be up to it? Or will they end up like Obama did, reaching for an unattainable compromise that squanders whatever hope anyone put in them? With millions still reeling from the wreckage of the Great Recession, that hopelessness opened the door for a Trump victory in 2016.
3. Bernie Sanders and the Squad are deep inside the tent 
Given Harris’s plans to run to the “centre” (aka, to the right), the Democrats will lean on some time-tested strategies to keep their more liberal base from getting discouraged. One way is their deployment of a type of identity politics to associate any criticism of Harris from the left with Trump’s racist and misogynist attacks. 
Another is to deploy as surrogates people who have progressive bone fides. That’s where people like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) really show how they fit inside the Democrats’ big tent. Sanders and AOC both endorsed Harris at the convention. After slamming the “billionaire class” and Big Pharma and calling for the US to make health care a right, Sanders said: “I look forward to working with Kamala and Tim to pass this agenda”. There’s no indication that Harris and Walz are interested in such an agenda. 
AOC’s praise for Harris for “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home” was even more cringeworthy. As AOC left the stage, delegates chanting her name, the national press started <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/23/aoc-mainstream-democrat-dnc-00175955">churning out articles on her newfound comfort as a “rising star”</a> in the Democrat “mainstream”.
<a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/08/online-left-democrats-occupy-sanders">Jacobin editor Matt Karp lamented</a> that a generation of people younger than “the original Berniecrats” see themselves as Democratic partisans rather than scrappy fighters against the Democratic Party establishment. Karp worries that “some of our best young people have been bought cheap”. He and his colleagues, who have spent years as virtual PR reps for Sanders’ and AOC’s promotion of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for social change—even “socialism”— should ask themselves if they also allowed themselves to be “bought cheap”.
4. Immigrant feel-good stories are a cover for anti-immigrant policies 
Vice President Harris’s story as a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica was key for the biographical documentaries and endorsement speeches at the convention. Harris wove her mother’s life into a patriotic riff about how “only in America”, the “greatest nation on earth”, could such a story be written.
Yet while immigrants served as talking points in many convention speeches, the Democrats were selling themselves as the party of “border security”. Responding to the anti-immigration core of Trump’s appeal, they presented themselves as the only party serious about cracking down on the southern border. 
“As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that [Trump] killed, and I will sign it into law”, Harris pledged. That bill, which failed to pass Congress this year, contained <a href="https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/analysis-senate-border-bill">provisions to make it more difficult for people to seek safety in the US</a> and allow for faster removals of asylum seekers. 
The previous three Democratic conventions featured undocumented speakers describing their plight. And the 2020 virtual convention featured special condemnation of Trump’s policy of “family separation” at the southern border. This year’s proceedings could not have been more different. 
The sheriff of Bexar County (San Antonio), Texas, spoke. Senior Latino politicians like Representative Pete Aguilar and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto vouched for Harris’s “toughness” on border policy and transnational trafficking. And all speakers who mentioned legislation touted Democrat support for the “toughest border bill” in decades, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/both-major-parties-push-racist-immigration-policies/">which conservatives largely wrote</a>. 
Unlike their counterparts at the Republican convention, Democratic delegates didn’t brandish “Mass Deportations Now” placards on the convention floor. But they’ve clearly decided to “counter” Trump by trying to steal his thunder.

Lance Selfa

What we learned from the Democratic National Convention

Of all the good news Vice President Kamala Harris has received since replacing Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, perhaps none was more surprising than the finding that more Americans say they trust her, rather than Trump, to steer the US economy.
The <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/08/12/harris-trump-economy-poll-2024-election">difference</a>
that the monthly Financial Times poll found—42 percent trusting Harris, compared to 41 percent trusting Trump—isn’t particularly significant; it’s more of a tie. 
But it was the first time the Democratic ticket was even in the running on this measure. And yet, for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/opinion/inflation-biden-economy.html">many liberal pundits</a>, the fact that so many people distrusted Biden on the economy was just a failure of Democratic messaging. 
Judged from the vantage of macroeconomic indicators, the US economy is, as an economist <a href="https://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/economy-forecast-lower-recession-chances-1f24174b">quoted in the Wall Street Journal put it, “the envy of the world”</a>. Of all the advanced industrial economies, the US has made the strongest recovery from the covid crisis of 2020-21.
The lowest unemployment rates since the 1960s; the lowest rate of Black unemployment in 50 years; wage gains from 2019 to 2023 to the poorest 10 percent of the working class <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/#epi-toc-2">surpassing those of higher-income groups</a>; a four-fold increase since 2021 in construction spending for manufacturing—t<a href="https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/lets-stay-focused-on-all-the-good?utm_source=publication-search">hese are all talking points that Biden/Harris partisans cite.</a>
Yet the incumbent Democratic president suffers from historic rates of unpopularity and was probably on track to lose to Trump in November before he stepped down. This was enough to befuddle all of Biden’s key advisers. 
But socialists aren’t so befuddled when taking a hard look at the reality of life and work in the US. From that vantage point, all of that economic glitter isn’t gold.
Start with real wages. An <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/econ-performance-pres-admin/">Economic Policy Institute analysis</a> of data going back to 1949 concluded: “Economic performance is stronger when Democrats hold the White House”. While the Biden administration is no exception, when compared to the Trump administration, one statistic stood out.
That was “percent growth of real wages of production and non-supervisory workers”. In non-statistical jargon, that means workers’ wages, adjusted to show their buying power. Two years into the Biden administration, workers had lost ground. The only other administrations in which real wages declined were the Carter, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations—those in power when the employers’ offensive against labour, and high inflation, attacked workers’ living standards. According to this statistic, Biden did worse than Reagan and Bush.
The post-pandemic decline in inflation might push real wages into positive territory by the end of Biden’s four years. But the fact that this is no certainty is part of the explanation for why Biden wasn’t “getting credit” for the economic trends that most economists and politicians consider positive for incumbents.
It’s common for people to think about the price of eggs or petrol when they think about inflation. But aside from commodities like these, the prices of which fluctuate with supply and demand, there are essential commodities and services with long-term price increases. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-annie-lowrey.html">Rent, housing, child care, education and health care top the list here</a>. Each has undergone double-digit increases in real costs over the last several decades. This means that life’s everyday “background” expenses—especially for people under the age of 40—are a constant source of stress and debilitating debt, even for people with decent jobs.
“This is the most money we’ve ever made, and this is the brokest we’ve ever felt”, Nicole Lewis, a teaching assistant living with her husband and three children in Michigan, recently told the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/inflation-interest-rates-wealth-loans-51d4276e?mod=Searchresults_pos4&amp;page=1">Wall Street Journal’s David Uberti.</a>
Taking child care as an example, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-annie-lowrey.html">journalist Annie Lowrey notes</a>: 
“So childcare for [kids aged] zero to five, this is a cost that families are paying for a relatively short time in their lives. And it is absolutely, absolutely crushing. Average childcare costs for a year are between $18,000 and $24,000. And the problem is not just with how much people are paying, it’s that people don’t pay. A lot of folks cannot afford that. And we do not have enough coverage through programs like Head Start [a federally funded early child education program for low-income families]. Head Start is severely underfunded. One in five kids who would qualify for Head Start, gets Head Start.
“And so, folks drop out of the labor force. They rearrange their work schedules. They get family members to help. And the issue is that we have basically maxed out what people can afford to pay, and that still doesn’t mean that childcare workers who are among the lowest paid in American life have a living wage. Most childcare workers are still making $14 or $15 an hour. It’s just not enough.”
In a bout of covid-stimulated experimentation, the Biden government’s 2021 American Rescue Plan provided tax subsidies to working families. These had the dramatic impact of cutting child poverty in half in one year. But to restore capitalist “normality” and scotch any idea that working people should expect their government to look out for them, the administration allowed the tax credits to lapse near the end of 2021. The predictable result was an increase in child poverty—to levels <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/child-poverty-increases-sharply-following-expiration-of-expanded-tax-credit">higher than they were pre-pandemic</a>.
Biden scrapped plans for increased subsidies for child care, universal pre-kindergarten, and wage increases for childcare workers as his “Build Back Better” plan was rebranded as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022. The IRA took steps to address some costs, like the outrageous prices Americans pay for prescription medications. But the core of the IRA was billions in corporate subsidies and tax incentives to stimulate a transition to an electrified economy that can compete more directly with China. 
The Biden/Harris recovery has also been highly unequal. According to one estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, the bottom 50 percent of earners increased their incomes by almost 5 percent. But the top 1 percent has gained more than 10 percent. That is the highest return for that mega-rich slice of the population since the Reagan administration in the 1980s. 
The lowest-income workers have earned the largest wage gains in an economic recovery in decades. Yet, even working full time, these workers earn less than $30,000 a year. US income inequality is more extreme <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA">today than it was in 1963.</a>
It’s common to describe US politics as “polarised”. But it’s also clear that the economic conditions for millions of ordinary people contribute to that polarisation. It’s not just the reason the November election is a toss-up despite the Biden-Harris “strong economy”. It’s also why millions feel that the major institutions of government and business are rigged against them, no matter which party is in power.

US workers have gone backwards under Biden and Harris

“Hope is making a comeback!” The words are Michelle Obama’s, from night two of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At least among US liberals, it seems undeniable. Guardian
columnist Emma Brockes, watching from New York, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/21/democratic-national-convention-kamala-harris-joe-biden">wrote of being taken</a> by “giddiness” and “hysteria”. The convention, she wrote, “unleashed a psychic energy”. “It was emotional! Friends on the east coast stayed up late watching, and cried. I cried!”
It would be easy to dismiss this as the usual fawning of a member of the media class captivated and ultimately overwhelmed by the spell of political power. Yet it is indicative of a broader phenomenon. The Harris effect reaches well beyond the circles inhabited by Guardian columnists; the new presidential nominee has generated an excitement among sections of the Democratic voter base not seen since Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was contesting the primaries, but with a breadth of support not seen since Barack Obama ran in 2008. 
Various indicators tell the story—polling, volunteer numbers, donations and crowd sizes.
The Washington Post this week noted an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/19/harris-poll-surge-is-driven-heavily-by-women-younger-voters/">18-percentage-point shift towards Democrats</a> among people aged under 40 after the party dumped Biden for Harris. An <a href="https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/documents/monmouthpoll_us_081424.pdf/">August 8-12 Monmouth University poll</a> found that Democratic enthusiasm about the election jumped from 46 percent in June, before Biden dropped out, to 85 percent after Harris became the presumptive nominee. Enthusiasm among independents increased from 34 percent to 53 percent. The poll also found that 92 percent of Democratic voters are enthusiastic about Harris being their nominee. Pew Research likewise found that <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/08/14/harris-energizes-democrats-in-transformed-presidential-race/">nine in ten Democrats say they are happy</a> that Harris is the candidate.
Contrast this with the last two Democratic presidential candidates. <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/07/07/2016-campaign-strong-interest-widespread-dissatisfaction/">Pew polling in 2016</a> found that only 43 percent of Democratic voters were satisfied with Hillary Clinton being the party’s candidate. In 2020, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/13/perceptions-of-trump-and-biden/">just 42 percent</a> were happy with the choice of Biden.
Another proxy for gauging “positive enthusiasm” is the proportion of a candidate’s supporters who are voting “for” the candidate as opposed to “against” the other candidate. In 2016, Pew found that less than half of Clinton’s supporters viewed their vote as being “for” her—50 percent said they were voting “against” Trump. In 2020, 56 percent of Biden’s supporters said their main reason for backing him was that he wasn’t Trump. <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/official-polls/fox-news-poll-new-matchup-same-result-trump-bests-harris-one-point">Fox News polling</a> in May found that about half of this year’s Biden supporters were primarily voting “against” Trump. 
By contrast, nearly two-thirds of Harris supporters polled by Fox described their vote as being “for” her, with around one-third voting “against” Trump. That puts Harris somewhere in between the paradigmatic lesser evil candidates (Clinton and Biden) and the more popular Obama, only one-quarter of whose 2008 supporters said their vote was more a vote “against” Republican nominee John McCain.
In terms of volunteers, Harris has also seemingly outperformed. Five days after Biden withdrew from the race, her campaign reported that more than 170,000 people signed up to volunteer. There are signs that the surge has continued: reports of 5,000 sign-ups in Nevada in the first week of August, more than 1,000 sign-ups in Detroit on the second weekend of the month, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/harris-trump-campaign-volunteers-philadelphia/">more than 43,000</a> in Pennsylvania in the last month, and 15,000 in Florida in the three weeks to 15 August, according to two sources. Presumably, there will be an update on national figures at the end of the month or in early September.
Harris’s numbers aren’t as impressive as those of Bernie Sanders’ last campaign, however. In one week, he signed up <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/02/25/bernie-sanders-says-1000000-people-have-signed-campaign-volunteers">1 million volunteers</a> after announcing his presidential bid in early 2019—a year before voting began in the primaries. (By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s 2015-16 primary campaign reported <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/hillary-clinton-campaign-2016-numbers-217271">89,000 volunteers</a> a month before the first ballots were cast in Iowa.)
While volunteer enthusiasm indicates something, it’s important not to read too much into the numbers. The major parties’ political machines will consistently deliver for the confirmed nominees, no matter who they are. For example, despite Democrats’ misgivings about his candidacy, Biden, <a href="https://join.mobilize.us/blog/2020-election-recap">according to one report</a>, mobilised at least 2.7 million people between April and November in the 2020 campaign.
Nevertheless, from a standing start, the mobilisation for Harris indicates a swell of enthusiasm. Coming out of the national convention, her campaign will likely shift into yet another gear as the entire apparatus of the Democratic machine is turned full tilt to November.
Donations, like volunteers, have also flooded in. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/22/us/elections/kamala-harris-donors.html">According to a New York Times analysis</a> of Federal Election Commission data, more than 1.5 million new donors gave a collective US$183 million to the Harris campaign in the last 11 days of July. “Just 10 percent of Mr. Biden’s donors in July were under 45 years old, compared with 28 percent of Ms. Harris’s donors”, the Times noted. According to the Harris campaign, two-thirds of the donations came from first-time donors and 94 percent were for $200 or less. 
This month, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which can hardly be accused of liberal bias, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/kamala-harris-fundraising-donors-election-2024-724da4f6">related anecdotes</a> capturing the mood of Democrats nationwide. They are only sketches, but are suggestive of a broader shift:
“Heather Ahern Huish was so elated when she read online that President Biden was endorsing Kamala Harris for the White House that the English teacher in rural Maine did something she hadn’t done in years. She made a political contribution, clicking on a Harris Facebook ad and donating $100—about the same amount she spends on groceries each week. ‘I was just so swept up in the moment’, said Ahern Huish, who is 56 and lives with her husband. ‘There was, like, zero hesitation.’ ...
“More than 6,000 people have handed over a $10 donation for an abstract ‘Kamala’ quilting pattern made by a couple in Illinois. The haul from a ‘White Dudes for Harris’ call left its organizers dumbstruck. ‘If you had asked me if I would be someone who raised $4.5 million for a presidential campaign before this, I would have told you, “There is no chance in hell”,’ said one of them ...
“In late July, political strategist-turned-businesswoman Jotaka Eaddy set up one of the regular Zoom calls she hosts for Black women in business, called Win With Black Women. Usually the calls attracted a few hundred people. But this time, Eaddy’s Sunday gathering became a vehicle for Harris fans looking for a way to show their support: More than 44,000 people joined the event with tens of thousands others listening in, according to Eaddy. She raised $1.6 million in roughly two hours.”
Finally, Harris’s crowds indicate a campaign galvanising the Democratic base. <a href="https://ash.harvard.edu/articles/the-real-numbers-tracking-crowd-sizes-at-presidential-rallies/">Harvard Kennedy School’s Crowd Counting Consortium</a>, which tracks public mobilisations across the United States, estimates that the vice president, before this week’s convention, averaged 13,400 attendees at her campaign rallies (of which there had been only six, however)—more than double Donald Trump’s 2024 average of 5,600 attendees. 
By contrast, lesser evil candidates are renowned floppers when it comes to pulling a crowd. Biden’s average this year was 1,300 people. In her time, Clinton wasn’t much better.
“The pictures have told the story over the past six months. Republican Donald Trump is filling convention centres, airport hangars and parks. Clinton, on the other hand, is filling community centres and small colleges, but just barely”, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/11/5/why-donald-trump-draws-crowds-hillary-clinton-doesnt">noted a 2016 Al Jazeera report</a>. Clinton did pull some larger audiences, but reports indicate that they generally, or only, materialised when she double-billed with celebrities or more popular figures—such as an election-eve rally of 40,000, which was also a concert featuring Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, with a guest appearance by Barack Obama.
It’s too early, however, to make meaningful crowd comparisons between Harris and the last two Democrats to have generated significant enthusiasm. Obama <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2008/10/big-crowds-for-obamas-red-state-tour-014965">at least twice drew more than 100,000</a> in his first presidential race and drew many “smaller” attendances of 20-40,000. Bernie Sanders’ biggest rallies were in the order of 30,000. But it’s difficult to ascertain the average crowd size for either of those candidates—they both held hundreds of rallies, displaying an endurance that Harris need not match, seeing as there are only a couple of months until polling day. 
At any rate, objective indicators point to a groundswell within the Democratic base; it is overwhelmingly pro-Harris rather than simply anti-Trump. Whether it will last is another question—but there’s no point in making predictions about the outcome of the November poll. As Sanders showed, motivating and captivating a base is not the same as carrying a majority. As well, US politics can turn on a dime. It was just six weeks ago, for example, that Republican candidate Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt. In its aftermath, a chorus of commentators predicted with certainty that the billionaire now had a lock on the election. That the shooting is now almost forgotten is illustrative of how quickly the media cycle and the political narrative can turn. 
It should also be noted that Hillary Clinton, at the same point in the 2016 race, held a larger average polling lead that Harris currently enjoys—<a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/national-polls/">6 percentage points</a> compared to <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/">less than 4 percentage points</a> (though this could bounce after the convention). Clinton’s lead blew out to almost 7 percent just three weeks from election day after an Access Hollywood tape, recorded a decade earlier, exposed Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. One NBC News/Wall Street Journal
poll put the former secretary of state ahead by 14 points soon after. At the time, even Republican leaders described Trump as unelectable and were <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/07/the-gops-brutal-responses-to-the-new-trump-video-broken-down/">calling on him to withdraw from the race</a>. Yet he still threaded a victory through the Electoral College.
Most progressives will view the Harris surge—and with it, a shift in the national polling—as a positive development. After all, who wants Trump to be again installed in the White House, from where he would resume his attacks on women, trans people, the environment, immigrants, workers and unions? Who wants fascist activists to be emboldened by Trump emerging victorious in November after a campaign of far-right invective and promises to deport millions, crush the left and further enrich billionaires? No-one with a left-wing bone in their body views a potential Trump second term with anything other than horror.
Yet there is something profoundly disturbing about a vice president up to her eyeballs in the Palestinian genocide managing to inspire legions of progressives. There is something unsettling about a Democratic National Convention that <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/22/they-want-to-erase-us-how-dnc-rejected-demand-for-palestinian-speaker">refused even to allow a Palestinian speaker</a> to address delegates about the horror of Gaza, funded by a Democratic government. There is something bizarre about <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/what-makes-the-democrats-different-from-but-the-same-as-the-republicans">a party run by billionaires</a> parading itself as the hope of the American working class. And there is something just flat-out dishonest about the party of the CIA talking about international “security”.
The Sanders campaign, whatever its limitations, injected the language of class and socialism into the US national debate. It got millions of people talking about how socialism, however broadly defined, sounds like a good thing. At the Democratic National Convention this week, party representatives got everyone talking about how prosecutors are heroes for middle America. 
“I’ll tell you what …”, Joe Biden started on the first night. The applause erupted before he could even begin waffling; before he could elaborate on what the “what” was. It went on. The delegates cheered in unison at whatever demented babble emanated from the stage, like a parody of the Hunger Games opening ceremony scene, when the gathered audience deliriously cheered contestants about to maul each other for the citizens’ amusement. 
Just an hour before Harris’s closing address, the enthusiasm was for a Michigan sheriff thundering about how police funding has increased in his county, and that’s why you should vote for Kamala. Then came former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta talking about how Harris would keep the US military the strongest in the world. Under her, he said, the US would remain interventionist. That is, it would continue invading countries and overthrowing governments that the State Department declares enemies of US imperialism.
For all the danger of Trump, here’s the Democratic rub: this is a party that can get away with anything precisely because its base will allow it. As long as the party comes with a scent of hopium and is decorated with a liberal dose of diversity, there is no left-wing challenge that it cannot overcome. That’s partly why it is the governing party of choice for big business in the US—an insurgent Democratic Party generating enthusiasm is the greatest safeguard to the establishment’s status quo. 
In the past twelve months, in the face of the horrors of Palestine, a new student movement began to emerge, the likes of which had not been seen in generations. A mass anti-war movement developed across the country, bringing together anti-Zionist Jews and Muslims, activists with generations of organising experience and young people moved to resist oppression and injustice for the first time. There was, arguably, even an emerging rupture in the ideological core of US liberalism as young people broke to the left.
These green shoots of an entirely different way of doing politics—one that put humanity first and was led by people on the ground rather than pro-imperialists in comfortable offices—have been poisoned by the DDT of the DNC. 
Outside the convention, a resilient minority continued to raise their voices for Palestine. But a combination of intimidation and co-option—along with an understandably sapped momentum after ten months of resistance to genocide—have taken their toll. In a city of nearly 10 million people, just 5-7,000 could be mobilised. Democratic-run Chicago might have mobilised more police than that.
Inside the convention, the renewed energy of the party of war was palpable. Republicans were warmly welcomed, but Palestinians were personas non grata. “Stray dis­sent­ers have had Palestinian flags taken away; a hijab-wear­ing pro­tester was drowned out by chants of ‘We love Joe’ and hit with a Biden plac­ard after inter­rupt­ing the pres­id­ent’s speech”, <a href="https://ft.pressreader.com/article/281891598603982">observed Eduard Luce in the Financial Times</a>. 
Imagine a Black woman being treated like that at a Republican convention. Now you know what the Democrats are capable of. They can do this and still hypnotise Guardian columnists.
Like the first Obama campaign, the momentum of Harris portends a domestic rehabilitation of US liberalism and the Democratic Party’s credentials, which will only help them sell the next war. That’s just as frightening as the prospect of another four years of Trump.

Ben Hillier

The end of the lesser evil election?

Soon after Vice President Kamala Harris introduced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, the attacks on his military record began. Quick comparisons were drawn in the media to the <a href="https://politicaldictionary.com/words/swiftboating/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Swiftboating”</a> of Democratic candidate John Kerry in 2004. Too be straight about it, debating the finer points of Walz’s military record misses the larger point being made here, that the cult of military “service” in the United States is a widespread and dangerous one.
Responding to attacks from Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, Walz <a href="https://singjupost.com/transcript-tim-walz-speaks-at-las-vegas-rally/?singlepage=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">told</a> a campaign rally—filled with enthusiastic <a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/5-key-takeaways-from-the-harris-walz-rally-in-las-vegas-3126570/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">hospitality workers</a>—in Las Vegas:
“I was born in a small town in Nebraska where community was a way of life. There’s some Nebraskans in the house. You think I’m kidding. You think I’m kidding. 400 people, 25 kids in my class, twelve were cousins. That’s small town. That’s small town. But you know what?
“My parents and my community taught me generosity towards my neighbour and to work for the common good. My dad was a chain-smoking Korean War-era veteran who, two days after my seventeenth birthday, took me down to sign up to join the National Guard. I was proud for the next 24 years to wear the uniform of this country.
“Thank you to every single one of you who wore that uniform. And I have to tell you, like my dad before me and millions of others, the GI Bill gave me a shot at a college education. And just like Tillie, my dad was a teacher.
“My older brother was a teacher. My sister was a teacher. My younger brother was a teacher. And we married teachers. The privilege of my lifetime was spending two decades teaching in public schools. And you might have heard coaching football to a state championship.”
Walz ticks all of the boxes for one kind of Democratic presidential campaign: small-town America, family tradition, military service, teaching and football. He was introduced by Tillie Torres, a Las Vegas teacher. The message was pretty clear that military service was the natural and honourable stage in one’s life from a nobody to a somebody in the Great American community. Connecting military service to teaching is also a sinister one given that <a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/06/military-recruiters-should-have-no-place-in-our-schools" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">high schools</a> across the country are one of the main recruiting grounds for the US military.
I was pretty shocked that one of the first widely circulated <a href="https://www.instagram.com/mngovernor/p/CNbBvDvnxR5/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">pictures</a> of Walz was a stern-faced, seventeen-year-old version of himself in 1981-era combat fatigues holding an M-16. For a candidate that caught the attention of the US media by calling the Republicans “weird”, a seventeen-year-old clutching a machine gun is not? Walz was, by many accounts, a <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/former-students-and-colleagues-recall-high-school-teachers-tim-and-gwen-walz-as-allies-and-advocates/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">popular</a> teacher with his students and liked by his colleagues. But the role model of the soldier-teacher is not a good one, especially for young men.
I don’t know if he ever directly encouraged any of his students to join the military or what happened to them after they signed up. But young people, especially <a href="https://www.vvaw.org/commentary/?id=687" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">high school</a> boys, can be easily impressed by the glamour of the uniform and combat through films, television and video games. This was particularly true during the 1980s and 1990s, when political leaders and their friends in Hollywood spent a lot of time rehabilitating the military following the US defeat in Vietnam, along with demonising the Vietnam anti-war movement.
Walz joined the National Guard in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the beginning of a massive military build-up and a resurgent anti-Communism and US imperialism. It wasn’t until the end of the decade, however, that the US could again send large numbers of ground troops to fight wars in far-flung corners of the globe. Panama, the first Gulf War, and after 9–11, the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq—the latter two dubbed the “forever wars”. The disastrous results for the countries that the US invaded and the large numbers of US soldiers who suffered debilitating physical and mental health conditions are still with us.
Walz was deployed only once overseas, to<a href="https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/10/03/tim-walz-national-guard-career-minnesota-governor-race" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> Italy</a> during the forever wars, and saw no combat. He spent seven months abroad before he returned home. Others from Minnesota were not so lucky. More than 8,000 Minnesota National Guard soldiers and Airmen were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2011. <a href="https://ngmnpublic.azurewebsites.us/our-fallen/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sixteen members</a> of the Minnesota Guard died in Iraq and another 79 were awarded Purple Hearts for combat injuries. Nearly 100 soldiers with some connection to Minnesota were killed in combat during the forever wars.
Walz retired from the National Guard in May 2005; he was elected to Congress during the Democratic sweep in 2006. <a href="https://reason.com/2024/08/06/tim-walz-is-against-unaccountable-wars-but-he-voted-to-fund-them-anyways/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Reason</a> magazine summarised his record on the forever wars:
“For all his strong feelings about war powers, however, Walz has also shown a tendency to shrink from tough political fights on the issue. During the debate over the surge, Walz <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/washington/02policy.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">voted to force</a> the US military to withdraw from Iraq within 90 days. Yet less than five months later, he voted to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2007/06/01/10634318/minnesotas-democratic-rep-walks-line-on-iraq-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">continue funding</a> the war. It was a position that put him at odds with a majority of his Democratic colleagues ...
“A similar pattern unfolded throughout Walz’s congressional career. According to <a href="https://www.peaceaction.org/legislator/tim-walz/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">voting records</a> compiled by Peace Action, an antiwar advocacy group, Walz often voted to repeal the War on Terror-era <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/02/09/the-inside-story-of-how-the-pentagon-blocked-efforts-to-end-the-iraq-war/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">authorizations for the use of military force</a> (AUMFs), while also voting against restrictions or cuts to military funding.”
Walz proved to be a reliable vote for the Democratic leadership during his years in Congress.
Another aspect of the military service cult is never to discuss what the military actually does beyond blandishments of “serving” or “protecting” our nation. Walz spent his entire military career in the Minnesota National Guard. A cursory survey of its history reveals one that parallels many others. But it’s not a good history: from suppressing the <a href="https://www.mnhs.org/fortsnelling/learn/us-dakota-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dakota uprising</a> in 1862 to the failed effort to crush the <a href="https://libcom.org/article/1934-minneapolis-teamsters-strike-photo-gallery" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Minnesota Teamsters strikes of 1934</a> to strikebreaking at <a href="https://againstthecurrent.org/atc002/behind-the-hormel-strike-fifty-years-of-p-9/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Horme</a>l in 1986 to defending the 2008 Republican convention from demonstrators.
This is not just a Minnesota story. The National Guard has deep roots in the history of the United States, stretching back to the earliest days of English colonisation of North America in the early 1600s, when colonists organised militias to defend themselves from Indigenous attacks and destroy native resistance to their expansion. Slave patrols in the Old South were replaced, <a href="https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/origins-modern-day-policing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according</a> the NAACP, by “militia-style groups who were empowered to control and deny access to equal rights to freed slaves. They relentlessly and systematically enforced Black Codes, strict local and state laws that regulated and restricted access to labor, wages, voting rights, and general freedoms for formerly enslaved people”.
Following the <a href="https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/great-labor-uprising-of-1877_by-philip-s-foner" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1877 Railroad Uprising</a>—which was the closest the United States ever came to a workers’ revolution—the National Guards or state militias in many states had to be reorganised after they demonstrated too much sympathy for the strikers across the country. The legacy of this era is hiding in plain sight. “Cities across the US still bear the physical legacy of the 1877 railroad strike”, <a href="https://enotrans.org/article/rutherford-b-hayes-1877-1881-the-great-railroad-strike/#:~:text=Cities%20across%20the%20U.S.%20still,units%20and%20suppress%20labor%20movements.%E2%80%9D" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according</a> to the logistics Center for Transportation. “To quell social unrest, many states and cities—with financial support from wealthy business owners—constructed armories resembling medieval castles to house National Guard units and suppress labor movements.”
When Walz was governor of Minnesota during the Black Lives Matter rebellion following <a href="https://www.kare11.com/article/news/verify/did-gov-walz-or-trump-deploy-the-national-guard-in-2020-unrest/89-edf24d97-dc4f-49a3-bcc5-fad7f7504a32" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">George Floyd’s</a> police murder, he deployed National Guard troops to Minneapolis, a move was <a href="https://apnews.com/article/tim-walz-trump-audio-riots-george-floyd-3b349ec2a8611f242333b76512a82d4f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">praised</a> by President Donald Trump at the time. This was no aberration in its long history. Minnesota is quite proud of the National Guard’s role in foiling “domestic unrest”. The Minnesota Military Museum boasts:
“Since its formation ... the Minnesota National Guard has been called upon to support the State of Minnesota 91 times in response to a variety of civil disturbances. Minnesota has experienced a wide range of race, labor and other social conflict since its inception and these upheavals received varied responses from state governments to include the deployment of the National Guard.”
The National Guard in many states recruits soldiers by emphasising their heroic role during natural disasters, as this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYm8tEC7uk0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">video</a> demonstrates. National Guard members are sold as do-gooders or “citizen-soldiers” who rarely if ever see combat. But the post-Cold War reorganisation of the US military has meant that the National Guard is more integrated into military operations abroad, in sharp contrast to the Vietnam War era. Since the end of the draft in 1973, the US military has had to rely on various means to recruit its soldiers.
The cult of military service sprouted in the era of the volunteer army. While it means that professional politicians like Tim Walz may ride this into the White House with Kamala Harris, for others, it is a road to the graveyard.
First published at <a href="http://www.joeallen-60224.medium.com">joeallen-60224.medium.com</a>. Joe Allen is a socialist based in the United States. He is the author of Vietnam: The (Last) War the US Lost.

Joe Allen

The US cult of military service

<a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/night-britain-uk-fight-back-riots-southport-immigration/">Reports of the anti-racist demonstrations</a> sweeping Britain on the evening of Wednesday, 7 August, were a sight for sore eyes. Quite literally—those of us watching the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/7/mapping-far-right-riots-in-the-uk">racialised thuggery</a> unfold across the UK since July have genuinely had to hold back tears. If the threat posed by the far right in Britain is to be successfully pushed back, much more anti-racist protest will be needed.
Britain hasn’t seen this level of coordinated far-right terror since the late 1970s. It’s <a href="https://socialistworker.co.uk/features/beating-the-nazis-in-the-1970s-we-did-it-before-and-we-ll-do-it-again/">reminiscent of the dark days</a> of jackbooted skinheads and the rise of the far-right National Front: days many believed were long gone. But almost 50 years later, anti-racists have once again found themselves having to organise emergency counter-protests against an onslaught of targeted attacks on refugees and migrants. 
The turnouts for the 7 August rallies in major cities were large. In East London, 10,000 took to the streets; there were 7,000 in Bristol, 1,500 in Liverpool and the same number in Sheffield. In one west London neighbourhood, around 400 protesters faced down a pathetic showing of four or five far-right thugs, protected and spirited to safety by the Metropolitan Police. The crowd took up a <a href="https://x.com/deborahfinding/status/1821266059141455880">chant</a> both poignant and to the point: “There are many, many more of us than you!”.
Reports also suggest that Muslim youth have organised themselves to defend physically their mosques and community centres—an echo of the <a href="https://irr.org.uk/article/recollections-on-the-asian-youth-movements-that-emerged-in-the-1970s/">Asian Youth Movements</a> of the late 1970s. 
Back then, migrant communities could also rely on mass anti-fascist mobilisations of workers and young people cohered around the <a href="https://redflag.podbean.com/e/lessons-from-the-anti-nazi-league-with-moira-leahy/">Anti-Nazi League</a> (ANL). After a <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/08/remembering-the-battle-of-lewisham-2">victorious march</a> against police and fascists in south-east London in 1977, the ANL chased the National Front off the streets wherever it was active. The radical socialists who organised the ANL also galvanised support from the most militant sections of the trade union movement; in 1979 the National Union of Mineworkers hosted a “Miners Against the Nazis” conference in collaboration with ANL activists. 
Today, unions are the only official institutions endorsing anti-racist demonstrations, union flags and contingents being present at many rallies. While left-pitching <a href="https://www.hastings.gov.uk/news/latest/joint-statement/">Greens</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C-V3tffo79c/">Labour</a> representatives shamefully warned their constituents against attending protests, many local union branches are trying to mobilise. One activist from the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers—which spearheaded a <a href="https://cms.redflag.org.au/article/britains-historic-strike-wave">strike wave</a> in 2022—told <a href="https://socialistworker.co.uk/anti-racism/7-august-fear-changes-sides-as-massive-protests-defy-the-far-right/">Socialist Worker</a> that a union conference held on 7 August had voted to attend a nearby anti-fascist protest en bloc. 
What the anti-fascist movement faces is a broad revival of serious and organised neo-Nazi street politics. The mainstream media have adopted terms like “rioting” or “disturbances”, but what we’ve seen are orchestrated physical attacks on mosques, immigration centres and refugee housing. According to UK anti-fascist research group Hope Not Hate, <a href="https://hopenothate.org.uk/2024/07/31/the-far-right-and-the-southport-riot-what-we-know-so-far/">flyers and social media posts</a> have been used to coordinate attacks at specific times and places.
On 27 July a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce4qd4e4e1vo">huge nationalist and anti-Muslim rally</a> of around 40,000 people was held in Trafalgar Square, London. Headed by notorious hate-monger Tommy Robinson, this mass mobilisation took place before the Southport stabbing that ostensibly triggered the wave of far-right violence across the country. And Robinson already had a follow-on <a href="https://www.thenational.scot/news/24490711.glaswegians-urged-stand-firm-tommy-robinson-promoted/">demonstration planned</a> for Glasgow’s George Square in September. This will be a major test for anti-racist counter-protesters to face down.
Hitler once wrote that mass rallies and street-level confrontations helped build the hardened core of Nazism because they “burn into the little man’s soul the conviction that, though a little worm, he is part of a great dragon”. 
Sinister <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq4c-Wiazw&amp;rco=1">speeches</a> at Robinson’s event echoed this sentiment and delivered clear incitements to racist violence. “There is no political solution to this problem [of Muslim immigration]”, one speaker proclaimed. “The mass of you, the sea of you ... you are the solution. Defend your home ... take back your country and unite the Kingdom—God bless the king!” Another, dressed in full military garb, <a href="https://twitter.com/TRobinsonNewEra/status/1818239415040221667">declared</a> to rapturous applause, “I will keep fighting until I’m lying on the streets, choking on my own blood”.
The establishment politicians, the police and media outlets now decrying “disorder” have done nothing to denounce the rhetoric spewing from Robinson’s brothers-in-arms. Indeed, they’ve pushed a hard-right racist agenda of their own in recent years. Former Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tried to establish <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/how-australia-taught-britain-torture-refugees">offshore refugee detention</a> camps in Rwanda. His successor, Labour’s Keir Starmer, promises instead new counter-terror powers and faster deportations of asylum seekers directly back to their home countries. 
Establishment parties have given fuel to the far right by whipping up anger against migrants. Almost 17 per cent of voters in the recent British general election <a href="https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10009/">voted for</a> openly far-right candidates running with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK or as ex-Conservative independents.
When mass industrial action <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/britains-summer-industrial-discontent">broke out</a> in 2022, the British labour movement had an opportunity to impose a different narrative about rising inflation and falling living standards. Instead of scapegoating migrants and refugees, striking workers laid the blame squarely on the capitalist class gorging itself on the profits of the crisis. 
Keir Starmer condemned those strikes, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/27/sam-tarry-sacked-labour-frontbench-rail-strike-picket-line-keir-starmer">sacked</a> a Labour shadow minister for visiting a picket line. The Labour Party has actively engaged in racist fearmongering and undermined serious class resistance and solidarity. The chickens are now coming home to roost.
The ruling class is cohering around a <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/riots-starmer-turning-point-police-b2593477.html">“law and order” response</a> to the so-called disturbances of the past few weeks. British anti-fascists are well aware of the role police played in <a href="https://socialistworker.co.uk/features/eyewitnesses-to-the-battle-of-cable-street-fascists-did-not-pass/">defending far-right marches</a> in the 1930s and ’70s. The police daily enact their <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/24/outrage-after-british-police-officer-filmed-kicking-man-in-the-head">own racist violence</a> against Muslims and enforce the “order” of a perpetually unjust system. 
That’s why any movement against the far right must be imbued with a radical and unforgiving critique of the system that breeds fascist thugs. They are the political spawn of equally criminal bosses, media moguls and establishment politicians. Against all of them—all these fascist worms and their capitalist enablers—our side must respond decisively: “There are many, many more of us than you”.

Ruby Healer

‘There are many, many more of us than you’: British anti-racists mobilise against far right onslaught

Parents these days have it tough. They are endlessly accosted with the dangers facing their children: drugs, gangs, TikTok, strangers, junk food, Fortnite, vaping.
So while it pains to add to the list, there is a much greater threat that never gets a second of airtime: liberal centrism. Luring victims into official politics with talk of “change from within” only to suck out their souls and fill the hollow shell with careerist ambition—now that’s scary.
Parents from the radical left should not think their offspring are immune. Former US President Barack Obama, aspiring president Kamala Harris and federal Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg all had a socialist parent. But each embraced the Democratic establishment abyss with the imperial nihilism of the glassiest-eyed Washingtonian dynasty. 
Barack Obama Sr., an economic adviser in newly independent Kenya, criticised the government’s pro-market development strategy, advocating the maintenance of communal land ownership and the nationalisation of foreign companies. “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation, so that not only a few individuals shall control the vast magnitude of resources”, he wrote in a <a href="https://www.politico.com/pdf/PPM41_080411_bhobama_article_1965.pdf">1965 paper for East Africa Journal</a>. “The government should tax the rich more ... Theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent of income.”
Barack Obama Jr., on the other hand, bailed out America’s largest banks and companies, destroyed union agreements and cut spending on social security. During his first term, 95 percent of all income gains in the US <a href="https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf">went to the richest 1 percent</a>. In his second term, Obama <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/us/politics/obama-offers-to-cut-corporate-tax-rate-as-part-of-jobs-deal.html">appealed to Republican lawmakers</a> to help him cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 28 percent. 
Joseph Buttigieg produced the first English translation of the Prison Notebooks, written by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci while imprisoned under Mussolini. Buttigieg <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/303230?seq=1">described </a>Gramsci’s legacy as one of “selfless commitment to the socialist vision ... of unwavering dedication to the cause of the oppressed; of brave, unyielding and very costly defiance of the fascist dictatorship”.
The legacy of his son Pete Buttigieg, formerly an intelligence officer in Afghanistan and corporate consultant for McKinsey &amp; Company, now the transport secretary to Genocide Joe, is decidedly less noble. “The secretary has focused on intervening to support American supply chains ... including measures to help cut in half the long-dwelling container congestion at America’s largest ports”, the official US Department of Transportation website <a href="https://www.transportation.gov/meet-secretary/secretary-pete-buttigieg">notes</a>.
Liberal centrist ghouls stalk elite universities’ law schools and political science departments, hunting for prey. Those in freshman tutorials who flirt with notions such as social justice and systemic racism are shepherded like proverbial lambs into career politics. 
In his Oxford University days, Pete Buttigieg and his friends talked of pushing the Democrats of their native US to the left and away from the “Third Way” centrism of Bill Clinton. But “over time, I’ve come to appreciate more the policy work that comes out of moderate organisations”, he <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/12/03/784151111/pete-buttigieg-spent-his-younger-days-pushing-democrats-off-middle-ground">told National Public Radio in 2019</a>, ahead of his failed presidential nomination bid. 
Donald J. Harris, a left-wing academic at Stanford University, was once <a href="https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1976/11/03?page=4&amp;section=MODSMD_ARTICLE11">described</a>
by the Stanford Daily as a “pied piper leading students astray from neo-classical economics”. He dedicated his 1978 Marxist work Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution to daughters Kamala and Maya.
Kamala Harris apparently loved the first two words of the book’s title but didn’t care for the rest. Economist Adam Tooze called her a “straight-up, main-line, big tech-identified happy Californian Democrat” on his podcast Ones and Tooze. Her presidential campaign has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/22/technology/silicon-valley-trump-biden-democrats.html">“invigorated” Silicon Valley</a>, as venture capitalist cash flows back into Democratic coffers. 
Between her father’s generation of radical Caribbean diaspora, who understood the criminal “justice” system to be a weapon of racist oppression, and Kamala’s campaigning as a tough prosecutor who knows how to put felons behind bars, something went terribly wrong. 
The liberal centre is clearly a danger to our youth. So let’s picture the television advertisements we might run if we finally sounded the alarm. 
A middle-aged radical sits on a couch, Che Guevara on her T-shirt and a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X on her lap. Low strings begin to throb menacingly. A deep voice-over asks: “Do you know where your child is right now?” 
Cut to the Sine Institute at the American University in Washington, DC. Nineteen-year-old College Democrats in blue blazers are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAqtK-WFd7w">conversing politely</a> with Young Republicans in red blazers. “The best part is that they’re going to talk about what they agree upon”, says Sine Institute director and disgraced former Democratic National Committee CEO Amy Dacey, laughing maniacally into the camera.
Fade out. 
“Is your child seeking common ground with Republicans? Stop it before it’s too late.” 
We pan down thousands of billowing, blood-soaked American flags to reveal Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi grinning and shaking hands with a conga line of Republican congressional representatives in celebration of the record number of <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/biden-managed-put-together-many-bipartisan-wins-rcna61883">bipartisan bills passed</a> under Biden.
Cut back to the university room, now all but empty. One last student from the audience, slinging a backpack over their shoulder, is about to leave when a shadowy figure in a knee-length <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/power-coats-inauguration">power coat</a>
approaches. A leaflet is placed in the curious student’s hand: “Campaign launch for Kamala: Meet your elected officials!”
Next shot: a speechifying Kamala Harris sports a sheriff’s badge the size of Arizona and wields a red-white-and-blue judge’s gavel in each hand. The lectern is branded with her official campaign slogan: Vote Blue Literally No Matter What We Do. The voice-over asks: “Does your child accuse you of supporting Trump any time you raise a criticism of the Democrats?”
Fade. The music grieves now, like a requiem mass. The screen fills progressively with a collage of photographs: college students smiling rapturously in selfies with Obama, Biden, Clinton, Harris, Schumer or Pelosi. 
A man strolls soberly into the centre of the shot.
“Every eight minutes, a law student accepts a summer job in a Democratic Party office. Look at these photos: notice the deadness behind the eyes, the ruthlessly pragmatic grip. At this point, it’s already too late. Liberal centrism claims thousands of young people like these every year. Without early intervention, your child could be one of them.”
A young woman’s blurred face speaks to the camera: “I told Mum and Dad I wanted to study law to fight systemic racism in the courts. But in sophomore year, I joined the College Democrats. Now I see everything is a lot more complicated than Daddy made out. If we don’t get tough on crime, we’ll lose office. Then how would we begin cautious police reform in 2044?”
A black screen; silence. A line of text appears: “Don’t let your child be sucked into the centre”.
We hear a final, sombre voice-over: “Know the warning signs. A meme about brat girl summer or coconut trees might look harmless at first. But suddenly, your child is canvassing for Top Cop Kamala. It’s never too early to start talking to your child about the true history of the Democratic Party”.

April Holcombe

Kids: Just say no to liberal centrism

“It’s tough being a member of the Squad these days”, wrote Branko Marcetic last year in the pages of Jacobin magazine, lamenting that “even committed socialists question what the point of the Squad has been”.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s successful bid to unseat long-term Democratic Party powerbroker Joe Crowley from his New York congressional seat in June 2018 unleashed an avalanche of expectations. The popular documentary Knock down the House chronicled her rise, described by producers as one of the “most shocking political upsets in recent American history”. Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, was joined by three other successful progressive challengers: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. Together, they were dubbed “the Squad” by the media.
On the American reformist left, expectations of a socialist breakthrough led by the Squad were high. Miles Kampf-Lassin wrote in Jacobin: “It’s no shock that Ocasio-Cortez and her cohort are being treated as a threat to a party establishment that has cozied up to corporate power and helped maintain the deeply unequal economic and political order in this country. It’s because they are one”.
Five years later, the Squad has lost its sheen. Rather than taking a hammer to the Democratic establishment, the Squad has become its enthusiastic left flank. Commitment to party unity has meant accepting the Biden administration’s right-wing domestic and international agenda, from voting to impose a unilateral contract on railway workers and quash their right to strike, to voting to fund Israel’s Iron Dome. 
As large numbers of young people turned away from Biden, labelling him “Genocide Joe”, and wealthy party donors abandoned him over his fading mental acuity, the Squad stood out as the biggest enthusiasts for the increasingly beleaguered president. 
In response to criticism after Biden’s disastrous performance in the presidential debate, Ilhan Omar offered a passionate defence, telling the Washington Post: “He’s been the best president of my lifetime, and we have his back”. This came after Omar in early February accurately described Biden as “greenlighting the massacre of Palestinians”—apparently a minor detail. 
When Biden announced his intention to withdraw from the 2024 race and endorsed Kamala Harris as his replacement, support from the Squad followed. Squad colleague Jamaal Bowman wrote effusively: “I am ... excited to see her execute her own transformational vision for the future of our democracy and our foreign policy ... Let us all follow her guiding light”.
The “guiding light” the Squad are now following is a cop. Harris is a former California attorney general—making her one of the leading enforcers of a system that has given the US the most incarcerated population on the planet. Harris fought against the early release of prisoners, her legal team arguing that emptying prisons would deplete the state’s source of cheap labour. She resisted Black Lives Matter demands to make police body cameras compulsory. 
Those who once claimed to challenge the warmongering, mass-incarcerating, corporate-backed Democratic establishment are now part of the furniture. Those, like AOC, who built their profiles protesting migration detention now face angry pro-Palestine protests calling out their complicity in their party’s crimes. So what happened? 
The truth is that, despite projections of radicalism from some of their supporters, the Squad were always moderate liberal Democrats with no real project of challenging the party leadership. While portrayed as “outsiders” in the media, most members of the Squad have a long history in the party. Ayanna Pressley worked her way up as an intern for a member of the Kennedy dynasty, as did Ocasio-Cortez. Rashida Tlaib worked as a Democratic staffer from 2004, while Ilhan Omar did the same in Minnesota from 2013. Their subsequent trajectory shows that it’s impossible to defend left-wing principles within the structures of a profoundly pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist party. 
Their approach to the Democratic Party was collaborative from the start. One of AOC’s first acts in office was an occupation of congressional powerbroker Nancy Pelosi’s office alongside climate activists. But AOC couched this action within an approach that aimed to gently influence Pelosi. “One of the things I admire so much about leader Pelosi is that she comes from a space of activism and organising, and so I think that she really appreciates civic engagement. And really what I’m here to do is just to support the folks who are here”, she said at the time. “Should leader Pelosi become the next speaker of the House, we need to tell her that we’ve got her back”, AOC added. 
The Squad did indeed have Pelosi’s back. They supported the venture capitalist—who has an estimated net worth upwards of $100m—for re-election as party leader at the end of 2018. Soon, AOC had christened her the “mama bear” of the Democratic Party. This established a pattern: members of the Squad would trade loyalty to the Democratic leadership for a shot at sitting on influential congressional committees.
The relationship between the Democratic left and centre was consummated under Biden. After swiftly dispensing with the half-hearted challenge from Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries, he moved to coopt the left by adopting some elements of their rhetoric as part of his policy agenda. As journalist Ryan Grimm, a sympathiser of the Squad’s project, admitted: 
“While Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad spent much of 2019 in conflict with party leadership, and spent the first half of 2020 trying to nominate Sanders for president, AOC had been a team player in the general election, and through Biden’s term, she had consistently framed her advocacy as in support of his administration and his agenda.”
The economic and social agenda of the Biden administration, dubbed “Bidenomics” by the press, has sometimes been presented as a victory for the left, something at least approximating the reformist vision of a Green New Deal. US socialist Ashley Smith argues that Bidenomics should better be understood as a project of “imperialist Keynesianism”—a project to rebuild the foundations of US capitalism, stabilise domestic politics and restore Washington’s imperial supremacy over China and Russia. 
Rather than pulling Biden to the left, Sanders and the Squad were pulled to the right, abandoning their reformist program to cheerlead an administration overseeing attacks on workers at home and militarism abroad.
The consequences of self-described socialists signing up to be the left wing of Biden’s imperialist agenda have been made starkly apparent over the past ten months, as a US-Israeli war on Gaza has claimed tens of thousands of Palestinian lives. AOC’s willingness to betray Palestine in the name of party unity has been clear since 2021, when she refused to vote against funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile system. Months of waffling about the war, evading and criticising protesters have alienated many in the Palestine movement.
More than five years on from the shock election of the Squad, there is a need for a serious critique of their project. The Democratic Party is the world’s oldest and most established capitalist party. Its list of crimes is the longest of any, given the party’s central role in administering one of the most brutal capitalist states on the planet—a state that has spent 80 years as the largest and most aggressive empire the world has ever known. The Democrats are the party of slavery and segregation, of Hiroshima and the wars on Vietnam and Gaza, of union-busting and austerity.
The very name “Democratic Party” is an oxymoron. Its structures are profoundly undemocratic, and it’s not really a party. Rather, it’s a series of fundraising cabals controlled by a powerful wing of the US capitalist class. No genuine socialist could operate politically within its institutions.
The best representatives of the socialist movement have always understood this. The American revolutionary Eugene Debs once said: “There was a time in my life, before I became a socialist, when I permitted myself as a member of the Democratic Party to be elected to a state legislature. I have been trying to live it down. I am as much ashamed of that as I am proud of having gone to jail”.
The balance sheet of the Squad’s first five years shows that a group of aspirational, progressive political careerists can comfortably exist in the swamp of the Democratic Party despite occasional ideological tensions and policy clashes. A real socialist movement is something different—it will have to be built based on an implacable hostility to the oldest, most powerful capitalist party on the planet.

Luca Tavan

Whatever happened to the ‘Squad’?

The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) 19 July <a href="https://www.icj-cij.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf">advisory opinion</a> that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories violates international law argued that the occupation should be ended “as rapidly as possible”.
The 83-page judgement further found that “Israel’s policies and practices in the West Bank and East Jerusalem implement a separation between the Palestinian population and the settlers transferred by Israel to the territory”. 
In other words, Israel is implementing apartheid.
The ICJ declared Israel was obliged to “immediately cease all new settlement activity”, repeal legislation and policies that discriminate against Palestinians or are “aimed at modifying the demographic composition of any parts of the territory” and “provide full reparation for the damage caused” by its illegal occupation. 
Twenty years ago, the ICJ issued another <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/016/2004/en/">advisory opinion</a>
that the construction of Israel’s “separation barrier” (better known as the apartheid wall) inside the West Bank was contrary to international law. Just as it did in 2004, Israel is today thumbing its nose at the ICJ’s findings. 
Since Hamas’ “Operation Flood” on 7 October last year, Israel’s efforts to extend and consolidate its occupation of Palestinian territory through settlement expansion and settler violence have dramatically escalated.
<a href="https://www.ohchr.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2024-03/Palestine-March2024.pdf">According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights</a> (OHCHR), 465,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank in September last year. An additional 230,000 lived in East Jerusalem. From 1 November 2022 to 31 October 2023, 24,300 new settlement housing units were approved, the largest increase on record. 
This year, the Netanyahu government has announced thousands of new settlements planned across East Jerusalem and the West Bank. At the same time, settlers have become increasingly emboldened to establish new outposts. These typically begin without official government approval but receive assistance to establish roads and infrastructure. The Israeli military stands ready to detain any Palestinians that get in their way.
On 21 July, Faz3a (a civil protection group, pronounced faz’a) reported that just one day after the ICJ statement, three of its international volunteers were evacuated to a hospital after being attacked by Israeli settlers in the village of Qusra in the northern West Bank. The volunteers were part of Faz3a’s recently launched <a href="https://www.defendpalestine.org/">Defend Palestine Campaign</a>, which seeks to build a mass protective presence for Palestinians under attack.
The settlers, using metal pipes and wooden batons, attacked Palestinian farmers tending to their lands alongside the volunteers seeking to protect them. As in past cases, the Israeli military failed to stop the attack.
“The attack today, not even 24 hours after the ICJ ruled that Israeli occupation is illegal and that settlers enjoy impunity when exercising violence, serves as further proof for the dire need for international civil protection in Palestine”, Mohammed Khatib, a Defend Palestine Campaign organiser, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C9sx1wFID6X/">said in a statement</a>. “Eighteen communities in the West Bank have been completely wiped out by such violence since October, and the Palestinian people have no time to wait.”
According to Faz3a, Qusra has been the target of “nearly daily attacks by Israeli settlers, who attack villagers, vandalise farms and have even burnt several houses in the village with complete impunity”.
On 11 October, four Palestinians were killed in the village when settlers attacked a family home. Two more were killed the following day.
Saeed Amireh describes a similar situation in his village, Ni’lin, located west of Ramallah in the central West Bank. Amireh told Red Flag that the violence of the Israeli soldiers and settlers since last October “is something we’ve not seen in decades”.
“Since 7 October, they have blocked the entrance of my village to isolate it and cut it off from the rest of Palestinian villages and cities. We can’t move in and out easily and we risk being shot dead”, Amireh said. 
The siege of Ni’lin is having a dire economic impact on its residents. Those employed outside of the village have lost their jobs. Farmers were unable to harvest their olives last season because of settler and soldier attacks. Eight olive pickers were shot, according to Amireh, his cousin being permanently disabled as a consequence.
Many residents are unable to pay their electricity bills because they are denied an income. Settlers are also attempting to deny residents access to communal water sources. 
“When we try to protest, they shoot directly at us with live bullets and arrest us”, Amireh said.
One of the most violent settler groups, known as the “Hill Boys”, is directly supported by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. 
“The Hill Boys have even stolen sheep from Palestinian Bedouin communities and cut us off from all sources of life and existence”, Amireh told Red Flag. “The settlers are helped fully by the Israeli soldiers at every step. They work as gangs ... they invade our homes, they steal whatever they see of value: money, phones, televisions, gold, cars etc. They even film their actions and laugh about it.”
The pattern of Israeli soldier and settler violence has been repeated throughout the West Bank over the past ten months. Since 7 October, <a href="https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-update-175-west-bank">according</a>
to UN monitoring group Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 554 Palestinians have been killed by the military in the West Bank, and at least ten more have been killed by settlers. 
<a href="https://www.unicef.org/mena/press-releases/child-casualties-west-bank-skyrocket-past-nine-months-unicef">According</a>
to UNICEF, 143 of the Palestinians killed are children. On average, a Palestinian child has been killed every two days in the West Bank since October, an unprecedented figure.
The OCHA further reports that, since 7 October, Israeli authorities have demolished, confiscated or forced the demolition of more than 500 Palestinian homes, resulting in the displacement of nearly 3,000 people. 
Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes and displacement of residents is not a new policy. Since 1967, the Zionist state has continually expanded its West Bank settler population to take more and more Palestinian territory. However, the escalating state violence is making Palestinian resistance more difficult. 
Amireh told Red Flag that military checkpoints are now a daily occurrence in Ni’liin. 
“If they find anything [on residents’ phones] related to Palestine such as a Palestinian song or flag, or that the person liked something in favour of the [Palestinian] resistance ... they arrest that person directly and put them in administrative detention”, he said.
“Administrative detention” refers to imprisonment without charge or trial, which is lawful in the West Bank for stateless Palestinians, who are subject to military law, but not for settlers, who hold Israeli citizenship. 
Amireh explained that, since last October, the military has detained 743 Ni’lin residents, mostly under administrative detention orders. Only seventeen have been released. A further 900 people have fled, while the remaining 4,300 residents remained trapped and isolated in the village.
In the last ten months, <a href="https://www.ohchr.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/documents/countries/opt/20240731-Thematic-report-Detention-context-Gaza-hostilities.pdf">according</a>
to another report recently released by the OHCHR, the military has “initiated daily mass, apparently arbitrary, arrests of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, affecting all sectors of Palestinian society”.
By the end of June, 9,440 Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem were being held in Israeli prisons, effectively hostages of Israel, almost double the number held at the end of September. 
Palestinians are held in shocking conditions. In interviews conducted by the OHCHR, former detainees alleged torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including sexual abuse of both women and men. 
“The testimonies gathered by my office and other entities indicate a range of appalling acts, such as waterboarding and the release of dogs on detainees, amongst other acts, in flagrant violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law”, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/un-report-palestinian-detainees-held-arbitrarily-and-secretly-subjected">said on 31 July</a>.
According to the OHCHR, at least 53 Palestinian detainees are known to have died in Israeli military facilities and prisons since 7 October.
The village of Ni’lin sits in West Bank Area B, defined as land that is under joint Palestinian Authority civil control and Israeli military control. The Palestinian Authority (PA) acts as Israel’s accomplice. 
Since 7 October, PA forces have reportedly killed eleven Palestinians protesting in solidarity with Gaza, and arrested hundreds more. Like the Israeli military, the PA has been found to carry out arbitrary detention, torture and ill treatment of its prisoners. One former detainee, arrested by the PA while participating in a Gaza solidarity demonstration in Hebron last December, told the OHCHR that during his detention he was slapped and punched repeatedly, kept in solitary confinement and deprived of the use of toilet for more than seven hours.
In Area C, approximately, 300,000 Palestinians live alongside the 400,000 Israeli settlers, who reside in approximately 230 settlements. This area, which constitutes 60 percent of the occupied West Bank, remains under Israeli military control. 
“The big target for the settlers is to annex all of Area C”, Amireh told Red Flag. 
Israel’s Civil Administration administers Area C directly, along with Israel’s settlements across the West Bank. The Civil Administration is headed by Smotrich, who is himself a settler. 
“To keep his coalition government alive, Netanyahu has given the settlers the West Bank like a gift to do whatever they want. They [the military] have armed over 150,000 settlers. They are very well armed and are preparing to massacre the [Palestinian] people. They are escalating the situation step by step, beginning by isolating people, separating us from each other. They are focusing now on attacking us in bigger and bigger groups”, Amireh said.
“My greatest fear is that if a war starts with Lebanon, they will try to massacre us like they did in 1948. It will become a catastrophe.”
In response to the escalation of settler violence, Faz3A is <a href="https://www.defendpalestine.org/en/join">appealing</a> for international volunteers to travel to the West Bank for the next olive harvest in the coming months. Once in Palestine, Faz3A volunteers undertake training to provide both direct protection to Palestinian civilians facing Israeli settler violence and attacks, as well as to monitor, document and report on violations of their rights.
At the same time, solidarity activists need to increase the pressure on our governments to isolate Israel. In this regard, the ICJ opinion focuses attention on the many ways Western governments continue to aid and abet Israel’s crimes. 
The ICJ noted that all states must cooperate with the UN to put in place measures to end the occupation (in other words, sanctions) and achieve “the full realisation of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”. No state, it said, should “render aid or assistance in maintaining ... Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
To date, the Australian government has followed the examples of the US, Britain and Canada by announcing sanctions against only a handful of extremist settlers. However, this measure avoids any meaningful action against Israel.
If Israel is to be stopped from ethnically cleansing the entirety of historic Palestine, we must act now to demand our government—and governments around the world—break all diplomatic, military and trade ties with apartheid Israel.
Nick Everett is the chair of Friends of Palestine Western Australia.

Nick Everett

Israeli settlers’ West Bank rampage escalates

When people board a train, they don’t check the driver’s race, gender or musical tastes, expecting that any of these might alter the journey’s final destination.
“That old white mumbler was going to take us to the city. Now there’s a Black woman in the driver’s compartment; I guess we could end up anywhere—perhaps a place where life is great and easy and everyone is good-looking.” 
No-one ever said that.
When it comes to US politics and the political vehicles of the ruling class, the same general rule applies: the trains run on tracks laid by the rich and powerful, and the drivers are methodically tested over decades to ensure they know every bend and can deal with unruly passengers if required. 
Whether it’s the Democratic locomotive or the Republican one, the destination is always the same: Crapsville, where wages are low, universal health care doesn’t exist, cops and prisons are everywhere, and money flows upwards into the pockets of billionaires and to fund the military-industrial complex. 
There are occasional exceptions to the rule, such as Donald Trump’s derailment of the Republican Party. But such events are extraordinarily rare, even unique. And even then, Crapsville is still the destination.
The opposite of rare and unique is Kamala Harris. 
A career prosecutor whose professional life was about filling prisons with poor people. A vice president who has gone along with the genocide in Palestine. More than anything else, however, Harris is an establishment Democrat. That doesn’t sound as incriminating as other charges brought against her. Yet it supersedes them.
US politics is often obsessed with the identity and character of potential presidents. Obviously, politics has a moral dimension that cannot be divorced from the records of individuals seeking office. But the myopic focus on whether someone is considered suitably “qualified” for office on character grounds—or whether their racial or gender identity will be a sign of social progress if they are elected—distracts from the core issue: the nature of the ruling class and the character of its political parties.
Over the last several election cycles, the Democratic Party has become the preferred political vehicle of the US ruling class—the country’s most powerful individuals. The party represents most of the richest congressional districts, receives the lion’s share of political donations from multinational capital and is now known as the party most linked to (and supportive of) the intelligence agencies and the surveillance state.
The US ruling class isn’t just a group of people who have done a little better than the rest, by birth or otherwise. It is an interventionist beast that attempted 72 international regime changes, including coups, in the four decades after World War Two (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/12/23/the-cia-says-russia-hacked-the-u-s-election-here-are-6-things-to-learn-from-cold-war-attempts-to-change-regimes/">according to investigations</a> by Lindsey A. O’Rourke, an assistant professor of international politics at Boston College). 
It’s responsible for tens of millions of deaths worldwide through its military aggression against countless countries, the latest being Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.
It’s a ruling class that, despite presiding over the most prosperous and productive economy in human history, refuses to grant the mass of its own population basic dignities such as universal health care or a living pension in retirement.
It is one of the most ruthless, violent and selfish social groups ever known in human history.
To the extent that a character assessment of Harris is warranted, it should not be to determine whether she is fit to lead the Democrats. It ought to question the basis of her success in gaining the presidential nomination.
One could ask what sort of character would want to lead the political vehicle of one of the most vile and destructive social strata in the world, would want to lead a party of genocide, would want to take the helm of an institution responsible for gross inequality and poverty across the United States and indeed the world.
The answer to that question is “many people”. And not just sociopaths. Plenty of good-hearted people would like to improve US capitalism and believe that working through the Democrats is a way to do so. Anyone involved in politics long enough knows that there is no shortage of deluded people—on both the left and the right—who think themselves capable of shifting the immovable.
The more pertinent question is what sort of character would be accepted by the Democratic establishment and would have the ruling class emptying its pockets in a funding drive to back the election campaign.
The answer is someone who has already proven that she’s one of them.

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