Resist Empire

Support TomDispatch
Donate
Tomgram

Juan Cole, A Centrist Muslim Alliance Against an Extremist Israel?

Posted on

Here’s a strange connection between Israel and the United States. Let me put it to you as a kind of quiz: Which two leaders on this planet have, at least in part, organized their political lives to avoid trial convictions and/or possible jail time? Yes, in case you hadn’t guessed, I’m thinking of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former American president and once again candidate Donald Trump.

With that in mind, consider the mayhem, the literal hell on earth, that one of those two has already caused due, at least in part, to his desire not to find himself convicted in a corruption trial — and don’t hold your breath waiting for the other to repeat that, in his own fashion, whether he wins or loses the American presidency in November. At least Benjamin Netanyahu has only one trial, still ongoing in the background of the present war in Gaza and the West Bank. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has so many of them that it’s hard to count. Only the other day the judge in his New York State bribery trial, where he has indeed been found guilty of 34 felony counts, put off his sentencing from September 18th to November 26th, after the election is over. That means on Election Day, despite facing 91 felony counts across four criminal cases, he will remain a “free” man.

Of course, should Donald Trump win this November, he can shut down the ongoing federal trials completely (a good reason for him to deny losing, no matter what the vote count may be) and, like Netanyahu, potentially distract us all from his personal problems by, starting in January 2025, committing mayhem on this planet.

And with that in mind, consider it a kind of hell on Earth that Benjamin Netanyahu’s all-out war on a strip of land 25 miles long and only four to seven miles wide is about to enter its 12th month and, as TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, creator of the must-read Informed Comment website, suggests today, is causing both chaos and a changing set of alliances in the Middle East (in which the United States could prove to be a big loser). Tom

The Sphinx and the Sultan

How Biden’s Bear Hug of Netanyahu Caused Washington’s Mideast Policy to Crash and Burn

By

At least one thing is now obvious in the Middle East: the Biden administration has failed abjectly in its objectives there, leaving the region in dangerous disarray. Its primary stated foreign policy goal has been to rally its partners in the region to cooperate with the extremist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu while upholding a "rules-based" international order and blocking Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason. President Biden’s Achilles heel has been his “bear hug” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, while launching a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza in the wake of the horrific October 7th Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

Biden also signed on to the Abraham Accords, a project initiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special Middle East envoy of then-President Donald Trump. Through them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco all agreed to recognize Israel in return for investment and trade opportunities there and access to American weaponry and a U.S. security umbrella. Not only did Washington, however, fail to incorporate Saudi Arabia into that framework, but it has also faced increasing difficulty keeping the accords themselves in place given increasing anger and revulsion in the region over the high (and still ongoing) civilian death toll in Gaza. Typically, just the docking of an Israeli ship at the Moroccan port of Tangier this summer set off popular protests that spread to dozens of cities in that country. And that was just a taste of what could be coming.

Read More
Tomgram

Stan Cox, It’s Not Music to Our Ears (or Our World)

Posted on

Once upon a time, there was something thrilling in record-breaking events like Babe Ruth’s 60th home run of the 1927 season. But today, maybe not. After all, we’ve just lived through the hottest summer on record globally and, though we’ve only made it to September, this year, too, could (like last year) set a new global heat record. It’s already setting them locally, that’s for sure. Take Phoenix, Arizona. With a record-breaking heat wave continuing across the American West, that city only recently set a new record of its own: 100 straight days (yes, you read that right!) of temperatures of at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher (and still going strong as I write this). Phoenix also shattered another record, experiencing the 56th day in which the temperature reached 110 degrees. (I have a feeling I should be putting exclamation points after both of those records, although count on one thing: in the years to come, they’ll undoubtedly be broken again — and again and again!)

This is the planet that we’re now on. And it’s a world that should, in every sense, take your breath away. It’s a place where, increasingly, nothing will be unaffected by climate change. And yet, with all that (and more) in mind (or do I mean out of our minds?) on a planet ever more clearly in trouble, we simply can’t stop making war and it matters not at all that war-making has a special ability to toss yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In other words, the human response to climate change is, in significant part, to ignore it or even add to its horrors. And war isn’t the only way we have of doing that, as TomDispatch regular Stan Cox makes strikingly clear today.

In fact, with all of that in mind, let him take you into another world — the universe of noise pollution and how it’s related to this (over)heating planet of ours.  Cover your ears and read on.  Tom

We’re Getting Sick of Noise Pollution

Keeping Our World Cooler Will Also Make It Quieter

By

The most pressing environmental crisis of these times, our heating of the Earth through carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution, is closely connected to our excessive energy consumption. And with many of the ways we use that energy, we’re also producing another less widely discussed pollutant: industrial noise. Like greenhouse-gas pollution, noise pollution is degrading our world -- and it's not just affecting our bodily and mental health but also the health of ecosystems on which we depend utterly.

Noise pollution, a longstanding menace, is often ignored. It has, however, been making headlines in recent years, thanks to the booming development of massive, boxy, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet traffic. Those servers generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of noise. Such installations, known by the innocuous term “data centers,” are making growing numbers of people miserable.

Read More
Tomgram

Michael Klare, Ensuring the Collapse of Civilization?

Posted on

I was born on July 20, 1944, in the midst of the Second World War. Barely a year later, the U.S. ended that conflict in the Pacific by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and creating two all-too-literal hells on Earth.

To this day, fortunately, no other nuclear weapons have ever been used (if, that is, you don’t count all the ones tested, including in above-ground places like Nevada). But in some sense, as I wrote a few years ago, “You could say that we’ve been living in a science-fiction novel since August 6, 1945, when that first American nuclear bomb devastated Hiroshima. Until then, we humans could do many terrible things, but of one thing we were incapable: the destruction of this world. In the nearly eight decades that followed, we have, however, taken over a role once left to the gods: the ability to create Armageddon.”

And of course, in our own seemingly inimitable fashion, we’ve also stumbled across a second slow-motion way to do in ourselves and the planet: climate change. In other words, we’re giving classic science fiction and dystopian fiction writers a genuine run for their money (which, of course, will be burned to a crisp).

Worse yet, 80 years after those first atomic bombs were used in Japan, nine (yes, nine!) countries (including Israel and North Korea) now possess atomic weapons. The U.S., Russia, and China, with the three largest nuclear arsenals on the planet, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare makes clear today, are all potentially preparing to expand them further. (The phrase in this country is “modernizing” and our government already plans to “invest” up to $1.5 trillion in “modernizing” this country’s nuclear arsenal in the decades to come.) And yet, as Klare also makes clear, it’s remarkable how little Americans think about such world-ending weaponry. The popular film Oppenheimer was an exception to that reality, though it paid sadly little attention to the devastation the bombs that Robert Oppenheimer played such a role in creating caused in the last days of World War II.

So, today, let Klare fill you in on humanity’s race to oblivion and just what we should indeed be paying far, far more attention to. Tom

The Armageddon Agenda

Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the Race to Oblivion

By

The next president of the United States, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will face many contentious domestic issues that have long divided this country, including abortion rights, immigration, racial discord, and economic inequality. In the foreign policy realm, she or he will face vexing decisions over Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and China/Taiwan. But one issue that few of us are even thinking about could pose a far greater quandary for the next president and even deeper peril for the rest of us: nuclear weapons policy.

Consider this: For the past three decades, we've been living through a period in which the risk of nuclear war has been far lower than at any time since the Nuclear Age began -- so low, in fact, that the danger of such a holocaust has been largely invisible to most people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of agreements that substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles eliminated the most extreme risk of thermonuclear conflict, allowing us to push thoughts of nuclear Armageddon aside (and focus on other worries). But those quiescent days should now be considered over. Relations among the major powers have deteriorated in recent years and progress on disarmament has stalled. The United States and Russia are, in fact, upgrading their nuclear arsenals with new and more powerful weapons, while China -- previously an outlier in the nuclear threat equation -- has begun a major expansion of its own arsenal.

Read More