technocrit

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28999448

By WAFAA SHURAFA and SAMY MAGDY Updated 11:37 AM EDT, April 22, 2025

"DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed at least 17 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and destroyed bulldozers and other heavy equipment that had been supplied by mediators to clear rubble. Separate strikes killed two people in Lebanon."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/36992556

US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem appeared in commercials aired on Mexican TV warning that anyone crossing the border illegally would be prosecuted and deported.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.semafor.com/article/04/22/2025/sheinbaum-bans-us-propaganda

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

After a GMU student wrote a provocative essay asking when violence against tyranny is justified, the university promptly forgot its own revolutionary roots — and called the cops.

Every accusation is a confession.

Why Israel Fears the Faces of Dead Palestinian Children on Its Streets (David Issacharoff | Haaretz, 2025-04-21)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-04-21/ty-article/.highlight/why-israel-fears-the-faces-of-dead-palestinian-children-on-its-streets/00000196-5985-d99b-a5ff-d9d7fa560000

archived:
https://archive.is/2025.04.21-202552/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-04-21/ty-article/.highlight/why-israel-fears-the-faces-of-dead-palestinian-children-on-its-streets/00000196-5985-d99b-a5ff-d9d7fa560000
———

“Ahead of an anti-war demonstration scheduled for Thursday in Tel Aviv – organized by the Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together – the Israeli police said they would not allow the protest to take place unless organizers agreed to a ban on signs displaying images of ‘kids or babies from Gaza’ or bearing references to ‘genocide and ethnic cleansing.’

“The document outlining these conditions was riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, perfectly reflecting the heavy-handed police, who are acting without any clear guidelines or legal basis.

“Even in death, Palestinian children killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza are treated as a threat in Israel…”

#StandingTogether #IsraeliOpposition
@palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@a.gup.pe @israel

Why Israel Fears the Faces of Dead Palestinian Children on Its Streets (David Issacharoff | Haaretz, 2025-04-21)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-04-21/ty-article/.highlight/why-israel-fears-the-faces-of-dead-palestinian-children-on-its-streets/00000196-5985-d99b-a5ff-d9d7fa560000

archived:
https://archive.is/2025.04.21-202552/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-04-21/ty-article/.highlight/why-israel-fears-the-faces-of-dead-palestinian-children-on-its-streets/00000196-5985-d99b-a5ff-d9d7fa560000
———

“Ahead of an anti-war demonstration scheduled for Thursday in Tel Aviv – organized by the Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together – the Israeli police said they would not allow the protest to take place unless organizers agreed to a ban on signs displaying images of ‘kids or babies from Gaza’ or bearing references to ‘genocide and ethnic cleansing.’

“The document outlining these conditions was riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, perfectly reflecting the heavy-handed police, who are acting without any clear guidelines or legal basis.

“Even in death, Palestinian children killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza are treated as a threat in Israel…”

#StandingTogether #IsraeliOpposition
@palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@a.gup.pe @israel

By all criteria, this a concentration camp. Not “concentration camp” as rhetorical inflation, or emotionally manipulative shorthand, or edgy metaphor—but as in: literally.

As in: detention without trial, state control, inhumane living conditions, forced labor, dehumanization, brutal violence, isolation from accountability, psychological torture, and—by every available logical extension—murder.

That last one we can’t yet verify in the strict evidentiary sense, but the circumstances suggest it like smoke suggests fire, and they are already trying to hide their actions and deny what is occurring.

Significantly absent in the long obituaries for Pope Francis in both the New York Times and the Washington Post were mentions of his deep concern for the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. In Francis’s last public message on Easter Sunday, just hours before he died, he had called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and condemned the “deplorable humanitarian situation” there.

The obits also failed to note that Pope Francis had personally telephoned the Holy Family Church in Gaza just about every evening since Israel invaded the territory in October 2023 — including the Saturday night before Easter. The church’s pastor, Rev. Gabriel Romanelli, remembered: “He said he was praying for us, he blessed us, and he thanked us for our prayers.” Other church members said that the Pope “would make sure to speak not only to the priest but to everyone else in the room.”

Pope Francis’s concern for Gaza and Palestine did not start in October 2023. Rev. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Christian theologian and Lutheran pastor, told Democracy Now:

I think no Palestinian will ever forget when Pope Francis, in 2014, stopped his car, went down, stepped down and prayed at the separation wall separating Jerusalem from Bethlehem — a moment that touched all of us and continued to speak to us for years.

Full Article

Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant legally residing in the United States, has apparently been disappeared to El Salvador’s notorious Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) after mistakenly turning onto the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, Michigan.

The bridge, one of North America’s busiest international crossings, links Detroit with Windsor, Ontario. Due to the complexity of nearby highways, even local residents occasionally take the wrong ramp. For Prada, this innocent mistake led to arrest, imprisonment, and deportation—culminating in his disappearance into a foreign prison.

This week on CounterSpin: CBS News on April 14 said:

We’re following new violence in the Middle East. Israeli strikes hit a major hospital in northern Gaza. At least 21 people were reportedly killed. The emergency room is badly damaged. Israel accused Hamas of using the hospital to hide its fighters.

Meanwhile, Houthi militants in Yemen said they fired two ballistic missiles at Israel. The Israeli military initially said two missiles were launched and one was intercepted, but later said only one missile had been fired.

There’s information in there, if you can parse it; but the takeaway for most will be that framing: “violence in the Middle East,” which suggests that whatever happened today is just the latest round in a perennial battle between warring parties, where you and I have no role except that of sad bystander.

When it comes to Yemen, elite media’s repeated reference to “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” not only obscures the current fighting’s political origins and recent timeline, it erases the Yemeni people, who are paying the price both for the fighting and for the distortions around it, from political elites and their media amplifiers.

We get some grounding from Khury Petersen-Smith; he’s the Michael Ratner Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began 82 years ago today, is now universally hailed as a bold act of Jewish resistance against the Nazis. But at the time, many Poles watched — or cheered — as the ghetto burned. The parallels with Gaza are hard to ignore.