Tag: Free Palestine

How Dare You?

By Amit Sengupta

You – have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?
– Greta Thunberg, UN Climage Action Speech, September 23, 2019

The first sailing ship to Gaza recently, ‘Conscience’, was bombed by Israel. It could not thereby sail with food and aid. In 2010, Israeli commandos killed 10 people on a Turkish ship, the ‘Mavi Marmara’; it was leading a small flotilla towards Gaza.

So where are they, 12 of them, bravehearts, Greta and her comrades?

Madleen, the Freedom Flotila, has been kidnapped by the killing machine of Israel. A picture shows an armed soldier with bread and water, with a defiant Greta, half-smiling, facing him.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said via a spokesperson that footage of the October 7, 2023  Hamas attacks will be screened for the Madleen crew after they reach Ashdod Port.

“Antisemitic Greta and her Hamas-supporting friends should see exactly what the Hamas terrorist organisation — which they came to support and act on behalf of — truly is,” he said. “They should see the atrocities committed against women, the elderly, and children, and understand whom Israel is fighting to defend itself.”

Born in Stockholm, she was first sensitized about global warming when she was just about eight. Reports say that she had bouts of depression when she was 11. Her father, Svante Thunberg, an actor, said:  “She stopped talking… she stopped going to school.” (BBC, May 9, 2024).

She was soon after diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. Her mother, Malena Ernman, an opera singer, said she became “much happier” once she decided to engage with the issue. She said that she became a kind of “superpower” once she was diagnosed with autism. Being ‘different’ became a ‘gift’.

In August 2018, when she was 15, Greta skipped school and began a solitary protest outside the Swedish Parliament.  She held a placard which said, ‘Skolstrejk för klimatet’ (School Strike for Climate).

Her solo protest sparked a spontaneous movement — a global campaign on climate change — ‘Fridays for Future’. And who were her first supporters?

Enlightened students, including from schools, from across the world. Many of them decided to skip school on Fridays, in solidarity with the campaign.

In April 2019, she told the European Parliament, “Our house is falling apart and our leaders need to start acting accordingly, because at the moment they are not.”

A few months later, she went on a two-week trip across the Atlantic Ocean, campaigning for her cause. Time magazine reported that she was given a warm welcome when she arrived in New York. There were high school students with hand-made signs. “The students broke into chants as the sailboat slowly pulled into the marina in Lower Manhattan: ‘Sea levels are rising and so are we!‘There is no Planet B!’”

ALSO READ: God! Don’t Break Our Hearts

“It is insane that a 16-year-old would have to cross the Atlantic Ocean to make a stand,” Greta said in a press conference.

At the UN Climate Action Meet, she said: “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

“World leaders have held 26 COPs. They have had decades of blah, blah, blah — and where has that got us?” This was again Greta speaking in Glasgow, in a youth protest, in 2021.

Nominated every year for the Noble Peace Prize from 2019 to 2023, clearly, the  young had found an inspirational icon, an indefatigable, dogged and visionary role model.

Then she was 16. Now she is 22. Small, stoic, frail, gutsy, resilient, determined, with a ready smile. Her strength of character is transparent. She smiles easily, even as she risks her life. Her comrades in Madleen, from different countries, also smile easily. They are not afraid. No, not at all.

She stands on the edge of the deck, holding the sail, inhaling the sea wind. Her images, her quotes, her dogged resistance, her clarity of vision, her compassion for the people of Gaza, her anger and angst at the non-stop mass killings, and systematic starvation of the people, bombed and shot dead while standing in queue for food, her disgust at the world leaders, especially in the West, for being complicit in this genocide — Greta has spoken her heart out, and the world has listened — in rapt attention.

Madleen, sailing towards Gaza via the great ancient city of Alexandria, became a floating platform of resistance and hope. A symbol of defiance and justice.

Now, in a pre-recorded message, she has  said that they have been abducted by the notorious Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Reports indicate that before the ‘abduction’ a chemical substance was thrown on the ship – which created itchiness in the eyes.

The Israeli foreign ministry has tried sarcasm: “The ‘selfie yacht’ of the ‘celebrities’ is safely making its way to the shores of Israel. The passengers are expected to return to their home countries. They were provided with sandwiches and water. The show is over.”

The show, indeed, is not over. It has just begun.

Rima Hassan, member of the European Parliament, on board Madleen, had a message, and it is all over social media: “If our boat is intercepted and stopped, I don’t want to hear excuses, everyone to the streets! We  will not turn back! We are continuing on our path.”

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was on the phone with the crew during their detention. “Madleen must be released immediately,” she said in a post on X. “Breaking the siege is a legal duty for states, and a moral imperative for all of us… Every Mediterranean port should send boats with aid, solidarity, and humanity to Gaza. They shall sail together—united, they will be unstoppable.”

All over the world (barring India, of course) mass protests have erupted, including in Tel Aviv. Hundreds have marched in Tel Aviv, Al Jazeera reported, holding candles, with pictures of the dead children of Gaza.

Stockholm, London, Holland and elsewhere, people are on the streets. In thousands. In Geneva, they have made a huge water fountain with the colours of the Palestinian flag. Inside football stadiums, Palestinian flags are fluttering with chants of ‘Stop the starvation, stop the genocide’.

On campus after campus in the US, students are denouncing the Israeli regime at their graduation ceremonies. Those who are arrested, are refusing to succumb — many more are joining in protest, unafraid of the notorious ICE, the latest Repressive State Apparatus of Donald Trump.

Spain, Columbia, Ireland, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, nation after nation is asking for a total boycott of Israel (not India, surely). As many as 14 nations in the UN Security Council have sought a ceasefire, with a lone America vetoing it. France, Germany, UK — their governments there are under intense pressure.

Dock workers in the West have refused to load deadly weapons bound for Israel. Jews across the world, including Orthodox Jews in Israel, are standing up against the relentless killings. Hollywood actors have signed statements in support (Bollywood etc, well…).

Doctors in the US have protested inside the hospital, despite warnings by the police that they will be arrested. One female doctor shouted, “If you starve children, they just die.” Doctors are risking their lives and reaching Gaza, despite most hospitals having been bombed, especially targeting pregnant women, mothers, and just-born children. 

Greta and her comrades have resurrected infinite optimism. And the will to fight back! Their message has reached the nooks and corners of the world. This grotesque dance of death and enforced starvation must end. Now!

Many more Madleens must now sail for the Mediterranean shores of Gaza. And many more Gretas will now be holding placards, in angst and anger, asking: How Dare You?

Donald’s Trumpet Plays Songs of Death

By Amit Sengupta

War is Peace.
– 1984, George Orwell

Trump’s trumpet, always cacophonic, unpleasant and jarring, is now turning bloody red. Unpredictably so.

An extreme Right-wing, racist, white supremacist, real-estate capitalist fanatic, he inflicted no war on the world, unlike almost all the presidents of the United States, backed by the arms industry, and their insatiable blood lust, including Barack Obama. Surprisingly, and ironically, he was bestowed the Noble Prize for Peace much too early in  his tenure — and one which he never really deserved. As was proved later.

Now Trump is celebrating the dead in far-away Yemen, a tiny and defiant country, unlike the American stooges spread all over in the Middle East. Women and children, scores of them are dead, and injured. Predictably, they always end up killing innocent, unarmed, defenseless citizens, as Benjamin Netanyahu has done  yet again in Gaza, killing 400 people in one go, yet again claiming that it was Hamas he was targeting with “full force”.

Indeed, as BBC and other media reports have categorically stated, Israel has said multiple times that the Americans were duly informed about the latest bloodbath, following obviously the typical Trumpist declaration that “all hell will break lose”. “We have made incredible achievements up until today,” said a proud Netanyahu. “Together we are changing the face of the Middle East.”

Indeed, they are. A face soaked with human blood.

Since a long time now, it has been transparent like hell that Netanyahu, on a weak wicket inside Israel, and disliked by a huge chunk of people who are not orthodox, blood-thirsty, retrograde fanatics, that he never really wanted a deal on the release of the Israeli hostages in custody of the Hamas. He dilly-dallied, did U-turns, turned his back, promised but retracted, played footsie, but he never really cared a damn for his own people. He knew, that as long as they are trapped somewhere in those dingy and dark tunnels in the ravaged landscape which the Israelis could not enter despite one year of relentless bombing, he can continue to satisfy his blood lust and kill thousands of Palestinians. This was his ‘Mission Ethnic Cleansing’ — so as to finally capture and conquer the mythical holy land — which never really belonged to them, not before the two world wars, and never ever after 1945.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum in Israel have condemned the bombing by air: “The Israeli government chose to give up the hostages.” Israel has violated the ceasefire which was  patronised by the US, post-Trump. Around 59  hostages still remain out there, waiting for freedom. Now, their fate seems to have been sealed.

Meanwhile, Mahmoud Kalil, a pro-Palestine activist from the prestigious Columbia University in the US has been detained only because he was campaigning against the genocide in Gaza. In a viral video, he was handcuffed and taken away, even while his wife, an American citizen, ran after the officers, pleading again and again that at least tell me, where are you taking him, really, you don’t have to do it this way. His detention, apparently with no legal validity, is a clear indication, that the witch-hunt in the new Trump era has finally begun, perhaps this time more brutal and nasty than the witch-hunt during the Cold War against dissenters, peaceful rebels, Leftists, artists, filmmakers and writers.

Something, which is a staple of most dictators, almost of them buddies of Trump — from Vladimir Putin to Victor Orban. A reminder of the relentless narrative ongoing in India since the summer of 2014.

ALSO READ: Trump And The New World Order

Playright Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, written in 1953, uses the historical similarity of the ‘Salem witch-hunts’ in 1692, in the backdrop of alleged witchcraft, to make a sharp comment on the Cold War witch-hunts in the US. Trump, with Elon Musk of the Nazi salute fame, and a dubious past record of inherited fascist ideology in South Africa, is now leading the witch-hunts upfront. Writes Miller in the thin book: “We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, writes counterpunch in a recent article (Operation Newspeak, March 18, 2025), is a warning about political repression, historical revisionism, mass surveillance, propaganda, censorship, and the State’s total control over truth. In the novel, which is set in an imagined future where war is perpetual, the dictator, Big Brother, and his government, ruled by the Party, dominate the superstate, Oceania…

“Newspeak is the Party’s official language, designed to prevent dissent, obstruct critical thinking, suppress rebellion, and control the perception of reality, which is achieved by eliminating words and manipulating language. “We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone,” says Syme, a character who works in the Ministry of Truth and oversees the compilation of the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary… “Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”

Published in 1949, the book expresses a similar narrative as in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, released in February 1936.  The tragic story is that of an industrial worker trapped in the relentless, mechanical motions of a ruthless machine age in an oppressive factory always under surveillance, and who finds solace and hope with a homeless young woman.

Counterpunch says that the New York Times ran an article about words that are discouraged at Federal Agencies under the new Trumpist administration. A total of 172 words appeared printed in red: Native American. Women. Black. Immigrants. Disability. Gender. Advocacy. Mental health. And, of course, any phrases or expressions having to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion: diverse backgrounds, diverse communities, diverse groups, diversified, diversify, diversifying, enhancing diversity, increasing diversity, inclusiveness, inclusive leadership… These words are all to be purged from websites, grant proposals, class curricula, without delay.

Undoubtedly, Trump’s Make America Great Again in in full play in fast forward. An America which perhaps wants the slave trade back, where all Afro-Americans must be shackled and turned into slaves, sold like cattle in open markets, and their women turned into sex slaves. An America where gender justice is abolished, so is women’s rights, the rights of immigrants, now shackled and chained and forcibly deported, students, dissenters, artists, writers and filmmakers, and those of the LGBTQ communities.

A 1984 dystopia stalks America, originally a land of immigrants, while the first white settlers conquered native land by enacting a million genocides of the indigenous communities who lived in their homeland since centuries. A Make America Great Again born in the quagmire of massacres and blood lust, constantly resurrecting its vicious past, here, there and everywhere, now in Yemen and Gaza.

And, yet, we need to hold on, dig in, write graffiti on the walls and inside our soul, notes of dissent, make meaningful films against all odds, like No Other Land, refuse to succumb or compromise, and peacefully continue an infinite struggle, with a thirst which can never be quenched — like the brave people of Palestine.

As Toni Morrison wrote: “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

Gaza on the lips of campus protestors

Gaza On Their Lips

By Amit Sengupta

Give Flowers to the Rebels who Failed!
– Wall writing, Sorbonne. France. May, 1968, students’ uprising

It’s just that, now, the rebels have not failed! Instead, they are flying on the wings of justice, painting the walls with the water melon colours of the Palestine flag. And they are all dancing the ‘Dabke’ dance on the same liberating song from Palestine, hands holding hands, wearing the black and white keiffyah, going round and round in circles, their young faces flush with all the luminescent colours of youthful rebellion and freedom!

Perhaps they know. Perhaps they don’t. April 30, 2024 marked the ‘Liberation Day’ in Vietnam. A tiny country with no military power defeated the world’s mightiest military and financial empire. The war started in 1955. After 19 years of mass murders of innocents, relentless bombing, burnt out villages, the guerilla forces of Vietnam, using the dense forests, defeated the Americans. Legendary communist revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, led the guerillas, and, finally, became victorious in 1975. Most American soldiers who came back alive suffered all their lives – with guilt, remorse, nightmares of what they did and what they saw, and ‘mass psychological trauma’.

Remember Apocalypse Now, the movie, by Francis Ford Copolla, with Marlon Brando in an epical role, as a brilliant American soldier (tipped to be a future general), who turned a rebel leader in Cambodia: The film begins with a famous song by Jim Morrison of ‘The Doors’:

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end…

The My Lai massacre shocked the world. More than 500 unarmed people of a South Vietnam village were killed by what was called a ‘search and destroy’ mission, on March 16, 1968. And who can ever forget that stunningly horrific picture – naked Vietnamese children running, screaming, scared out of their minds, as they were ‘napalmed’– genocide by bombs which spread like a raging fire burning all that is around, including human flesh.

In Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (1970), an educated young man looking for a job is asked by an interview board, as to what was the most significant event in the 20th century? He says, it was the victory of the Vietnamese people against the US. They said, why not the landing on the moon? He said, cryptically, that with the progress of science, this was waiting to happen – hence, it was predictable. However, who could have ever imagined that a little country would defeat the mightiest military empire in the world? They ask, cynically: Are you a communist? He says that one does not have to be a communist to accept this truth!

Now Vietnam has resurrected yet again, as yet another dead-end called Gaza, with the mass protests of the 1960s stalking the campuses and the American conscience. One thousand flowers are now blooming in almost every campus. This magical ‘flower- power’ has spread across to other countries: Switzerland, Canada, Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Puerto Rico. In Amsterdam, where the cops are almost always invisible, they have suddenly turned brutal. Hundreds have been arrested in the US, including faculty members. At UCLA, the cops allowed Right-wing Zionists to enter the campus and attack the students with rods and chemical spray. At Columbia, where it all started, they have broken the ‘Free Palestine’ encampments, while the students have resurrected them again and again.

The faculty wrote in a letter on May 3, 2024: “We, faculty members of the History Department of Columbia University, condemn the use of police force against students, as well as the ongoing presence of the NYPD on our campus. We insist upon the rights of students and scholars to engage in non-violent protest or public speech, and we deplore the arbitrary disciplining of students, faculty, or staff for doing so. We are also dismayed that the use of public force resulted from a decision-making process, from which faculty were excluded. We disagree about many of the issues being debated on campus this year, but we agree that history shows how deeply damaging it is for a university to meet students’ protests with violence and criminalization. Since the last time the police were called on this campus in large numbers, in 1968, Columbia has worked hard to restore community, build shared governance, deal peacefully with protest, and maintain a culture of respectful debate. We must hold on to this legacy.”

So who is Hind Rajab?

She was a six-year-old beautiful girl in Gaza who was murdered by the Israeli army. So the students in Columbia captured the Hamilton Hall, with it etched memories of the 1960s, and renamed it ‘Hind’s Hall’!

Hind Rajab

Since her murder, Hind’s mother had withdrawn into a silence of infinite suffering. On hearing this news, she said: “I started crying, because I wanted all these movements and support to come while Hind was still alive! Wake up now! Why are others like Hind still going through this?”

Writes Keenga Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker, (May 8, 2024): “Students who engage in civil disobedience do so with the expectation of some reprisal. That is, after all, the moral imperative at the heart of this particular form of activism: self-sacrifice in the name of a higher political goal. But many of the student activists had not anticipated being arrested; they were shocked when set upon by police aggressively seeking to clear an area or simply to forbid public demonstration… Whatever the cause of arrests, the punishments pursued by school administrations have been excessive and cruel. Students and faculty members who have participated in the protests have been suspended and banned from campuses, and evicted from university housing, before disciplinary proceedings have begun. Some have been expelled; others have been banned from graduation ceremonies, have faced uncertainty about their legal records, and have generally been treated as pariahs. The level of repression has been shocking.” (Taylor is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, among other acclaimed books.)

Despite the State repression, with a shaky, discredited, Joe Biden at the helm, the ‘counter-narrative’ as ‘counter culture’ is now etched on the walls. In Canadian campuses, streets are being renamed with Gaza landmarks. In Naples, Italian artist Eduardo Castaldo turned his photographs into street murals as a form of ‘creative resistance’.  He has visually documented life under Israeli occupation as a photojournalist. ‘Bella Ciao’ is being sung, with the sublime strings of guitars. Frida Kahlo is now a Palestinian. And so is Jesus Christ on the cross.

The ‘Caitlin Newsletter’ quoted Secretary of State Anthony Blinken: “Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond. And, of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t –  we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

The newsletter says: “Notice how he said the word “narrative” three times? That’s how empire managers talk to each other, because that’s how they think about everything. This is because empire managers are always acutely aware of something that normal human beings are not: that real power comes from manipulating the stories –  narratives –  that people tell themselves about their reality. They understand that humans are storytelling animals whose inner lives are typically dominated by mental narratives about what’s happening, so if you can control those narratives, you can control the humans. They understand that power is controlling what happens, but true power is controlling what people ‘think’ about what happens.… That’s what’s going on with all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, plutocrat-funded think tanks, and mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood. A few clever manipulators understand that you can control a society by controlling its dominant narratives…”

It’s just that the counter-narrative has come to stay. And it is spreading far and wide. This time, even in Sorbonne, the rebels have not failed! They are, instead, winning an impossible war. In solidarity with the trapped people of Gaza and Rafaa. While the slogan resounds in collective chorus – Say no to Genocide! Ceasefire Now! Free Free Palestine!

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