it’s rlly disturbing how we’re now in a place where we have a militarist, genocidal government in Germany taking part in a war against the Russians in Ukraine and mass-arresting dissidents, especially Jews as part of a genocide. the AfD coming to power at this point would be little more than a ceremonial coronation for Nazism in modern Germany.

Extremist Israeli settlers hit by EU and US sanctions - The Guardian

Far-right group Lehava and several individuals accused of violence targeted in dual announcements

The EU and the US have imposed tough new sanctions against key figures alleged to be behind extremist violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The sanctions – announced within hours of each other by the EU and by the US Treasury – targeted a number of prominent individuals and organisations, most prominently Bentzi Gopstein, the leader of the Levaha group, who reports in the Israeli media suggest has acted as an adviser to the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir.

While the EU placed sanctions on Lehava, a far-right group that campaigns against relationships between Jews and non-Jews, the US did so specifically against Gopstein, who was convicted of an Israeli court earlier this year for racist statements.

Also hit by EU sanctions were Meir Ettinger and Elisha Yered, two leading figures in the extremist Hilltop Youth, which was described by the EU as “a radical group consisting of members known for violent acts against Palestinians and their villages in the West Bank”.

The new round of sanctions against far-right figures in Israel marks the latest ramping up of the international campaign against settler and extremist violence which has exploded on the occupied West Bank in the six months since Hamas’s attack on Israel from Gaza on 7 October last year.

As well as Gopstein, the US imposed sanctions on two entities that it said helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for two violent extremists in the West Bank who had already been targeted with US sanctions, underlining its intention to pursue those it sees as attempting to bypass sanctions.

The US Treasury department said one entity, Mount Hebron Fund, had launched an online fundraising campaign that raised $140,000 (£113,000) for the settler Yinon Levi, after he was hit with sanctions on 1 February for allegedly leading a group of settlers that assaulted Palestinian and Bedouin civilians, burned their fields and destroyed their property. EU sanctions also apply to Levi, 32, who is accused of “multiple violent acts”.

The Treasury said the second entity, Shlom Asiraich, raised $31,000 on a crowdfunding website for David Chai Chasdai, who the US says led a riot that included setting vehicles and buildings on fire and causing damage to property in Huwara, resulting in the death of a Palestinian civilian.

“Such acts by these organisations undermine the peace, security, and stability of the West Bank. We will continue to use our tools to hold those responsible accountable,” the deputy secretary of the Treasury, Wally Adeyemo, said in the statement.

The EU sanctions will include an asset freeze, a prohibition on provision of funds or economic resources to them or for their benefit and a travel ban to the EU for the individuals named.

Restrictive measures were agreed by the European Council of leaders in March in an official communique when they strongly condemned extremist settler violence, stating that perpetrators must be held to account.

According to the official journal, one of the four named individuals, Neria Ben Pazi, 31, “established four of the most violent outposts in the West Bank in 2019”.

He was “one of the main perpetrators of the forced displacement of a Bedouin community of Wadi as-Seeq near Ramalah. His actions “have been likened to torture”, the EU’s official journal says.

It cited a vicious attack on 12 October in which Palestinians were “severely beaten, handcuffed and photographed in their underwear” as well as being “urinated on” and having cigarettes stubbed out on their bodies.

Ettinger, 33, is listed because he is considered a leading figure of the Hilltop Youth. According to the official journal “he was involved in a deadly arson attack in 2015” on a Palestinian West Bank home “that killed two parents and their 18-month-old baby”.

He is “responsible for serious human rights violations or abuses, including torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment as well as violations or abuses of the right to property and the right to private and family life of Palestinians in the West Bank and for supporting and encouraging such acts”, the journal says.

These alleged abuses are of “serious concern” with regard to EU foreign policy as set out in article 21 of the treaty of the European Union, the EU added.

Another member of the group now under EU sanctions is Elisha Yered, born in 2001, who was reported to have engaged in settler violence through “price tag attacks” including “physical and psychosocial harassment, beatings, murder and demolition of property, against Palestinians … of a systematic nature”.

The journal says he was “part of a group of armed settlers” involved in an attack last year near Ramallah which led to the death of the 19-year-old Palestinian Qusai Jammal Mi’tan and wounded several other Palestinians.

The West Bank is the largest Palestinian territory in the Middle East but was captured in the 1967 war and the area has been under military occupation since, while Israeli settlements have consistently expanded. Palestinians envisage the West Bank as part of a future independent state also including Gaza and East Jerusalem.

Lehava is described as a “radical rightwing Jewist supremacist group” that “uses violence and incites violence against Palestinians, Christians and Messianic Jews”.

According to the journal, Lehava “organises violent protests against Jewish Muslim weddings and the LGBQTi community”.

BREAKING: Israel’s National Security Minister Ben Gvir says imposing sanctions on an IDF battalion operating in the West Bank is a ‘red line’ and that he expects the defense minister ‘not to submit to American dictates’.

apparently the US isn’t even imposing sanctions, they’re just applying the Leahy Law to this one particular battalion? sounds like bullshit to me, how can you not fund one battalion in particular?

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to announce sanctions in the coming days against the Israel Defense Forces’ “Netzah Yehuda” battalion for human rights violations in the West Bank.

It would be the first time that the US has imposed sanctions on an Israeli military unit. The sanctions will prohibit the battalion and its members from receiving any kind of military assistance or training from the US.

The president of Kyrgyzstan, Sadyr Japarov, has recently signed into law major restrictions on imperial NGOs (ratified last month). Some here might recall similar events in Georgia around a year ago sparking an attempted colour revolution. Hopefully Kyrgyzstan’s better economic integration with China and Eurasia (and the absence of any delusions about ) will lead to a cleaner expulsion of imperial influences.

Relatedly, Georgia’s government has not given up on their efforts to ratify an anti-NGO bill. (Although the western-sponsored riots in Tbilisi around a year ago successfully intimidated the plurality Georgian Dream party into withdrawing the bill, it failed to remove the government.) Now a resurrected bill is back in the news after the parliament voted on and passed a first reading. The president has declared intentions to veto, while the plurality party continues to back it with the potential of recruiting supermajority support.

Blinken to head to China April 24-26 to discuss ‘serious concerns’

State Secretary Blinken will attempt to persuade #China to cut an alleged support for #Russia’s defense industrial base amid the war in Ukraine.

https://x.com/MayadeenEnglish/status/1781778001727828121

A man wearing a bomb vest has barricaded himself in the Iranian embassy in Paris, and is threatening to blow himself up. French police have set up a security perimeter around the embassy

French counter terrorist police have arrested the man who threatened to blow up the embassy.

Article in German newspaper titled “More than just harsh words”… about how Annalena Baerbock got into an argument with Netanyahu

THAT’S STILL JUST HARSH WORDS YOU GENOCIDAL IMBECILES

NEW: The U.S. is expected to announce sanctions against the IDF ‘Netzah Yehuda’ battalion for human rights violations in the occupied West Bank, according to three U.S. sources – Axios

Wiki on them is rather light with not much to say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netzah_Yehuda_Battalion

My assumption here is that the liberals will try to spin IOF atrocities into “a few bad apples” and then scapegoat batallions like this one in order to deflect from it being an iof-wide problem. Essentially create an “Azov” of Israel to deflect through and propagandise around it being “only a thousand people”.

Welcome to fanfiction hour, courtesy of Pepe Escobar.

spoiler

Pepe, in a 1 million view tweet, has recently alleged that a “very high level intel source” from Asia, but not Russia or China, has informed him that Israel’s initial plan to respond to Iran was to detonate a nuclear bomb over Iran to cause an EMP which would wipe out the electronics of the whole country. They sent an F-35 with its nuclear cargo flying towards Iran, but once it left Jordanian airspace, Russia proceeded to shoot down the F-35. Now, every country involved is maintaining silence about this, and Israel’s lackluster response later on was essentially them scrambling to put something together once Plan A failed.

Scott Ritter has responded:

Israel would never take such a precipitous action. Not only would it provide public acknowledgment of Israeli nuclear weapons capability, thereby putting Israel in open violation of existing agreements between it and the U.S., it would also put Israel in violation of the 1968 Outer Space Treaty prohibiting the deployment and/or use of nuclear weapons in space and the Biden administration’s recent admonishments in this regard. Moreover, the scenario describes makes no sense in terms of the characterization of the weapons involved, both in terms of the alleged Russian-Israeli engagement, and what Israel would hope happens regarding EMP. This is, in every way shape and form nonsensical reporting.

I think if you’re trying to assert that Israel wouldn’t do something just because of a little minor nuisance to them like “laws”, then that’s a pretty weak argument. Not totally without merit, there are rational players still in the Israeli state somewhere or they’d be a few months deep into a losing war with Hezbollah by now, but a weak argument nonetheless.

A very strange and hyperreactionary Twitter user who I very occasionally check up on to see how far they’ve gone off the deep end in the last few months, but who is unfortunately pretty knowledgeable about military matters (story of our goddamn lives in this megathread; Twitter-popular communist military nerd when?), has given a set of stronger reasons why this didn’t happen, and therefore what we would expect if Israel did indeed ever plan to attack Iran in a massive war scenario.

1. Things have a chance of failing, especially when you’re talking about the F-35. It is extremely unlikely that Israel would send a single plane to launch a single bomb for a mission which, if it were to fuck up and fail in some way, may well cause the destruction of their entire nation under a rain of missiles. If Israel were to attack Iran like this, we would see multiple planes carrying multiple nukes flying at Iran to ensure that at least one of them managed to do the task.

2. This plane would need support. You would need an escort, including other planes like AWACS. You would also need to refuel. There was a US refueling plane flying in southern Iraq on that day, as the pro-Pepe people claim - but there’s one there every day.

3. If you were Israel, you would want to misdirect and cause chaos in Iran and the surrounding area to distract them and thus prevent them from taking countermeasures, like disconnecting vulnerable points in an EMP blast in their underground bases (which are, conveniently, at least partially shielded from EMPs). A drone attack consisting of a few drones would not be the required chaos. If anything, it would direct Iranian attention towards the sky. A terrorist attack by “ISIS” in a few Iranian cities at once would have been more effective.

4. The US would know what Israel was doing, because Israel cannot act purely alone (it needs US refueling etc). Either it would force Israel to stand down (and thus the hypothetical nuke-laiden F-35 would never have flown at all), or the US would have decided to go along with it and help Israel by engaging Iraq and Syria and distracting Russia. This did not happen. The US also would have been able to detect a Russian plane taking off from an airbase to intercept the F-35 and would have either forced Israel to abort, or engage the Russian plane somehow.

5. An EMP is generated by detonating a high-yield (1-10 megaton) thermonuclear bomb at high altitudes (at least 60 kilometers, but as high as 500 km). For complicated reasons, the effectiveness of EMPs depends on where you are on the planet due to variability in magnetic field strength. Magnetic field strength is higher at the poles (though there’s a lot of variability; there’s a less intense zone over the South Atlantic and a more intense zone over Australia despite being at about the same latitude for example). Russia and the United States are therefore, coincidentally, among the two most vulnerable countries to EMPs when just talking about magnetic field strength. Iran is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum

Because of the lack of real testing into EMPs for obvious reasons, it is unknown precisely how far up or how big the bomb would have to be to cover Iran. The EMP would also decay with distance - this means that many military sites close to the borders would be less affected if you got it a little too small, thus ensuring a massive response from Iran which would destroy Israel too. Whereas if you got it a little too big, you could easily hit many other countries (in the Middle East - the supply of much of the planet’s oil!) and perhaps even Russia itself, which would possibly cause Russia to respond to Israel rapidly.

6. Israel would probably deliver a nuclear payload with a Blue Sparrow missile. Assuming a 700 kg warhead capable of delivering 2 megatons, which is a reasonable guess as to the bomb size and yield you’d need to disable Iran assuming certain factors, it could just barely fit inside the missile. But no warhead of this magnitude with that relatively low weight has been reported outside of the now-discontinued Russian Topol-M. The most common nuke yield in the US arsenal is at about 500 kilotons, and the most powerful nuclear free-fall weapon in the US is the B83, at 1.2 megatons with a weight of over 1000 kilograms. So Israel would need to have done some pretty intense nuclear science to create a warhead that is both twice as strong and half as large as the most powerful US nuke. Not impossible, but there’s no reason to believe it.

Scott himself has just responded further to Pepe with about the same arguments as to why Israel couldn’t perform this attack.

Workers at the Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, TN voted overwhelming yesterday to join the UAW. 73% in favor with 84% turnout.

Michael Roberts: Modi and the rise of the billionaire Raj

[hexatlas tags: india, china]

Another great piece by Roberts, this time on India, given the ongoing elections. He goes over the BJP’s likely strong upcoming victory, and then:

How is it possible for the BJP and Modi to be so popular? First, because of the bulk of the BJP’s political support comes from the rural and more backward areas of this huge country who have not benefited from the strident rise of Indian capitalism in the cities. These areas are bulwarks of Hindu nationalism, incentivised by fear of muslims.

The second reason is the total failure over the decades of the main capitalist party and standard bearer of Indian independence, the Congress party, to deliver better living standards and conditions for the hundreds of millions, not only in the country but in the city slums. Congress appears to millions as the party of the establishment controlled by a family dynasty (the Gandhis), while the BJP appears to many as the populist party of the forgotten people.

The Modi government makes much of its handouts to the poorest. Welfare schemes have been expanded such as providing free grain to 800 million of India’s poorest, and a monthly stipend of 1,250 rupees ($16; £12) to women from low-income families paid into half a billion new bank accounts, along with free gas connection in millions of houses for the poor and over 40 million toilets constructed.

But in reality, the BJP and the Modi government is fully integrated and supportive of Indian capital, especially big capital. PM Modi has made the economy a major part of his election pitch, pledging at a rally last year to lift the country’s economy “to the top position in the world” should he win a third term. The Modi’s government’s key policy is Viksit Bharat 2047—a plan to make India a developed nation by 2047, 100 years after independence, something China is targeting for 2030.

Roberts spends the rest of the article describing how the idea that India will ever catch up to, let alone exceed China is comical and deeply unserious:

• India’s GDP growth figures are greatly exaggerated. Additionally, China and India had about the same GDP per capita in 1990, but now China’s is six times higher. The gap between China and India is not narrowing, it’s widening.
• China’s Human Development Index has improved from 0.48 in 1990 to 0.77 in 2021 (for context, the US’s is 0.92). India’s has gone from 0.43 to 0.63.
• India’s income inequality - in some measures greater than when under the British Empire - dampen economic growth for the whole society, as wealth concentrates and stagnates in the bank accounts of oligarchs rather than being dispersed throughout society. Labor creates value, not entrepeneurs.
• Healthcare is not available for many and impoverishes people due to how expensive it is. Infant mortality in the poorest Indian states is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. Government spending on health is only 1-2% of GDP.
• India has a third of the world’s malnourished children. 74% of the population cannot afford healthy food.
• The average income in India is being dramatically outclassed by China. Income growth is well below claimed GDP growth.
• Where income growth is taking place at high speeds tends to be in the financial and real estate sectors, but these don’t employ that many people relatively speaking. Labour force participation has fallen under Modi and less than half of the adult working population is employed.
• Most Indians are employed in small businesses where labour rights are ignored.
• India’s manufacturing sector post-pandemic has been weak. Dreams that India might become the next world-factory like China now that there is political pressure (as well as capitalists seeking to minimize labor costs) and that China’s manufacturing will plummet are almost certainly not going to happen so long as the Chinese state wills it and increases planning and state control over corporations.
• Infrastructure is not nearly as good as in China. China invested 6.5% of its GDP in infrastructure development (pre-COVID at least), whereas India invests just 4.5%.
• 78% of Indians are literate (and only 62% of Indian women), while 97% of Chinese people are literate. China has many more people in vocational education despite having similar population sizes.
• Productivity growth has been falling under Modi. Overall, labor productivity is an average of 4% in India while in China, it’s 6.3%. This is because in China, underemployed peasants can move to the cities to get manufacturing jobs due to state planning of labor and infrastructure building. India’s urbanisation rate is much behind and employment growth is very slow.
• Groundwater provides 85% of India’s drinking water, and groundwater is thus declining at one of the fastest rates in the world. Predictions are that the situation will be critical within 20 years.

Overall, India will probably fall into a middle income trap, with mass exploitation of a billion or more people by the top 10%, while China continues its meteoric rise under intelligent state planning even despite Western sanctions pressure. India’s BJP has no real solutions for the fundamental problems facing them. They are doing the classic neoliberal/fascist things - privatisation, cuts in subsidies, more regressive taxes, blaming powerless minorities for the country’s problems, etc - and these make the situation worse, not better.

A new tiktok divestment bill happened? Apparently the main difference is that they have 1 year to divest instead of 6months. Is there anything else important about this version of the bill?