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Violence

Over 600 Attacks Against 20,000 Human Rights Defenders In 2023

Mining, big agribusiness, and the fossil fuel sectors have unleashed an astronomical spate of attacks on human rights defenders (HRDs) throughout 2023. Crucially, perpetrators linked to companies and projects in these sectors account for the majority of over 600 attacks across the course of the year. This is according to a new damning report by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC). Staggering scale of attacks against human rights defenders On Tuesday 7 May, the BHRRC published its annual briefing on attacks against HRDs. Alarmingly, the data recorded 630 attacks which directly impacted an estimated 20,000 people. In particular, these were those involved in speaking out against business-related harms during 2023.

Masked Israel Supporters Attack UCLA’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment

Los Angeles, CA — Over more than five hours on Tuesday night, pro-Israel Zionist agitators violently beat, pepper sprayed and threw fireworks at hundreds of college students and protesters in a “unilateral, surprise attack“ as they held UCLA’s Palestine solidarity encampment while security and police stood by idly. Though police didn’t intervene until the fifth hour of the attack, the encampment stayed intact with the students repelling the continuous onslaught as they defiantly chanted “we’re not leaving” and “Free Palestine.”

Recent Settler Violence In The West Bank, Explained

Violent Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank have skyrocketed ever since October 7. Before that, 2022 and 2023 were already setting record highs in settler violence, but the nature of settler attacks today is on an entirely different level. Settlers are now expelling entire Palestinian communities from their villages for the first time in decades. According to the UN, Israeli settlers expelled about 1,200 Palestinians from some 25 rural communities across the West Bank, including seven communities that have been completely depopulated.

West Bank On Strike Following Israel’s Tulkarem Massacre

A comprehensive strike was declared across the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem on 21 April in mourning of at least 19 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces during a three-day raid there. Israeli troops withdrew from the city earlier on 21 April, after inflicting widespread destruction in Tulkarem’s Nour Shams refugee camp. Hamas called in a statement after midnight on Saturday for all people “to ignite confrontations with the criminal Zionist occupation … in the West Bank and Al-Quds, in response to the criminal massacre in Nour Shams camp in Tulkarem.”

Investigation: Prince Harry Charity Linked To Horrific Abuses In Africa

A charity with strong ties to Prince Harry has been funding rangers responsible for horrific abuses against Indigenous people in the Congo, including torture and rape, according to a major investigation published in the UK’s Mail on Sunday. The abuses have taken place in Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of Congo, which is managed by African Parks – Prince Harry is a member of their Board of Directors, a position to which he was “elevated” in 2023, after having served as their President for six years. The investigation has uncovered evidence of countless atrocities committed by African Parks’  “armed militia” against local Baka people.

Every Jew A .22 And MZ-4: The Path From Kahane To Ben-Gvir

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister and head of the extremist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, traveled up and down Israel distributing assault rifles (including MZ-4s) to Jewish-Israeli citizens in the weeks following Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7. It was a significant escalation in Ben-Gvir’s ongoing efforts to arm Jewish Israelis and, using these events as photo ops, the far-right lawmaker was greeted with great fanfare by the recipients — new civilian guards, intended to become ​“rapid response” groups. These civilian-arming events irked the U.S. government— which has been providing additional arms to the Israeli military since the outbreak of the war — and led to a threat from the Biden administration that the United States would stop sending guns.

Violence In Ecuador Is Result Of Deliberate Dismantling Of The State

The systematic violence which has immersed Ecuador is the product of a process of deliberate destructuring of the rule of law derived from policies implemented by the last three neoliberal governments, warned Jorge Paladines, an academic at the Central University of Ecuador and a professor of law and political science, in an interview with Sputnik. That, today, Ecuador is in a situation of internal armed conflict, that the country has been plunged into a state of emergency, and that a live television program was interrupted by armed men, is not the result of spontaneity or chance.

Ecuador In Crisis: A Country Broken By Neoliberalism

People across the world were shocked to see a drug gang waving rifles and grenades in the TC Television studios in Guayaquil, and the scene was perhaps the cinematic peak of successive days of explosions, riots, lootings, shootings, car explosions, and widespread panic that has paralyzed the country. However, the shocking and unprecedented episode on the public channel in Guayaquil—and the events that preceded and followed it—are just the latest chapter in a spiral of organized violence that has lasted for about five years and that has metastasized in the last two. It is the sad metamorphosis of a country that went from being the second safest in Latin America to becoming the most violent, with a homicide rate that has grown almost 800% since 2019.

Teaching Hatred And Normalizing Violence Against Palestinians

Since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, there have been numerous Western officials publicly decrying school textbooks in Palestine (West Bank and Gaza) and how they instill violence against settlers, occupiers, and the Zionist entity. The officials rely in their outcries on reports by a liberal institute that defames Palestinian textbooks, while aggrandizing Zionist entity’s textbooks as harbingers for peace. Simultaneously, since the Al-Aqsa Flood, there have been numerous videos circulating showing young settlers not only being apathetic to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza (when the time of writing, it has surpassed 20,000 civilians killed) but also celebrating such atrocity.

Murder Thy Neighbor: A Recap Of Mass Shootings In 2023

2023 was the Year of the Mass Killing, with only 2019 ranking higher in terms of total mass shootings and death in the United States. ABC reports 627 “mass shootings'' in 2023. That means that in “the world’s leading democracy,” as the U.S. government likes to present itself both within the empire and across the globe, we collectively endure roughly two random murder sprees per day. While feigning concern, the corporate press predictably engages in sensationalism and fuels this pandemic. The ruling class refuses to touch the ideological cornerstones of U.S. society that undergird this ongoing fratricidal saga – a white supremacist, hypermasculine, gun-obsessed culture, a proliferation of untreated mental health issues, profits over human needs, violent conquest abroad and promoting hatred and divisions at home.

‘Bodies Everywhere:’ One Family’s Harrowing Journey Out Of Gaza City

I am Zakaria Baker, one of the people who were displaced from their homes four days ago in November 2023 – around November 7, 2023. The beginning of the displacement is as follows: An Israeli intelligence officer called one of my cousins. There were about 20 of us sitting on chairs. The bombing of Al-Shati Refugee Camp did not stop for a single second. The missiles that were fired at the camp – we couldn’t see or hear them. They were barrel bombs. When they were dropped on a residential block of six or seven houses, they destroyed them completely. The scariest and most painful thing is that these missiles are fired at houses crowded with people.

Anti-Arab And Islamophobic Hate Crimes On The Rise In The US

This Saturday, three young Palestinian men, ​​Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Ali, and Kenan Abdulhamid were shot in Vermont. The three men, all college students, were shot at four times by 48-year-old Jason J. Eaton. They were speaking Arabic and two of them were wearing Palestinian keffiyehs. All three of the shooting victims are 20 years old. This comes shortly after three separate videos went viral of former State Department official Stuart Seldowitz harassing an Egyptian halal cart worker with vile Islamophobic and racist remarks. “Did you rape your daughter like Mohammed did?” Seldowitz asked the worker.

The Right’s Persecution Of Palestine Supporters Looks Like A New Red Scare

I attended the Janazah and burial of Wadea Al-Fayoume on October 16. In the first weeks of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the six-year old Palestinian American boy, from a suburb of Chicago, was stabbed 26 times by his family’s landlord in a hate crime. The United States is currently awash in rhetoric justifying Muslim and Arab deaths. Joseph Czuba, 71, the landlord charged with killing Wadea and gravely injuring his mother, was on the receiving end of that rhetoric. Czuba was reportedly an avid listener of conservative talk radio. According to Czuba’s wife, he’d grown irate over supposed plans for a ​“national day of jihad,” a mistranslated call for mass protests that was weaponized by rightwing media to cause panic.

Israel’s Violence Will Never Bring ‘Safety’ To Anyone, Including Jews

The horror and heartbreak in Gaza reaches new proportions each minute: Israel’s siege has killed at least 3,400 people and injured more than 12,000 in the past week and a half, and a possible ground invasion threatens unspeakable levels of new violence. The Israeli forces and settlers have also killed 61 and injured 1,250 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The death tolls climb even as Palestinians and those in solidarity with them are marching and rallying worldwide in powerful and urgent protests. For us, as anti-Zionist Jewish journalists, the past week and a half has been a flood of many griefs.

On Indigenous Peoples Day, Unity And Justice In The Wake Of A Hate Crime

Albuquerque, NM –  Marking Indigenous Peoples Day, Indigenous groups and supporters are calling for unity and justice for Jacob Johns, an Indigenous activist from Spokane, WA, who was shot and gravely wounded by a domestic terrorist at a peaceful prayer ceremony on September 28, 2023, in Española, New Mexico.  “This is a hate crime,” said Johns’ attorney John Day. “It needs to be recognized and prosecuted as such. Jacob’s heroism in protecting the lives of innocent people, including children, is important in itself, but there’s an even larger principle at stake here: we cannot afford to minimize or normalize targeting lawful, peaceful assembly of people with violent crime because they belong to a different group.

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Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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