(Source.)

(En français.)

The Handbook's attempt to define Jewish identity is dangerous and misleading. At its core, it falsely claims that all Jews are inherently Indigenous to Israel, using this as a justification for Zionism and as a tool to silence anti-Zionist voices, regardless of whether or not they are Jewish.

This redefinition not only misrepresents indigeneity, by conflating biblical ties to the region with the current nation state of Israel, but also conflates Jewish identity with Zionism, labeling any opposition to Zionism (including by Jews themselves) as antisemitic.

By stating that most Jews "affirm Zionism as central to their Jewish identity," it erases the diversity of Jewish beliefs and traditions around the world. It reduces Jews to essentially a single, monolithic group. In reality, Canadian Jewish opinions on Israel and Zionism are varied and shifting every day a fact that the Handbook ignores outright.

A recent survey showed that only half of Canadian Jews identify as Zionist, with 27% saying they do not. This undermines the Handbook's reliance on the confusing metric of "belief in Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state", a statement which can be interpreted in many different ways.

Excluding a couple of shorts, it is at this point that the show officially becomes one decade old. I wish that I could say that this show got stale, but it didn’t, really; it already sucked donkey balls back in the ’90s, only it was less reactionary. If Comedy Central had cancelled it back then or shortly afterwards then a few of us could look back at it as a quaint relic, along with AOL and GeoCities domains. But like an Axis holdout in the Philippines, it just soldiers on, barely aware of how much the world has changed.

This brings me to my next point: it is okay for a successful series to bid farewell to its audience. As Bill Watterson said regarding his unpopular choice to discontinue Calvin and Hobbes:

It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now “grieving” for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason Calvin and Hobbes still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it. I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.

Of course, Calvin and Hobbes is vastly more tolerable than South Park (shudder-inducing though it may be to realise that both took some inspiration from Peanuts), but the point here is that this would have been as good a time as ever for the show to exit gracefully from the scene. Nonetheless, the showrunners apparently loved money too much for that, so…

With Apologies to Jesse Jackson: ‘Jesse Jackson is not the emperor of black people!’ I smiled.

I can sympathize with Randy’s recent past constantly coming back to haunt him. It is extremely frustrating when you know that you made a serious mistake but others hang onto their grudges, no matter what you promise or whatever progress that you have made. Still, this story dissatisfies me. The showrunners almost seem to be saying that being stigmatised for spewing a racial slur is similar to being of a stigmatized ethnicity, which is too ridiculous to merit comment.

I feel like I should have despised this episode more than I did, not only for the repeated racial slurs but also for the tedious encounters between Cartman and a short bloke, but the ending was better than I expected: Stan explicitly acknowledged that, as a white, he’ll never truly understand what it feels like to be the target of a particularly infamous racial slur. It’s nothing revolutionary, but at least it reminds us to be humble.

Overall, though, not a good episode. It is easy to imagine somebody else (black or not) constantly facepalming or eye-rolling throughout this, and most of the jokes were boring at best. I am going easy on it for the okay ending, but to be honest I probably shouldn’t.

Cartman Sucks: He sure does!

Lice Capades: The only parts that I enjoyed were the lice dying horribly and getting caught in the hurricane. Also, I have to admit that I was unaware until now that lice travel by means of flies; it is a welcome break when this show is educational. The rest of this episode is filled with tedious stretches of nothing happening… what? Oh all right, there is some drama between classroom students over who had the lice, and the lice have their own story arch, but it was all so uninteresting that it might as well have been nothing.

Basically, everything that this episode did, Osmosis Jones and Antz did better (if only slightly).

The Snuke: There is something mildly charming to me about a Muslim sitting in a Jewish student’s vacant desk. I doubt that the showrunners were aware of the important similarities between Judaism and Islam, but I still appreciate this detail.

I have never seen a single episode of 24, yet within only a couple minutes I could already tell that this was going to be another parody episode. Ugh.

The only part where I got close to laughing was when the Redcoats fired at jet fighters with muskets. The rest of this story is pretty boring, filled with the immaturity that you would expect from this show. I can tell that the showrunners wanted to help normalise Muslims, but most of the time we just see Cartman pestering them and little time seeing them engaged in mundane activities. It is kind of like that The Simpsons episode ‘MyPods and Boomsticks’, only less effective. Overall, you aren’t missing out on much by overlooking this episode.

Fantastic Easter Special: It started off interesting, with a few serious moments and a question about what rabbits and dyeing eggs have to do with Christianity, but then it devolves into generic movie parody nonsense (about The Da Vinci Code, I am presuming). I was mildly amused about the Pope’s hat originally being designed for a rabbit, but the rest of this story was pretty yawn-inducing, and Yoshke’s gory death scene was cringeworthy.

D-Yikes!: No comment.

Night of the Living Homeless: Wow, what a wretched episode. Walmartipedia claims that this is ‘a satire and commentary on how homeless people are often seen as “degenerates to society”’, and while I have not listened to the DVD commentary, I find that hard to believe given the showrunners’ propertarianism and how the climax offers no advice for helping houseless folk. This story depicts them as greedy, ungrateful, mindless, invasive pests who don’t deserve a penny, and there is an implication that they are probably con artists. At least the violence against them was minimal, save for Randy shotgunning someone in the face and Cartman hitting two houseless adults with his skateboard.

If this was indeed intended to be satirical, it is pretty lazy since all that it does is gently exaggerate how anticommies already see the homeless: that the homeless are less than human. It would be so ridiculously easy for militant anticommunists to see this episode as only validating their opinions, and as mocking the homeless for being ‘parasitic’. Anyway, I am giving this pukestain of an episode an F−.

Le Petit Tourette: Tourette’s syndrome? It’s called coprolalia, dipshits. I have a feeling that the writers based their cluelessness on Tourette’s Guy since he was an Internet sensation back in the early 2000s (presumably excessive profanity was a novel concept at the time). Apart from his heterosexist and misogynist moments, some of Tourette’s Guy’s clips are still mildly amusing, but they are not good recordings of his syndrome’s symptoms and it is regrettable that he was many people’s introduction to the disorder.

This story is likewise not going to give anyone a very accurate representation of Tourette’s syndrome, because even if the writers grasped that phenomenon, Tourette’s syndrome symptoms are just not funny. If you have ever seen a documentary on the subject, you would understand. To be fair, the writers balance this slightly by showing us sufferers who do not exhibit coprolalia, but these are likewise just one-dimensional caricatures reduced to their symptoms. The story briefly introduces them as little disclaimers, then forgets about them almost completely.

So this episode is unfunny, but I’ll give it this: the story actually gets more interesting in the later half, because Cartman unexpectedly exhibits a disorder causing him to blurt out awkward truths about his life, thereby disrupting his plans and, surprisingly, Kyle’s own plans. I could call this a passable episode for that reason alone, but the casual ableism is pretty hard to overlook (and don’t get me started on the antisemitism).

More Crap: If for whatever reason you insist on watching this abysmal episode, do yourself a couple favours: first, invert the colours on your monitor or television set. This makes the episode’s visuals less intolerable. Then, make sure that you are lying in a bed or at least a recliner. After that, you’ll be ready to subject yourself to twenty-two minutes of the cringiest dad jokes imaginable. Now here’s an even better idea: avoid this episode like the fucking AIDS.

Imaginationland: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Not a three-parter! Fuck!

Okay, okay, here is one thing that I like about the first seven minutes: the Imagination Balloon reminds me of the Ship of the Imagination from Cosmos. Remember Cosmos? It has a massive table of elements in vials, somebody making pie in slow motion, somebody time-travelling on a simple bicycle, great music, beautiful quotes like ‘We are made of starstuff’. It’s just great. I wish that I were rewatching that… but alas…

Oh, somebody suicide-bombs and massacres some imaginary characters. That’s kind of nice. The first part also gets slightly exciting at the end because it ends on a cliffhanger.

The twoth part is likewise very uninteresting, but I want to note that the idea to nuke Imaginationland is awfully similar to the original Doom concept to launch a nuke into Hell… wait a minute, one character explicitly says, ‘So, we’re about to nuke Hell.’ Weird coincidence.

The biggest problem with this three-part special is that the stakes are so low. You have to feel emotionally invested in these characters for the tension to have any effect, and even if you have that emotional connexion, knowing that most of these characters are either replaceable or unlikely to die is going to reduce the tension. An imaginary character dies? Big deal. Just imagine a replacement. Background character dies? Who cares; they got plenty more. Kyle suffocates? As if the showrunners were going to discontinue one of their main characters forever. These factors all reduce any excitement to be had.

There is also the really tedious running joke about Cartman trying to get Kyle to suck his scrotum. This is not only an unfunny joke about sexual harassment, it gets old pretty quickly, too.

The point that the writers made was that fictional characters are important because of how they affect us, which kind of makes them ‘real’. It is an interesting point I suppose, but it would have been more compelling if the delivery were better: there weren’t many clues in the story that that lesson was coming.

The only time that I laughed was when they dropped a nuclear bomb on Imaginationland. Otherwise, sitting through these three episodes was a chore.

Guitar Queer-O: The title alone should tell you everything that you need to know about this episode’s quality, but I am going to elaborate rather than take the easy way out again.

It becomes apparent within the first several minutes that this is going to parody a drama, specifically something in the ‘rock band’ subgenre of dramas, and this makes the story unbearably predictable and anticlimactic. They’re just substituting serious phenomena in the drama with ones that are less serious, so the ‘rock band’ is two guys playing with plastic guitars, a crowd becomes a virtual crowd, ‘getting big’ means scoring a million points, a drug addiction becomes a video game thereabout, and so on. It is one of the laziest scripts that I have ever seen.

I mean, just picture this: a producer wants to hook Stan up with a better player, and the player shows off his skill in public. Since the guitar is plastic and does not actually generate any music, it’s just the sound of somebody clacking a bunch of buttons repeatedly. Ba dum tish!

The only part where I got close to smiling was when Stan switched to playing a driving simulator, complete with its own plastic controller. Overall, this episode is a waste of time. Yes, even more so than Guitar Hero… especially more so than Guitar Hero.

The List: Another parody of a crime drama, only this one has a generic lesson about how looks aren’t everything and that we should not judge others based on physical appearance. Much like the previous episode, roughly 90% of the script would have been easy to fit into a children’s cartoon. Who else here remembers Fillmore!?

What I liked about this season finale is that it gave Wendy a more prominent rôle. She rarely even had any speaking rôles in the last few seasons, so reintroducing her was a welcome break. That being said, I still found most of this episode uninteresting and unfunny.

One laugh. That is the most that I got in the five hours and eight minutes that I watched this: one laugh, specifically when they dropped a nuclear missile on Imaginationland. I am guessing that that was supposed to be a serious moment. The problem was, Imaginationland is so obnoxious and worthless that it is hard to feel any sadness or disappointment when it all vanishes in a snap. It’s almost like when Mecha-Streisand devastated South Park: you are presumably supposed to feel contempt for her because of her wanton destruction, but because South Park is such a worthless town anyway, her havoc has the opposite effect on viewers who loathe this series.

I could maybe say that Imaginationland, Episode III is the best of the worst here for that laugh alone, but the rest of the episode is so uninteresting and annoying that it is perfectly worth skipping entirely. You would be better off reflecting on how South Park Studios invested so much time and effort into that epic three-part special (which they advertised to death back in the day): a fact that is either tragic or unintentionally funny, depending on your point of view.

South Park, the longest running in ‘adult’ animation, operates on a predictable formula that leaves boredom in its wake. Its creators are driven by a terrible sense of humour. When the last celebrity has died, when the last disability has been recorded, when the last bowel movement has been passed, and when modern audiences’ tastes become too sophisticated, then—and only then—shall Trey Parker and Matt Stone realize, too late, that humor is not in bank accounts they have (almost) never been funny. Not on purpose, anyway.

Over the course of three years the fascist colonial authorities in the […] colony of Cyrenaica emptied an entire region of its people in an effort to quell an anti-colonial rebellion and prepare the colony for settlement and incorporation into Mussolini’s envisioned Fascist empire. In this short time span, fascist authorities forcibly deported the semi-nomadic peoples of Cyrenaica from their homeland in the Jebel region and interned them in concentration camps on the desert coast.

These policies resulted in the deaths of more than half of the semi-nomadic population of Cyrenaica, the decimation of their herds, and the near elimination of their way of life. [Fascist] Italy proudly broadcast this episode of colonial conquest to its fellow Western imperial powers who watched a genocide unfold with relative disinterest.

This international neglect provided Fascist Italy with the opportunity to pursue its genocidal policies with minimal consequences or scrutiny, strengthen its geopolitical position in colonial Africa, and elaborate an increasingly radical, violent, and self-assured ideology for […] Fascist colonialism.

[…]

Over a period of four short years the Fascist colonial government forcibly deported an estimated 100,000 “semi-nomadic” people from the colony’s interior and held them in a string of 16 concentration camps on the Mediterranean Coast.

From 1929 to 1934 Cyrenaica’s estimated population dropped from 225,000 to 142,000, indicating that 83,000 people disappeared from the colony in only five years. Of the 83,000 missing, about 60,000–70,000 are believed to have died as a result of the policies of deportation and internment.²

[…]

With the rebellion in Tripolitania crushed and the Benghazi parliament formally suppressed, the fascist regime was free to use whatever means necessary to “pacify” Cyrenaica. The “pacification” of Cyrenaica was by no means the first time that the Italian government employed novel weapons and tactics against its colonial subjects.

The initial invasion of Libya in 1911 saw the first use of aeronautical anti-civilian tactics. The [Regia Aeronautica] would swoop low over Libyan villages and hand-drop explosives on military targets in order to terrorize the civilian population.²³

The Fascists utilized airplanes in Libya again in 1926 when [Fascist] Italy became the first country to intentionally use poisonous gas against civilian populations by dropping canisters of phosgene gas on caravans in the Libyan interior.²⁴

By the end of the 1920s the military situation in Cyrenaica had become untenable for the [Fascists]. Omar al-Mukhtar’s highly mobile guerrilla bands known as duar were able to attack [Fascist] military positions and then quickly disappear back into civilian society making them nearly impossible for a formal army to suppress.

The Governor of Cyrenaica from 1926 to 1929, Attilio Terruzzi, bemoaned that even armies of 5,000 or 10,000 men were insufficient against even a few hundred guerilla fighters who, owing to their semi-nomadic lifestyle, weren’t tied to any specific location and seemed to be able to appear and disappear spontaneously across hundreds of kilometers.²⁵ Terruzzi’s strategy was to use brute force and technological superiority to combat an enemy with better knowledge of the terrain and integration into the local society.

Over the course of three years the fascist colonial authorities in the […] colony of Cyrenaica emptied an entire region of its people in an effort to quell an anti-colonial rebellion and prepare the colony for settlement and incorporation into Mussolini’s envisioned Fascist empire. In this short time span, fascist authorities forcibly deported the semi-nomadic peoples of Cyrenaica from their homeland in the Jebel region and interned them in concentration camps on the desert coast.

These policies resulted in the deaths of more than half of the semi-nomadic population of Cyrenaica, the decimation of their herds, and the near elimination of their way of life. [Fascist] Italy proudly broadcast this episode of colonial conquest to its fellow Western imperial powers who watched a genocide unfold with relative disinterest.

This international neglect provided Fascist Italy with the opportunity to pursue its genocidal policies with minimal consequences or scrutiny, strengthen its geopolitical position in colonial Africa, and elaborate an increasingly radical, violent, and self-assured ideology for […] Fascist colonialism.

[…]

Over a period of four short years the Fascist colonial government forcibly deported an estimated 100,000 “semi-nomadic” people from the colony’s interior and held them in a string of 16 concentration camps on the Mediterranean Coast.

From 1929 to 1934 Cyrenaica’s estimated population dropped from 225,000 to 142,000, indicating that 83,000 people disappeared from the colony in only five years. Of the 83,000 missing, about 60,000–70,000 are believed to have died as a result of the policies of deportation and internment.²

[…]

With the rebellion in Tripolitania crushed and the Benghazi parliament formally suppressed, the fascist regime was free to use whatever means necessary to “pacify” Cyrenaica. The “pacification” of Cyrenaica was by no means the first time that the Italian government employed novel weapons and tactics against its colonial subjects.

The initial invasion of Libya in 1911 saw the first use of aeronautical anti-civilian tactics. The [Regia Aeronautica] would swoop low over Libyan villages and hand-drop explosives on military targets in order to terrorize the civilian population.²³

The Fascists utilized airplanes in Libya again in 1926 when [Fascist] Italy became the first country to intentionally use poisonous gas against civilian populations by dropping canisters of phosgene gas on caravans in the Libyan interior.²⁴

By the end of the 1920s the military situation in Cyrenaica had become untenable for the [Fascists]. Omar al-Mukhtar’s highly mobile guerrilla bands known as duar were able to attack [Fascist] military positions and then quickly disappear back into civilian society making them nearly impossible for a formal army to suppress.

The Governor of Cyrenaica from 1926 to 1929, Attilio Terruzzi, bemoaned that even armies of 5,000 or 10,000 men were insufficient against even a few hundred guerilla fighters who, owing to their semi-nomadic lifestyle, weren’t tied to any specific location and seemed to be able to appear and disappear spontaneously across hundreds of kilometers.²⁵ Terruzzi’s strategy was to use brute force and technological superiority to combat an enemy with better knowledge of the terrain and integration into the local society.

Mattan here. I am the executive director of Refuser Solidarity Network and an Israeli refuser. Last week, for the first time in many years, a reserve soldier was jailed for refusing to serve in protest of the ongoing genocide. His name is Daniel Yahalom, and he is refusing over the barbaric genocide in Gaza and the ongoing settler-military takeover of the West Bank.

From the beginning, we've made it clear: the military cannot afford mass refusal. They're trying to project strength, but the longer this war drags on, the more the cracks begin to show. They hoped punishment would break our resolve, but they're only strengthening our movement. Let's show him that he is not alone! Write a support letter to Daniel and ask 3 friends to do the same.

Daniel had already served more than 200 days since the war began. But when he understood the destruction, he made a choice. In his words: "Since October 7, I have served over 235 days in the reserves with a heavy heart. I was haunted by a heavy feeling that the fate of the hostages was being forsaken and that the war, which is largely unbridled, is being paid for in Gazan blood... The situation in the West Bank also got worse and worse... Meanwhile, what about the hostages? Every day they were dragged to the margins of the exhausted Israeli consciousness."

Following Daniel's arrest, "Soldiers for the Hostages", a group of soldiers who refuse to take part in the war on Gaza, held an emergency protest outside the military prison where Daniel is being held. They showed up wearing shirts that read: "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust wars." Our movement made itself heard, reminding Daniel he is not alone.

This isn't just about one soldier, it never was. His arrest is a test. The government is betting that fear will silence us, that one prison cell will be enough to keep the rest in line. But his arrest has had the opposite effect, and it has only given our movement momentum. As opposition to the government and calls for the end of the war grow, the arrest of refusers continues to bring our movement into the mainstream. Hundreds have signed our refusal letter, more are joining every day, and we're not going anywhere till the end of the genocide and the occupation.

This moment marks an escalation on the part of the government, but also an opening. The media is watching while the public asks questions. People who once believed refusal was unthinkable are beginning to reconsider. That's where we come in. We're opening another way forward, a way of hope and resistance.

We fight to end the genocide, and to the systems of occupation that make wars like this inevitable. Until then, we will support all those wrongfully jailed for refusing service and the current state of affairs. We will continue to show up. At jails. At protests. In the streets. In the press. Now is the time for civil resistance. For those supporting us from afar, let's show Daniel that he is not alone! Write him a support letter and ask 3 friends to do the same.

In solidarity,

Mattan Helman
Executive Director
Refuser Solidarity Network

(Taken from an email sent to me by the Refuser Solidarity Network. Emphasis original.)

Located around three miles away from Mauthausen concentration camp, the Gusen site had attracted the SS because of its proximity to the Gusen and Kastenhof stone quarries. SS authorities purchased land at the site on May 25, 1938. Managers of the SS-owned firm Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke (DESt-German Earth and Stone Works), which used concentration camp prisoner labor to extract and finish construction materials at Mauthausen, established next to the “Wiener Graben” stone quarry in 1938, deployed a forced labor detachment from Mauthausen on a daily basis to the Gusen quarries beginning in 1938.

Tiring of marching the prisoner detachment three miles to the Gusen quarries, SS authorities authorized the construction of concentration camp Gusen in late 1939. During the winter of 1939–1940, German, Austrian, and Polish concentration camp prisoners from Mauthausen constructed the camp and prisoner barracks.

Although the site counted as an external labor detachment of Mauthausen during its initial construction, the SS opened Gusen as a separate camp on May 25, 1940, identifying the surviving 212 prisoners from the construction detachment by separate Gusen incarceration numbers and removing their names from Mauthausen records. That same day, a transport of approximately 1,084 Polish prisoners arrived in Gusen.

Over the next several weeks, the SS transferred some 8,000 Polish prisoners to Gusen from other concentration camps, including Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Gusen retained its autonomous status until early 1944. It had its own numbering system, death registry, SS guard battalion, and postal administration.

During the period of its construction, SS Sergeant Anton Streitwieser commanded the Gusen external detachment site. On July 1, 1940, SS Captain Karl Chmielewski became the camp commandant. In late 1942, SS First Lieutenant Fritz Seidler replaced him. Seidler commanded the camp until liberation.

Prisoners

In addition to German, Austrian, and Polish prisoners, the SS incarcerated in Gusen approximately 4,000 Spanish Republicans (Spanish refugees, who had found refuge from the Franco regime in France in 1939 and whom Vichy French authorities turned over to the Germans in 1940) in 1940 and 4,400 Soviet prisoners of war in 1941. Nearly three-quarters of the Spanish Republicans died in the first year at Gusen. By the beginning of 1943, fewer than 500 Soviet prisoners of war were still alive in the camp.

During the later war years, the arrival of more than 3,000 Yugoslavs, more than 9,000 Soviet civilians and more than 2,400 Frenchmen further diversified Gusen's inmate population. Yet the high mortality rate, caused in particular by Commandant Chmielewski's brutal and sadistic management of the camp, kept the prisoner population to between 6,000 and 7,000 up until 1943. Better rations and less arbitrary mistreatment led to a decrease in the death rate from the summer of 1943 until the autumn of 1944, as the SS sought to maintain its labor force.

The need for labor to construct underground tunnels in 1944, induced the SS to increase the prisoner population to more than 24,000 by the end of 1944, including the arrival of 2,750 Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz in June 1944, thousands of Polish Jews from Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Flossenbürg in the late summer and autumn of 1944, 1,000 Polish civilians captured in October 1944 during the Warsaw Home Army uprising, and some 1,500 Italian civilians.

The following appeal was issued by a coalition of grassroots, anti-war organizations including the ANSWER Coalition involved in organizing the People's Assembly for Peace and Justice

[Tomorrow], politicians from NATO countries will gather in Dayton to plot their next wars. For over 75 years, NATO has been a dealer of destruction in place like Afghanistan and Libya and threatened the entire world with devastating global conflict.

On May 25, people from across the country will gather for a protest and counter-summit — the the People's Assembly for Peace and Justice. Bus tickets from cities across the Midwest are now available!

Register for the People's Assembly here

Pittsburgh, PA
Bus departs at 6:00 a.m.
East Liberty, exact location TBD
Buy your ticket here

Louisville, KY
Car caravan departs at 8:00 a.m.
Meeting point: 236 Woodbine St
Contact to reserve a seat: [email protected]

Columbus, OH
Car caravan departs at 9:30 a.m.
Location: Mayme Moore Park, 867 Mount Vernon Ave
Contact to reserve a seat: [email protected]

Chicago, IL
Bus departs at 5:30 a.m.
140 S. Columbus Dr. in downtown Chicago
Buy your ticket here

Cincinnati, OH
Car Caravan departs 9:30 a.m.
5033 Glencrossing Way
Contact to reserve a seat: [email protected]

Please make an urgently-needed contribution today to help cover the costs of this demonstration and conference. If you are not able to attend the protest, your generous donation can help cover the costs of other attendees' bus tickets.

(Taken from an email sent to me two weeks ago by the ANSWER Coalition. Emphasis original.)

To better understand how the Italian economic connections with [the British Empire] affected those with [the Third Reich] and vice versa, the period analysed in this section is reduced to the months of Italian non-belligerency, from 1 September 1939 to 10 June 1940.

The events of these 9 months in fact show with greater clarity — actually, in some cases, they bring to light — many of the dynamics that were previously hidden. The [A]llied maritime blockade was certainly the element, that added new important and delicate issues to the general relations and particularly to the economic talks that Italy had with Great Britain — that was, de facto, the only manager of the block.

A few days after the beginning of the [Wehrmacht’s] attack on Poland, in fact, the Italian Foreign Minister had urged his London embassy to ask the competent authorities to allow the Italian ships that were in German ports on 1 September to return home without undergoing the controls of British patrols at sea.

The answer was not only a positive one, but Italian ships were even offered to be escorted by the British fleet across the North Sea. The political meaning of such an offer was not underestimated by Rome, so that Ciano ordered that “the issues of an economic nature that up to now have been dealt directly with the technical departments from today must be exclusively forwarded and managed by this Ministry”.⁶⁹

In early October, then, the Italian competent authorities started to meet the naval attaché at the British embassy in Rome on a weekly base, in order to smooth possible frictions in the controls of the maritime blockade. These meetings turned out to be the starting point for the creation at the end of the month of a permanent Anglo-Italian joint standing committee.⁷⁰

The purpose of the latter would have been not only to deal with all the issues of the blockade, but also to draft a possible commercial agreement, that, given the circumstances, was perceived immediately by both parts as a possible strategical step in the relations between the two countries. Perhaps to give more importance to this — after all — unexpected event, London decided to issue an order according to which the British would have provided assurances to their companies for the payments of Italian buyers.

[Fascist] Italy, in fact, was not only lacking foreign currency reserves to liquidate purchases abroad but had also a significative passive disbalance in the clearing with the United Kingdom.⁷¹ Showing such a trustful position, London hoped to get the negotiations off to a good start.

[…]

Coming to the British, it should be said that the already mentioned division about the position that had to be taken with [Fascist] Italy, together with the eventual unwillingness of Mussolini to send war material to London were ultimately the elements that influenced the negotiations for the commercial agreement, bringing them to a failure.

A memorandum drafted in February 1940 by the Italian Economic War Office outlined the main stages of Anglo-Italian economic relations since the outbreak of the war, and let us know that a preliminary agreement for commercial exchange was signed in November 1939 and that specific negotiations also started for the supply by [Fascist] Italy to Great Britain of other goods for military use.⁸¹

In early January Sir Wilfrid Greene, Master of The Rolls and president of the British delegation in the Joint Standing Committee, was sent to Rome as the person in charge of the negotiations, carrying tangible proposals for a radical solution to the issue of control over smuggling.⁸² Before leaving London, Greene attended a meeting at the MEW “to discuss plans for the Italian negotiations”,⁸³ but when he arrived in [Fascist] Italy he immediately understood that the problem of economic agreement with the Italians was to be treated as a political problem.

In a letter to the Foreign Secretary, in fact, he wrote clearly that the consequences of the [A]llied blockade of German coal exports departing from neutral ports (Rotterdam in primis), had gone far beyond the purely economic and commercial domain.

With this measure, the British had effectively forced the Italians to buy a much higher share of coal in Great Britain and this, while Rome’s deficit in clearing continued, inevitably implied a reduction in the amount of other commodities that the fascist government could at that point buy, as well as the danger of German reprisals.

(Emphasis added.)

Mohsen Mahdawi is a legal permanent resident of the United States. In April Mahdawi went to his naturalization interview in Vermont, the final step on his path to obtaining U.S. citizenship. But instead of receiving his citizenship, Mahdawi was kidnapped by armed and masked DHS agents in plain clothes who prevented him from interacting with his lawyer. DHS had planned to fly him to Louisiana, but he missed the flight and was instead held in a prison in Vermont, which he credits with his speedy legal process compared to students who have been held in similar situations for months.

In this, his first interview since being freed from prison, Mahdawi goes into detail about his ordeal at the hands of ICE and his family and friends’ suffering in Palestine, and it is well worth watching the full interview to hear Mahdawi speak about his life in his own words.

His final message is: “The same message that the Gazan people have been sending to us, we’re gaining strength from them… No more universities for students to attend or to graduate from in Gaza, a painful reality. They are sending us a message that there is so much more to hope for than giving up on the idea of justice and surrendering to fear and to violence. So, I say, stay strong, and we will celebrate under the sun in a matter of a very short time.”

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)

Momodou Taal, who left the U.S. in March rather than allow the current administration to deport him, speaks to In These Times about a wide range of topics, including his lawsuit against the current administration’s executive orders targeting international students.

Taal articulates one of the many connections between the targeting of immigrants and the administration’s attempts to silence the pro-Palestine/anti-genocide movement: “On the campaign trail, Trump said, if you were seen at these 'pro-Hamas’ protests, we will find you and we will deport you. So Trump is making good on his promise… what we’re essentially saying in this country now is we cannot critique another government anymore, let alone the American government.”

Taal sees the current repression, however, as a sign of weakness rather than strength: “the fact that we have the largest empire in history, the most militarized empire in history, fighting against students, repressing students and compelling and forcing universities to clamp down on students, for me, that’s not a sign of strength on their part. It’s a sign that they’re losing their ideological battle.”

There is far more in this interview than will ever fit into a short blurb—check out the rest at the link above.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)

“The guards don’t just walk up to people and be abusive, but if you annoy a guard or something they’ll threaten to send you to Guantanamo or El Salvador.”

This is a quote from a Venezuelan man being held at the El Paso Service Processing Center, an ICE prison in El Paso that Amnesty International has been investigating. Along with local legal aid and service providers, whose funding has been cut in the past few months, Amnesty International has written a full report on EPSPC, and it’s a harrowing tale filled with abusive prison guards, rotten food and contaminated water, lack of legal services, and a myriad of other human rights abuses.

Amnesty investigators who visited the prison also heard stories of family separation and children being left alone without supervision or support. Prisoners have been denied legal representation and access to the law library inside the prison, as well as due process. Read more from Amnesty’s report at the link above.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)