According to a recent report by Axios, for the first time, the Biden-Harris administration is explicitly threatening to suspend military aid to Israel unless some very specific conditions are met. These conditions amount to “the most wide-ranging and comprehensive list of US demands from Israel since the beginning of the war.”

Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024, an annual award established by English PEN in memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy named British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah a Writer of Courage, with whom she would share her award.

Anyone who has studied the history of propaganda must have rolled their eyes as I did upon hearing reports of babies being beheaded by Hamas militants after their incursion into Israel a year ago. History has repeatedly shown that such reports are inevitably fabricated or at least wildly exaggerated in order to influence public opinion in favour of war.

The mass killing operations of Israel are there for all to see but the military objectives of the Zionist onslaught have not been met. Even in the confined quarters of the Gaza enclave, a year of unrestrained criminality hasn’t subdued the armed resistance. Even if all out regional conflict takes place with direct US involvement, imperialism will reap what it sows.

There is no greater example of human agency at this moment than the resilience of Palestinians against Israel’s attempt to erase life, culture and history in Gaza. If there is any lesson to draw, it is from this resilience, which has reshaped our perceptions of the liberal international order and inspired young people around the world to resist the damage we have created and condoned.

We live in a world in which wealthy imperialist countries dominate and exploit the nations that are poor and oppressed. It is not surprising that this great international injustice involves the devaluing of human life. The conduct of political leaders in the West attests to this but it is also in evidence if you examine the track record of the corporate media.

On September 27, Israel dropped US-supplied 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on the Dahiya residential area of Beirut, flattening six apartment blocks and killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The cost of Nasrallah’s scalp was likely several hundred Lebanese civilian lives. The Palestinian journalist got it right. Their dead don’t seem to count the same way.

While Zelensky continues to talk of restoring all of Ukraine’s lost territory he has begun to wake up to the reality that this is impossible by military means. Unable to shift dynamics in his favour, he is hoping instead to shift the political dynamics by refocusing the Ukrainian war effort away from defending its own territory and towards striking the territory of the Russian Federation.

With JNF Canada vowing to appeal the CRA’s decision to revoke its charitable status, Canadian activists must use this victory to continue to fight and condemn the organization’s other fundraising initiatives. While it can no longer issue charitable tax receipts, the JNF is still free to raise money in Canada and send it directly to those who carry out ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Territories.

The regrettable reality is that there is almost no room for an honest debate about Canada’s role in perpetuating the Russia-Ukraine conflict, or on how the war can end, writes CD columnist Yves Engler. We are too busy banning films that dare to portray ordinary Russian soldiers as human beings.