Breaking the Sound Barrier by Amy Goodman

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “oh rafah. aching rafah. aching of refugees aching of tumbled houses bicycles severed from tank-warped tires and aching of bullet riddled homes...” So begins a poem written by Rachel Corrie, in Gaza in 2003, just weeks before she was crushed to death by a US-made Israeli military bulldozer, while she and others from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) nonviolently resisted the demolition of yet another Palestinian home. Now, as Israel plans a land invasion of Rafah, where an estimated 1.4 million refugees from across Gaza have fled Israel’s unrelenting bombardment that has killed over 32,000 people, and as Israel’s strategically-imposed starvation stalks and kills the children of Gaza, her words are strikingly relevant. Rachel Corrie died on March 16th, 2003, three days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. She was 23 years old, soon to graduate from Evergreen State College in her hometown of Olympia, Washington. She went to Gaza to commit her idealism to action, in solidarity with Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. What she saw transformed her. “I’ve been here for about a month and a half now, and this is definitely the most difficult situation that I have ever seen,” Rachel said on camera, later released in “Death of an Idealist,” a 2005 documentary. “In the time that I’ve been here, children have been shot and killed. On the 30th of January, the Israeli military bulldozed the two largest water wells, destroying over half of Rafah’s water supply. Every few days, if not every day, houses are demolished here.” Tom Dale, a fellow activist, was with Rachel when she was killed. “A bulldozer turned toward the home of Dr. Samir Nasrallah. Dr. Samir and his young family were friends of Rachel,” Dale recalled on the Democracy Now! news hour this week, 21 years after Rachel was killed. “She placed herself between the bulldozer and the home, as we had done so many times before and, indeed, as we had done earlier in that day. The bulldozer driver just kept on going...ultimately, she lost her footing, and she was sucked down into the earth and terribly, horrifically died.” Devastated by the loss of their daughter, Rachel’s parents, Craig and Cindy Corrie, committed themselves to the cause that cost Rachel her life. They formed the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, to support peacebuilding in Gaza and elsewhere. They also sought justice, unsuccessfully, through the courts in both Israel and the US, suing the Israeli military and Caterpillar, the bulldozer manufacturer. Speaking this week on Democracy Now!, the Corries reflected on the ongoing occupation, siege, and now war on Gaza, a place they have visited multiple times, never without personal risk. Cindy recalled their September, 2003 visit to Rafah: “We sat on the floor in the Nasrallah family’s home and ate a wonderful lunch,” she said. “We were taken to the spot...exactly where Rachel had been when she was killed.” Craig Corrie described how Dr. Samir Nasrallah, a pharmacist, and his family are now trying to escape Gaza into Egypt: “That family did everything they could to hold onto that house. They were eventually forced out, and some of them went through seven other houses. Now we hear that they want out of Gaza. After 21 years of trying to hold onto their homes and their lives and their futures and their pasts in Gaza, like so many people, they want to survive, and they want out,” Craig said. He added, “At this point we have to be looking directly at the Palestinians and hearing their voices...as long as Israel is coveting the lands and the homes of Palestinian people, there will not be peace in Israel and Palestine, and neither the Israeli people nor the Palestinian people will be safe.” Rachel Corrie was a talented writer. On February 27th, 2003, just over two weeks before she was killed, she wrote her mother, “I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared...This has to stop.” Rachel went on, “Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.” Streets in Palestine are named after Rachel, as is a children’s center in Rafah. Palestinian poet Mohammed Abu Lebda, who as a child lived not far from where Rachel was killed, said on Democracy Now!, “Every single person here in Gaza...and especially Rafah, knows Rachel Corrie – because she was trying to deliver a very important message, the most important message in the world, which is peace.”

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan March 8th, International Women’s Day, arrived not a day too soon, as women, half the world’s human population, still endure varying degrees of oppression, violence, inequality and discrimination. This day’s living history is steeped in struggle and celebration; a day when women protest with courage and tenacity. From the Taliban to Texas, men wield words and weapons to subjugate women. Solidarity and action, to protect and liberate women, are needed now more than ever. Systemic oppression of women may be worst in Afghanistan. Richard Bennett, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, calls the Taliban’s treatment of women “tantamount to gender apartheid.” In an update to the UN Human Rights Council on March 6th, Bennett said, “The Taliban’s intentional and calculated policy is to repudiate the human rights of women and girls and to erase them from public life...authorities can be held accountable.” That same day, in a remarkably brave protest, Afghan women held a “read-in”: sitting on the ground outside Kabul University, they opened books and began reading, defying the Taliban’s ban on education for women and girls. “Those women who protested yesterday in Kabul know what they’re facing...they might be killed,” Zahra Nader said on the Democracy Now! news hour. She is an Afghan-Canadian journalist and editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a media outlet that covers human rights in Afghanistan. “They are still willing to take that risk, because that is what’s going to bring them hope. This is a fight for them, to resist...even if that comes at the cost of their own lives.” Next to Afghanistan, in Iran, nationwide protests continue, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody last September 16th. Amini was arrested by Iran’s so-called morality police, accused of not wearing her hijab properly. The Iranian government has responded to the protests with a harsh crackdown, arresting thousands. Four men have been publicly executed so far, simply for protesting. Fourteen more face execution, according to Amnesty International. Now, a wave of apparent poisonings has struck Iranian girls’ schools. At least 290 schools have been targeted, affecting no less than 7,000 students. “These horrific chemical attacks on girls’ schools...have to be understood as a punishment against women and girls who have been leading this nationwide revolt for several months now,” Manijeh Moradian, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Barnard College said on Democracy Now! “In response, people have been protesting. The national teachers’ union called for nationwide strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations. This is a nation in revolt.” March 8th is significant in modern Iranian history. The Iranian Revolution ousted the brutal U.S.-backed dictator, the Shah of Iran, in January, 1979. Millions of Iranians hoped for a democratic, secular future. Instead, the return from exile of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ushered in harsh, theocratic rule. On March 8th, 1979, Iranian women rose up in protest against the Ayatollah’s new regime. “Those women who poured into the streets on International Women’s Day 43 years ago rightly understood that the enforcement of mandatory Islamic dress code, mandatory hijab, was part and parcel of the erosion of all of the democratic promises of the revolution,” Professor Moradian explained. She went on to link this history to today: “In Iranian Kurdistan, in Saqqez, the hometown of Mahsa Jina Amini, the teachers are on strike right now, defending the right of women and girls to education but also condemning the broader state repression and the economic crisis that’s impoverishing ordinary people in Iran. Saqqez is where this uprising began in September, with the slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom,’ – all about life and joy, [and] deeply connected to feminist movements and to International Women’s Day.” Republican politicians in the U.S. decry the Taliban, including its treatment of women. But their apparent feminism only goes so far, as these legislators pass law after law attempting to control womens’ bodies, restrict reproductive healthcare and criminalize abortion. In Texas, five women have sued the state after they were unable to obtain an abortion to terminate life-threatening pregnancies. Four months into her pregnancy, plaintiff Amanda Zurawski’s water broke. She needed an abortion, but couldn’t find a Texas doctor willing to do it. She then developed sepsis, which could have killed her. She may never be able to give birth as a result. The imprisonment of women for miscarrying, as happens already in El Salvador and other countries, may be coming soon to red states in the U.S. March 8th, International Women’s Day, began as a socialist protest among striking mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, demanding not only Bread, but Roses. Now, over a century later, in addition to Bread and Roses, women, gender non-conforming and trans and LGBT...

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Em Berry recently published a poem, “Because of Us,” that reads, This morning I learned The English word gauze (finely woven medical cloth) Comes from the Arabic word [...] Ghazza Because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries I wondered then how many of our wounds have been dressed because of them and how many of theirs have been left open because of us Berry’s poem is painfully timely, as the Israeli military, after weeks of bombing civilian targets (including schools, hospitals and ambulances) has expanded its ground invasion, attacking hospitals directly with tanks and troops. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 26 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are non-functional, denied electricity, fuel, supplies and damaged by Israel’s assault. Inoperable incubators, respirators, and dialysis machines have left patients to die. Staff trapped at Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, dug a mass grave to bury over 180 dead patients. Israel has also killed an estimated 200 medical workers. Among them, Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old internist and nephrologist at Al-Shifa, killed along with his father, father-in-law and brother-in-law on Saturday, November 11th, when Israel shelled his home. He is survived by his wife and two young children. Dr. Alloh spoke on the Democracy Now! news hour on October 31st, two weeks before his death: “The few trucks that were allowed in with aid to Gazan people is almost nothing compared to what we need,” Dr. Alloh said. “Water, gloves and gauze, this is not what we are looking for. We are looking for devices, medications... for providing real healthcare for people in need.” Days earlier, Dr. Alloh made an excruciating decision, ordering his staff to stop resuscitating an older patient, as the hospital lacked a working ventilator for her, so, even if successfully resuscitated, the patient would still die. He instructed the doctors and nurses to triage care, saving those with a chance of survival. Despite Israel’s constant bombardment and approaching ground invasion, Dr. Alloh refused to leave: “If I go, who treats my patients? We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper health care. So we can’t just leave,” he said. “You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so I think only about my life and not my patients?...This is not the reason why I became a doctor.” That brave decision cost Dr. Hammam Alloh his life. A family member wrote Democracy Now!, saying his body remains buried under rubble. Al-Shifa, meanwhile, has become a war zone. “If I should choose today between hell and Al-Shifa, I would choose hell,” Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician with decades of experience in Gaza, said on Democracy Now! He tried repeatedly to get into Gaza in recent weeks, to get to Al-Shifa, without success. “Twenty out of the 23 ICU patients had died. Seventeen other patients died because of lack of supplies, oxygen and water. And three, if not five, of the 38 premature newborns have died because of this slow suffocation that the Israeli occupation army is exposing all the hospitals to...I’m out of words to describe this systematic, man-made slaughtering of patients in civilian hospitals.” While words may fail Dr. Mads Gilbert, those of the late Dr. Hammam Alloh on Democracy Now! offer a posthumous call to action: “We need this war to end, because we are real humans. We are not animals. We have the right to live freely...we are being exterminated. We are being mass[ive]ly eradicated. You pretend to care for humanitarian and human rights, which is not what we are living now. To prove us wrong, please do something.” At least 1.6 million Palestinians have been displaced by Israel’s war on Gaza, out of the enclave’s population of 2.3 million. Earlier this week, Israel dropped leaflets on the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, warning residents to flee – many for the second time, after fleeing northern Gaza. The United Nations Security Council passed its first resolution Wednesday, after four previous, failed attempts, calling for extended humanitarian pauses in Gaza, with the United States abstaining. The late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, as a child, survived the 1948 Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” when 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and 15,000 were killed during Israel’s founding. Darwish lived much of his life in exile and was a critic of Hamas. He wrote in his poem, “To A Young Poet,” “A poem in a difficult time is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.” As the WHO warns Gaza’s hospitals are becoming cemeteries, it’s time to heed the poets and the doctors, stop the killing, end the occupation, and dress the open wounds of war.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The bodies of drowned migrants are still washing up on the beaches of Crotone, Italy on the Mediterranean Sea. Their wooden boat crashed on the rocks just offshore from this Calabrian resort town, turning the beach, said one local, “into a graveyard.” The death toll reached 67 on Wednesday, with 80 survivors. It is assumed that many more died, as at least 200 people were aboard the boat when it departed Izmir, Turkey, a few days earlier. “I have been treating migrants for 30 years and have never seen anything like this,” Orlando Amodeo, a local doctor, told The Guardian. “These people traveled 1,078 kilometers by sea only to die three meters from the shore.” The Mediterranean Sea itself has become a massive graveyard in recent years. The UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that at least 26,000 migrants have perished while crossing to Europe, mostly from Turkey and Libya, fleeing Afghanistan, Syria, and drought-stricken and war-torn African nations. Many more migrants have died uncounted, as clandestine voyages on makeshift boats, overcrowded by human traffickers out to maximize profit, too often disappear at sea without a trace. “There is a lot more media attention in this case because the tragedy happened so close to Italy,” Caroline Willemen, deputy head of search and rescue with Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, said of the Crotone shipwreck on the Democracy Now! news hour. “But this is something that happens on a quite, unfortunately, regular basis, also very often closer, for example, to the Libyan coast, to people leaving Libyan shores. Very often that news will not even reach Western media.” Over seven million Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion have rightly been welcomed in Europe. Teymoori Mohammad lost a relative in the Crotone disaster. Speaking to the press there, he lamented the lack of equal treatment for non-white refugees: “Because they have their black hair or they don’t have green or blue eyes, they didn’t rescue these people...their human right. Because they have the black eye or the black hair, they weren’t human.” MSF has been operating search and rescue vessels in the Mediterranean since 2015, plying dangerous waters to rescue thousands of migrants who might otherwise have died, while also dodging an increasing array of regulations and restrictions imposed by European countries intent on blocking migration. MSF’s latest ship, the Geo Barents, was refitted and launched in June, 2021. It is currently impounded in a Sicilian port, victim of Italy’s new crackdown on humanitarian search and rescue operations, launched by the far-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. “This new legislation that has come out targets only NGOs doing search-and-rescue work,” Willemen explained. “Keep in mind that the vast majority of people who arrive in Italy, either they manage to arrive autonomously or they are rescued by the Italian Coast Guard, but the legislation targets only NGOs, which says quite a lot.” Médecins Sans Frontières is not the only humanitarian organization involved in migrant rescue that is being hounded by various European governments. Sea-Watch, RESQSHIP and other German-based groups are condemning Germany’s new ship safety ordinance that seems designed specifically to hamper civilian migrant rescue operations. In 2015, a youth-driven project led to the acquisition and conversion of a small fishing vessel christened Iuventa. The ship operated in the central Mediterranean, considered the most dangerous route to Europe, helping save 14,000 migrants from 2015 until it was seized by Italian authorities in 2017. Now, more than five years later, several crew members are being tried in Italy, along with activists from MSF and Save the Children, accused of “aiding and abetting unauthorized immigration.” Sascha Girke, one of the Iuventa crew members made a statement in court on Wednesday: “I would like to begin this statement today, in this courtroom by commemorating those who lost their lives off the coast of Crotone...while we were sitting in this courtroom on Saturday, they started to fight for their lives. In a terrible and unambiguous way, the deaths of these people remind us of what is actually being on trial here: the Crotone shipwreck is inseparable from this trial...It wasn’t the bad sea weather – it was the denial of help where it was possible. The answer to the Crotone disaster is the expansion of rescue capacities at sea and not their confiscation. The answer is safe and legal entry routes and not Fortress Europe.” Six years ago, Dr. Orlando Amodeo posted a video showing body bags of drowned migrants being lowered to a dock, off of one of MSF’s rescue ships. He called the video “From Mare Nostrum to Mare Mortuum,” invoking the ancient Roman name for the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea,” and naming what it has become, Mare Mortuum, the Sea of Death.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The hurricane season and the election season have converged in the United States. The prospect of catastrophic, irreversible climate change and the potential demise of democracy are both very real. The fate of these essential pillars of our society hinge largely on what we all do in the coming weeks and months. The climate catastrophe enveloping the planet requires a truly global solution – one that a majority of the world’s population is eager to achieve. But the will of the masses means less and less these days, as more governments fall under control of autocrats. Nationalists, racists, xenophobes and ideologues are gaining power in country after country. Italy is an important case in point. Just this week, a formerly fringe neofascist political party obtained a plurality in national elections. Giorgia Meloni is expected be Italy’s first far rightwing Prime Minister since Benito Mussolini was driven from power in 1943. “She really sees her party as carrying the heritage of fascism into today,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “Ignazio La Russa, who’s a party elder...said a few days ago, ‘We are all heirs of the Duce [Mussolini].’” Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party joins an increasingly powerful far-right movement in Europe that includes Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party; Spains Vox party; France’s National Rally led by Marine Le Pen; and the Sweden Democrats, with roots in that country’s neo-nazi movement, now poised to lead a new rightwing coalition government there. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary is the European rightwing’s model strongman, suppressing the press and free speech, openly advocating racist, anti-immigrant policies, and criticizing European integration and the European Union. Orbán, Meloni and other European rightwing leaders are being embraced by the Republican Party in the U.S. and its would-be strongman Donald Trump. The U.S. Republican Party has been effectively purged of any Trump critics, and is rapidly organizing in states across the U.S. to simply reject election results they don’t like. Rather than storming the Capitol, as thousands of Trump’s supporters did on January 6th, 2021, the GOP now has a plan to quietly seize power by suppressing the vote and declaring victory regardless of the outcome in November, 2024. Corrupt, gerrymandered state legislatures and Trump-aligned governors and secretaries of state have already put this plan into motion as they seek to consolidate more power in the 2022 midterm elections just over one month away. Trump has repeatedly labeled climate change a hoax. His European adherents aren’t so blatant, but generally support expanded burning of fossil fuels, increased reliance on nuclear power, and a rejection of the United Nations climate negotiations. Those negotiations are dubbed “COPs,” for “Conference of Parties” to the Kyoto Protocol. This year’s conference in November, COP27, will be in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, where a broad coalition has appealed to the military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to allow participation of civic and environmental groups, and for the release of Egypt’s many political prisoners. The UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, often relies on dictatorships. Past hosts have included Qatar and Morocco, where genuine protest is effectively banned. Next year’s COP will be in oil-rich Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Let’s not let the COPs be run by cops. “Part of the job for climate campaigners is to work for functioning democratic states, where people’s demands for a working future will be prioritized over vested interest, ideology and personal fiefdoms,” climate activist Bill McKibben wrote last April, reflecting on climate activism in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In nations where protest is somewhat tolerated, like the United States, the stakes are high and time is short. NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus understands this. He was arrested last April while protesting JP Morgan Chase’s continued investments in fossil fuel projects. “I keep yelling at the top of my lungs. I’m risking arrest. I’ve been forced to become a climate activist,” Kalmus said on Democracy Now! “I’m terrified of the inaction of world leaders, who keep dancing around the real issue which is we have to rapidly ramp down the fossil fuel industry...it’s a bittersweet thing. We’re finding exoplanets. We’re doing these amazing missions like redirecting asteroids, and yet with all that technology, with all that knowledge, somehow it’s not translating into stopping what is clearly the biggest threat facing humanity, which is global heating.” Hurricanes and drought are now displacing millions, driving climate migration that increases anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the U.S. This further empowers racist xenophobes like Trump and Meloni. Climate and democracy are under enormou...