I am reproducing this piece by Robert Reich. I fear what happened in Nazi Germany and more recently in the Arab Spring may be about to happen in the United States. Who would ever have thought this could become a reality, (although the warning signs have been gaining credibility for decades)?
The Trump regime is actively suppressing speech at major American universities.
Trump’s recent executive orders bar diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at all educational institutions that receive federal funds.
Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to punish any university that permits “illegal” protests but did not define what he meant by illegal protests.
On Saturday, Trump’s immigration officials arrested a Columbia graduate student — who is a permanent resident of the United States with a green card and an American wife — and sent him to a prison in Louisiana. Why? He did not engage in criminal activity. The graduate student peacefully expressed political views that the regime dislikes.
Then on Monday, the Trump regime warned 60 universities that they could face penalties for allowing peaceful demonstrations and speech that the administration dislikes.
And on Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, told reporters that Columbia had refused to help the regime identify people engaged in speech the regime found objectionable, and warned, “We expect all America’s colleges and universities to comply with this administration’s policy.”
The particular objectionable speech that the regime is using as a pretext for its crackdown on free speech on university campuses is the student-led protests against Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government for its bombardment of Gaza.
Trump has turned those protests into accusations of antisemitism. Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, described the graduate student who was arrested and whose green card was voided as a “national security threat.”
But let’s be clear: Peaceful protests against Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza are not the same as antisemitism. (As I’ve said repeatedly in this letter, I’m Jewish, I am not antisemitic, and I am disgusted and appalled by what Netanyahu has done to Palestinians in Gaza.) Nor does a peaceful protest turn someone into a national security threat.
And let’s be clear about another thing: The Trump regime is using antisemitism as an excuse for cracking down on free speech on university campuses.
Trump used the same accusation against Democrats during his presidential campaign — blaming the alleged rise in antisemitism on “the leadership of this country,” but conveniently ignoring the fact that the rise in reported antisemitic acts began during Trump’s first term.
Trump also conveniently disregarded prominent Republicans who have engaged in antisemitic behavior — such as North Carolina’s then nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, who called himself a “black NAZI” on a pornographic website, and Trump ally Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has made a string of antisemitic remarks, including blaming Jews for killing Jesus to explain her vote against a bill meant to address antisemitism.
The real reason Trump and the Republican Party are cracking down on universities is their belief that universities are dominated by the left.
As I’ve noted, JD Vance (Yale Law ‘13) has called university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Victor Orban’s method for ending “left-wing domination of universities” — giving universities “a choice between survival or [being] … much more open to conservative ideas.”
Yet whether you like or dislike what’s said at universities, free speech is at the core of our democracy, and protecting it should be one of the core missions of universities.
Which is why America needs a new Free Speech Movement, similar to the one that broke out on college campuses 61 years ago.
Do you remember?
In the fall of 1964, soon after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Berkeley’s university police arrested a student who was staffing a table in the middle of Sproul Plaza and put him in a police car. The student had violated Berkeley’s ban on political activity on campus.
When someone in the surrounding crowd of students yelled, “We can see better if we sit down,” hundreds of students sat — trapping the police car for the next 33 hours. Berkeley administrators negotiated an end to the siege but refused to end the ban on political activity.
The student protests grew. At an even larger rally, a graduate student named Mario Savio addressed the crowd, criticizing not only Berkeley but America itself.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
Hundreds of Berkeley students occupied its administration building, leading police to make the largest mass arrest of students in American history and shocking a public accustomed to campus conformity.
As Savio later told The Washington Post, the Free Speech Movement was an outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement. “Are we on the side of the civil rights movement? Or have we gotten back to the comfort and security of Berkeley, California, and can we forget the [Black] sharecroppers whom we worked with [to register to vote] just a few weeks back? Well, we couldn’t forget.”
A few days after Savio’s speech, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told aides that he feared Savio and other protesters would inspire student rebellion at other colleges across the land. Hoover turned his secret surveillance machine on Savio, including covert action to “disrupt” and “neutralize” him, for more than a decade.
In 1976, a U.S. Senate subcommittee exposed these activities and forced the FBI to restrict those it investigated and what measures it could take. (The guidelines remained in effect until September 11, 2001, after which time George W. Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, loosened them to “fight terrorism,” and the Patriot Act gave the FBI more power to pry.)
Now, Trump is president and the FBI is under Kash Patel.
If I were young university student again (wouldn’t that be nice?), I’d do whatever I could to reignite the flame of the Free Speech Movement. It’s needed today as much if not more than it was 61 years ago. (If you’re a university student, I urge you to take this suggestion to heart. If you know any university students, you might suggest this to them.)
If I were in charge of any of the 60 American universities that Trump has just threatened for allowing “illegal” protests, I’d join together with the heads of the others and sue the Trump regime for violating the First Amendment rights of those universities and their students.
Craig Unger begins his book, ‘American Kompromat’ with the initial targeting of Donald Trump as a Russian asset. I am copying in some extracts from the first pages of the book. Many readers will have read the book a few years ago, maybe read the reviews of this best seller, but I have only now come across it:
At the store, Kislin and Sapir had brilliantly positioned themselves to win over Soviet bigwigs as clients, running into, as Sapir did, a boyhood friend from the old country who surfaced as bodyguard to Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, once the longtime KGB chief in the Soviet Republic of Georgia. Others who came by included Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko; future KGB counterintelligence chief and, subsequently, prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov; and Georgy Arbatov, the Kremlin’s American-based media spokesman.4 But one such client didn’t quite fit in with the rest—Donald J. Trump. Many details about Trump’s transaction with Kislin are not known. In fact, Kislin himself seems to be the only source of it, having told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2017 that he “had sold Trump about 200 televisions on credit.” According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Trump, who later developed a reputation for stiffing his vendors, made sure he paid Kislin on time. “I gave [Trump] 30 days, and in exactly 30 days he paid me back,” Kislin said. “He never gave me any trouble.”5 But there was more to it than that.
Kislin sold Tv’s which were not NTSC but PAL, so would only work in the Soviet Union. He was from Odessa, Ukraine, and was Jewish.
Soviets had introduced subterfuge into the way they sometimes allowed oppressed Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel and the United States. The strategy was brilliantly designed to exploit legislation sponsored by Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) and Representative Charles A. Vanik (D-OH), who were concerned about the plight of Soviet Jews who weren’t being allowed to leave the country. In a nutshell, the Jackson–Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974 allowed the Soviet Union to enjoy normal trade relations with the United States, but only if Jewish refugees were allowed to emigrate. Which turned out to be exactly what the Soviets wanted……..
……..” All well and good, but Kalugin also included a Trojan-horse-like component to what appeared to be the newly benevolent Soviet emigration policy. “We told [the émigrés], you can go, but you will provide us with information. And they pledged their services to us,” Kalugin said.11………..And what was their task after that? “To penetrate all Western institutions. Government, primarily, and business, particularly high technology,” said Kalugin. “That’s something Russia was always behind. But also the government organizations. And some did succeed in that sense.” So in the aftermath of Jackson–Vanik, the Soviet Union magnanimously allowed hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews to immigrate to the United States. By any measure, it was an extraordinary achievement in human rights. Jewish dissident Alexander Lerner declared that fulfillment of these promises meant “a profound improvement of the emigration policy and that it should be responded to positively by the world.” But the amendment also had the effect of creating a hole in America’s defenses so massive that huge numbers of Russian criminals and KGB spies could and did inundate the United States. In the last half of the seventies, Kalugin himself sometimes went to Soviet night spots like Rasputin in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach in hope of recruiting new talent—that is, Russian mobsters who would work in tandem with the KGB. “I’d look around, pick up some people, and check their backgrounds with Moscow to see if they were good enough to promote a relationship with.” In the United States, of course, the Italian Mafia would have been at war with the feds, but the Soviets and the Russians were different. They coopted the Russian Mafia. They weaponized organized crime. As Kalugin told me, “The Mafia is one of the branches of the Russian government today.” So, under cover of this new, more humanitarian emigration policy, the Soviets opened the floodgates. Hence, legislation with the goal of allowing Jewish refugees to immigrate to America had the unintended consequence of fueling the growth of the Russian Mafia and a new generation of KGB assets in America—one of whom was Donald Trump.
Q. What triggered Putin to react with intense anger against the West?
A.
How Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Speech Marked a Cold War Turning Point
Reagan’s words reflected a shift that was underway as Soviet reforms and protests were pressuring the East German government to open barriers to the West.
Under apartheid, Zulus were confined to KwaZulu-Natal and denied South African citizenship from 1981 to 1994. Today, about 10-12 million Zulus live in KwaZulu, preserving their language, customs, and identity amid South Africa’s multicultural landscape.
…..legal framework of apartheid. Human Rights Watch found that the Israeli government has demonstrated an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the OPT. Yesh Din reached this conclusion in the West Bank, specifically. B’Tselem found that Israel is maintaining a system of apartheid over Palestinians in the OPT as well as Palestinians living within its own borders.
USAID was frozen recently. The result for Zulus was:
Majola is one of millions of patients in South Africa affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s global foreign aid freeze, raising worries about HIV patients defaulting on treatment, infection rates going up and eventually a rise in deaths.
The relief fund is currently active in seven districts in KwaZulu-Natal, five in the Eastern Cape, four in Gauteng, and several districts in other provinces across the country…….
…….HIV/Aids programmes would be most affected, as these programmes were the focal point of funding through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfa)
Today, geographical patterns of poverty on the map of South Africa still correspond to the apartheid “homelands”, barren rural regions far from cities, packed with people but with little infrastructure, no development and few jobs. Municipalities with high percentages of people living in poverty are today often found in regions that were once homelands.
Meanwhile Trump wants to own the Palestinian homeland and has been angry that South Africa has supported the Palestinians. He is freezing aid because he wants South Africans to stop seizing land of white farmers who stole it during colonial occupation.
We watched the report of your conversation with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, with fear and distaste. We find it insulting that you expect Ukraine to show respect and gratitude for the material assistance provided by the United States in its fight against Russia.
Gratitude is owed to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the front lines for more than 11 years in the name of these values and the independence of their homeland, which was attacked by Putin’s Russia.
We do not understand how the leader of a country that symbolizes the free world cannot recognize this.
Our alarm was also heightened by the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation, which reminded us of the interrogations we endured at the hands of the Security Services and the debates in Communist courts. Prosecutors and judges, acting on behalf of the all-powerful communist political police, would explain to us that they held all the power while we held none. They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people suffered because of us. They stripped us of our freedoms and civil rights because we refused to cooperate with the government or express gratitude for our oppression. We are shocked that President Volodymyr Zelensky was treated in the same manner.
The history of the 20th century shows that whenever the United States sought to distance itself from democratic values and its European allies, it ultimately became a threat to itself. President Woodrow Wilson understood this when he decided in 1917 that the United States must join World War I. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this when, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he resolved that the war to defend America must be fought not only in the Pacific but also in Europe, in alliance with the nations under attack by the Third Reich.
We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and America’s financial commitment, the collapse of the Soviet empire would not have been possible. President Reagan recognized that millions of enslaved people suffered in Soviet Russia and the countries it had subjugated, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their defense of democratic values with their freedom. His greatness lay, among other things, in his unwavering decision to call the USSR an “Empire of Evil” and to fight it decisively. We won, and today, the statue of President Ronald Reagan stands in Warsaw, facing the U.S. Embassy.
Mr. President, material aid—military and financial—can never be equated with the blood shed in the name of Ukraine’s independence and the freedom of Europe and the entire free world. Human life is priceless; its value cannot be measured in money. Gratitude is due to those who sacrifice their blood and their freedom. This is self-evident to us, the people of Solidarity, former political prisoners of the communist regime under Soviet Russia.
We call on the United States to uphold the guarantees made alongside Great Britain in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which established a direct obligation to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for its relinquishment of nuclear weapons. These guarantees are unconditional—there is no mention of treating such assistance as an economic transaction.
Signed,
Lech Wałęsa, former political prisoner, President of Poland
And, in reading the piece below, I have learned those extremist Catholic beliefs have never been extinguished. The Opus Dei cult has evolved out of that Spanish history.
It is not one supported or practiced by most Rank and File Catholics. It is a kind of Catholicism which has done irreparable harm. It is a kind of Catholicism unfit for existence in the modern world.
Inquisitor Bernard Gui said, the layman must not argue with the unbeliever, but “thrust his sword into the man’s belly as far as it will go.” In a time of burgeoning ideas about spirituality, the Church insisted that it was the only avenue through which one was permitted to learn of God. Pope Innocent III declared “that anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of God which conflicted with Church dogma must be burned without pity.”
Then I open Craig Unger’s 2017 book where he surprised me with this:
In effect, as attorney general, Barr, a leading figure in the newly emergent Catholic right—with its ties to Opus Dei, a mysterious fringe sect with roots in fascist Spain—was bringing in a new strain of religious authoritarianism and theocratic nationalism to join forces with Trumpism on their way to collision after collision with the US Constitution. All this in a world of decadence and depravity tied to figures like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, whose pedophile operation trafficked in underage girls as young as eleven, and also had links to Russian intelligence. This was a war for the soul of America. And at the heart of it all were seemingly simple questions that had never been answered. Indeed, almost absent from the presidential campaign was any discussion of what put Trump in the White House in the first place: Russia.
My mind is being exposed to an intriguing avenue of thought which seems to have historical facts behind it. I must find out more.
I am trying to understand how daily news now reveals the US and Russian foreign policies are aligning.
The US vote against a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia for starting the war against Ukraine placed it in previously unthinkable company – on the side of Russia, Belarus and North Korea. Even China abstained from the vote
I have a range of relevant books I am reading just now which are opening my mind to historical events which have led us to this tumultuous point in time.
None of us can afford to remain bystanders. Educating ourselves is more important than ever, but retaining an open mind is important.
So the latest guru to influence the techies is Curtis Yarvin:
Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington.
For over a decade, Yarvin, an ex-computer programmer-turned-blogger, has argued that American democracy is irrevocably broken and ought to be replaced with a monarchy styled after a Silicon Valley tech start-up. According to Yarvin, the time has come to jettison existing democratic institutions and concentrate political power in a single “chief executive” or “dictator.” These ideas — which Yarvin calls “neo-reaction” or “the Dark Enlightenment” — were once confined to the fringes of the internet, but now, with Trump’s reelection, they are finding a newly powerful audience in Washington.
Craziness is as craziness does. It is hard to believe that these cults are breaking American ambitions to be the shining house on the hill.
Weapons of war have been designed and manufactured by the US since Eisenhower, after WW2. But he warned, in his final address, of a potential over intense concentration on an arms race. The consequence would be funds directed at a massive military-industrial complex, rather than meeting the greater needs of the people of America.
I’m reproducing the newsletter of Ralph Nader, 22nd Feb 2025:
From: Ralph Nader <info@nader.org> Date: 22 February 2025 Subject:Stop Repeating the Vast Undercount of Gazan Deaths. It Is Ten Times Greater. Reply-To: Ralph Nader <info@nader.org>
Stop Repeating the Vast Undercount of Gazan Deaths. It Is Ten Times Greater.
By Ralph Nader
February 21, 2025
Enough already of the media’s lazy indifference to the vast undercount of the Palestinian death toll from Netanyahu’s genocidal daily bombing and shelling of Gaza’s defenseless civilian population. I’m referring to all the media – the corporate media, the public media, and the independent media. They all stick with the Hamas Ministry of Health’s (MOH) count of named victims whose corpses have been identified by hospitals and mortuaries. For months there have been no operating hospitals and mortuaries to send their grisly data to the Health Ministry.
The official Hamas count that all sides like to cite is now over 48,000 deaths. As American doctors back from Gaza before the Rafah closing last year said—just about everybody surviving in Gaza is sick, injured, or dying. They put the death estimate almost a year ago at a minimum of 95,000, not counting tens of thousands of families buried under the rubble when Israeli F-16s blew up entire apartment buildings.
Why would all sides to this one-sided Israeli war of extermination rely on Hamas’ figures? Well, Hamas has an interest in low-balling the number of deaths to limit the rage of its inhabitants and allies abroad for not protecting the people of Gaza and not providing them with shelters. The Israeli super-hawks want to keep the undercount low to dampen down the international rage, boycotts, and demand for more sanctions and ICC prosecutions. The Biden administration and now the Trump regime also benefit from a low number.
Here is the Washington Post’s esteemed foreign affairs editor Karen DeYoung’s reply on September 6, 2024 to my inquiry:
“We use the Gaza MOH [Ministry of Health] figures – as does the United Nations, World Health Organization and virtually every other humanitarian organization – while noting that independent media are not allowed to enter Gaza and the casualty counts are most certainly underreported… The Lancet [British Medical Journal] report notes that based on other ‘recent conflicts…it is not implausible to estimate’ that four times as many have died than those listed by the MOH…The time will come, I believe, when an independent accounting can be done.”
But six months later the time still hasn’t come. The Biden State Department had a much higher estimate of deaths but refused to release their analysis, obstructing our Freedom of Information request filed last May 24, 2024. All kinds of estimates and projections by reputable universities, specialists, global health groups and UN agencies point to a much higher death and overall casualty toll. But the State Department won’t come forward with a reasonably estimated number that can replace Hamas’ statistical immolation.
For example, in late 2023, the chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh—Professor Devi Sridhar—said that if the destruction continues, half a million Palestinians would die in 2024. The devastation has gotten worse—the bombings, the genocidal denial of “food, water, medicine, electricity, fuel” in the omnicidal words of the high Israeli military officials, the spread of diseases, untreated injuries, babies born into the rubble, infants starved, lack of potable water, sick elderly without critical medicines, and more. This is the result of 110 thousand tons of bombs (Israeli admission) daily tank shelling and precise destructions. Yet neither she nor most other experts who have projected continuing mayhem have offered a number.
Interestingly, the media has no trouble estimating the Syrian deaths at the hands of dictator Assad (500,000) nor the deaths in the wars in Sudan or Ukraine. Only the Palestinians, who are not allowed to live, don’t get the respect of having their deaths accurately estimated. One team of Gazan undertakers said they buried 17,000 bodies in mass graves by February 2024, including 800 in one day.
Were the shoe on the other foot, Congress would not only have had intense public hearings: it would have declared war against Hamas. With total U.S. co-belligerency – from huge weapons supplies to the veto at the UN, Netanyahu gets away with blocking Israeli and all other reporters from going freely into Gaza, and shuts up those conscience-stricken Israeli soldiers who are sickened by what they were ordered to destroy. One of them said, “I felt like, like, like a Nazi … it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.”
Some columnists in the U.S. like Charles Lane and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and Netanyahu’s mouthpiece, Bret Stephens of the New York Times, do not believe the Israeli military consciously targets civilians and civilian infrastructure. Israelis scoff at such naivete; many want more annihilation of all Palestinians whom they regard as “subhuman,” “vermin,” “snakes,” or “animals” (racist words from high Israeli politicians over the decades).
Some 45 years ago, former UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abba Eban —under then Prime Minister Menachem Begin—wrote that Israel “is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name.”
In August 2024, based on available historical, empirical, and clinical records, we estimated about 300,000 Palestinians had been killed. (See the August/September 2024 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). By now it is over 400,000. Yet the media still uses the figure by Hamas and ignores the lives blown apart under the killing fields in Gaza.
At 400,000 and growing, far more Palestinians have been killed in Gaza than the combined total of deaths from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden in World War II. This week, Netanyahu dropped leaflets in Arabic signaling a forthcoming violent exclusion of Gaza’s trapped, unsheltered Palestinians from their homeland. More accurately estimated civilian casualties matters morally and for the intensity of the political, diplomatic, and civic resistance when the world learns the truer toll of death and injuries in this tiny enclave the geographical size of Philadelphia.
To remind the world of the daily Israeli violations of settled international law inflicted on Gazans (also in the West Bank and Lebanon), international law practitioner Bruce Fein compiled this concise list:
ISRAEL’S TEN VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL HUMANITARIAN LAW IN GAZA
Genocide Count I. Killing Palestinians in Gaza.
Genocide Count II. Deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
Genocide Count III. Destroying hospitals and maternal care necessities intended to prevent births by Palestinian women in Gaza.
Crimes against humanity. Extermination and persecution of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza as part of a systematic attack directed at Palestinian civilians.
Deliberately targeting civilians and civilian property for destruction.
Failing to provide for the security and welfare of the inhabitants occupied by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.
Impeding delivery of humanitarian assistance.
Forcible relocation of civilian population.
Use of military force causing civilian casualties vastly disproportionate to the importance of any legitimate military objective.
This diagram below has been helpfully put together because digitisation enables such quick overviews.
Thanks to digitisation we have given away our personal information believing it was held securely, TRUSTING the systems which held the data.
It has now been stolen and tampered with by those who had contempt for us believing in such a myth.
Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic, February 29th 2025:
For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else.
The Trump administration is now bringing the post–World War II era to an end.
Each of us has either lost our homeland, knows of family who has, or doesn’t know their ancestors did so in recent centuries. But all of us have origins from thousands of years ago back in pre- Christian times, when early civilisations rose and fell, and land was grabbed and those who once occupied it were forced out, enslaved or assimilated.
Somewhere within us we have race memory that knows that pain of loss of homeland. We recognise it and should be able to relate to it. Yet some of us lack the humanity to recognise it. We may only have the motivation to take from a perceived vulnerable group, take what we have decided is rightfully ours, though it is not.
And in Ronen Bergman’s book, ‘Rise and Kill First’, he relates the 1980s painful situation Palestinians find themselves in, being classed as terrorists because it is their belief the land the Jews assert is theirs, is not.
APPROXIMATELY 2.5 MILLION PALESTINIANS (no general census was conducted during that period) lived in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, having been under Israeli rule since 1967. Their frustration and bitterness had been growing steadily year after year. Israel had opened its gates to Palestinian workers, and some 40 percent of the workforce crossed the border every day to work in Israel, but only menial jobs were available, at exploitation wages and in difficult conditions. Palestinian construction laborers and dishwashers watched resentfully as Israelis thrived and reached an almost Western European level of economic prosperity. Inside the occupied territories themselves, unemployment grew, and there were few jobs available for those with higher education. The cities were intolerably overcrowded, and Israeli authorities did nothing to improve municipal services, nor did they provide land for building and agriculture to meet the needs of a burgeoning Palestinian population. Israel did, however, confiscate Palestinian lands and settle increasing numbers of its own citizens there, a blatant violation of international law. Many of these settlers were ideologically driven, believing in the idea that “Greater Israel” belonged to the Jews. Others were simply seeking a better standard of living and taking advantage of the heavily subsidized housing. After enduring these aggravations, wretched conditions, and visible injustices for years, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were on the verge of exploding. But this was something that Israeli intelligence either could not see or did not want to see. A longtime focus on pinpoint warfare against the PLO and its leaders had concealed the swelling rage of the Palestinian people from Israel’s intelligence community and its politicians. The Israelis’ tactical achievements and ability to locate and eliminate PLO leaders and militants nearly anywhere in the world had given them the sense that Israel could forever impose its rule over the millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories without consequence.
And now, in 2025, President Trump desires to make Gaza an American Riviera.
So now I’m reading ‘Burn Book’, by Kara Fisher. As I was passionate about computers in education back in 1981, this book has great resonance for me. Kara Fisher began as a journalist, intrigued by the young start-ups in Silicon Valley during the flourishing of the Internet. Here is an extract from the first pages of her book:
All these companies began with a gauzy credo to change the world. And they had indeed done that, but in ways they hadn’t imagined at the start, increasingly with troubling consequences from a flood of misinformation to a society becoming isolated and addicted to its gadgets. So had I, so much so that I had taken to joking at the end when I made speeches: “I leave you to your own devices. . . . I mean that; your phone is the best relationship you all have now, the first thing you pick up in the morning and the last thing you touch at night.” It always got a laugh, but by the time Trump was halfway through his term, it was much less funny and it was dead clear that I had underestimated how compromised the tech companies would become. “Facebook, as well as Twitter and Google’s YouTube and the rest, have become the digital arms dealers of the modern age,” I wrote in one of my first columns after I joined the New York Times as a columnist in 2018. “They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has too often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.”
From those days in the 1980s when I worked as National Information Officer for the UK’s Microelectronics Education Programme, to now, when all my hopes for the future of our children have been smashed into fragments, I find myself greatly saddened in my final years of life at the present era of tech influence on us today.
We know there are huge positives from developments in technology, but we, the global population, are paying much too high a price.
borderslynn 
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