Apr. 30, 2024 ❧ Potential ICC arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, another George Floyd in Ohio, and doggone Kristi Noem
Plus: The return of Ken Bone, the DEA reschedules weed, a rapper sentenced to death, a historian's dinner with Andreessen, and a "marvelous" bird.
Slurp up some news!
ICC reportedly preparing arrest warrants for Netanyahu & Co.
The Israeli government is freaking out at the possibility that its leaders could be hit with arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza. On the 28th, the Times of Israel reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (you know, the “we are fighting human animals” guy), and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi could be facing charges, a prospect that Netanyahu called “a scandal on a historic scale.”
The ICC—an international body that can prosecute individuals for genocides and other crimes against humanity—has not yet confirmed that it intends to prosecute members of the Israeli government, but suspicions abound. A source told The Times of Israel that the Israeli government is “making a concerted effort to head off feared plans by the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants,” which will most likely be on charges that Israeli leaders have “deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza.” According to The New York Times, senior Hamas leaders may also be charged for war crimes committed during the October 7 invasion of Israel. Axios, meanwhile, reports that members of the US Congress are attempting to prevent the ICC’s issuing of warrants as well.
For months now, it has been clear that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war by blocking the entry of aid to the Gaza Strip, leaving it in a state of famine. Israel has blocked aid shipments, restricting them to far below the necessary amount to feed the population of Gaza and, on more than a dozen occasions, fired on unarmed Palestinians trying to reach food aid and bombed aid trucks. And even after facing international condemnation following the IDF’s killing of seven World Central Kitchen employees in a clearly marked aid convoy, the UN Human Rights Office reports that these restrictions have continued. “The extent of Israel's continued restrictions on entry of aid into Gaza, together with the manner in which it continues to conduct hostilities, may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime,” said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk. An Oxfam report finds that “the catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation in Gaza are the highest ever recorded on the IPC scale, both in terms of number of people and percentage of the population. Never before have we seen such rapid deterioration into widespread starvation.”
For this, along with prosecuting a war that has killed at least 34,000 people—70 percent of whom are women and children—Netanyahu deserves to be prosecuted. He cannot plead ignorance to the unfathomable destruction this war has wrought: Even he has acknowledged that a majority of those killed are innocent people, but he has pressed ahead nonetheless. Worse, Netanyahu is currently gearing up for an invasion of Rafah, where more than a million people are currently sheltering after having their homes totally destroyed. Everyone from the UN to the US intelligence community acknowledges that such an invasion will have catastrophic humanitarian consequences.
It’s worth remembering, though, that Netanyahu—although he’s undoubtedly a war criminal and a dangerous far-right zealot—is not a unique figure in this respect. The Israeli apartheid regime was destroying Palestinian homes and lives decades before he came to power, and it won’t necessarily stop if he’s prosecuted or ousted from his seat. The international community can’t let itself fall for a “limited hangout” in which Netanyahu personally is blamed and punished for the massacre in Gaza, but the nature of the Israeli state and its relation to Palestine remains the same. A lot more fundamental change than that will be needed, before we see anything approaching justice.
PAST AFFAIRS
“Is the International Criminal Court a Functional Institution?”
In a 2022 interview, Brandeis law professor Richard Gaskins—author of The Congo Trials in the International Criminal Court—joins Current Affairs to discuss the history of the Court, its limitations, and the potential it still holds:
“The ICC embodies a vision of global justice in which war crimes are universally forbidden, intended to carry forward humanitarian principles. But so far, the court has only completed a handful of trials, and it has been heavily criticized for focusing on crimes committed in Africa while ignoring Western atrocities. Yet the court has only existed since 2002, and many hold hope that it can someday be an institution that ensures victims of atrocities around the world receive justice.”
STORY THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
Nearly four years after George Floyd’s murder, Ohio police kill a Black man by kneeling on his back
[CONTENT WARNING: Police Brutality]
Ohio police killed a 53-year-old Black man, Frank Tyson earlier this month that drew eerie parallels to the murder to George Floyd almost four years ago. Body camera footage released this weekend shows two Canton police officers pinning a panicked Tyson to the floor of a bar after Tyson crashed his car into a pole nearby. Tyson is shown struggling and shouting “They’re trying to kill me! Call the sheriff!” as officers attempted to restrain him.
After Tyson was put in handcuffs, an officer is shown putting his knee on Tyson’s upper back for around 30 seconds as Tyson shouted, “I can’t breathe. I can’t... get off my neck,” while cops responded back saying “Calm down,” and “You’re fine. Shut the fuck up.” They appeared to ignore his pleas for help even as he lost consciousness. As he lay on the floor motionless, officers waited more than five minutes before checking his pulse and another three before beginning to perform CPR. During that period, officers were seen joking with bar patrons, with one saying “I’ve always wanted to be in a bar fight. I don’t know if this counts.” Tyson was then taken to the hospital by paramedics where he died. The two primary officers involved in the killing of Tyson, Beau Schoenegge and Camden Burch, have been placed on administrative leave and the Canton Police Department says it has contacted the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation to perform a probe into Tyson’s killing.
While the murder of George Floyd was a national story that sparked months of outraged protests against police brutality and racism in America, Tyson’s killing has gotten little national media attention despite its obvious similarities. As with Floyd’s death, the officers who killed Tyson behaved with callous indifference to the wellbeing of the person they were restraining, and every nightmarish second of it is caught on video for the public to see. But the lack of public outcry seems to make the worrying suggestion that we have simply become numb to the problem of police brutality, even though it’s only gotten worse since 2020.
Tyson’s killing once again highlights how ill-suited our police are to deal with mental health crises and how frequently attempts at “non-lethal” restraint go wrong and result in death. According to a recent investigation by The Associated Press, more than 1,000 people have been killed in the past decade by officers attempting to use methods of “less lethal force,” like physical holds and tasers. Many of these encounters, the investigation continues, began as the result of mental health or drug-related crises. One wonders how they might have turned out differently if the person responding were a trained mental health professional or social worker rather than a police officer.
PAST AFFAIRS
In 2021, Texas-based public defender Mary Grace Ruden wrote for Current Affairs about why “Our ‘Normal’ Responses to Mental Health Crises Are Not Working”:
“Problems that arise from mental health diagnoses are complex, and require medical professionals and social workers who approach the work from a place of trauma-informed care, sensitivity, and help. They need to have a broader and deeper understanding of appropriate responses, services, and interventions. Instead we invest near-exclusively in criminal enforcement, armed officers, jails, and prisons. The complexities surrounding crises in mental health call for a public health response. And calls to help people experiencing mental health crises can be more safely and effectively addressed by community organizations and non-law enforcement responders, as shown in a growing number of cities and states. Getting people the care and services they need is public safety—it is crime prevention. There are ample models of non-police response around the country that work. If these models became the norm instead of the exception, we could save taxpayer money, families’ trauma and heartbreak, and yes, Black lives.”
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ South Dakota’s Governor Kristi Noem has admitted, unprompted, to killing her dog (and goat.) These disturbing revelations come from the Governor’s upcoming book, No Going Back. The book is a fairly blatant piece of self-promotion, coming at a time when Noem is widely speculated to be on the shortlist for Donald Trump’s running mate. But as journalists from the Guardian discovered when they cracked open a review copy, it’s also a repulsive tale of animal cruelty.
In a few short pages, Noem tells the reader about her hunting dog Cricket—a “wirehair pointer, about 14 months old” who had an “aggressive personality” and proved difficult to train. After Cricket disrupted a bird hunt by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” and later killed some chickens when she got loose on a neighbor’s farm, Noem decided to take her to a gravel pit and “put her down” with a gun. (The idea that she could simply put the dog up for adoption, or that it might be her fault as an owner that Cricket was poorly behaved, doesn’t seem to have occurred to her.)
Amazingly, Noem also confesses to shooting a goat who she claims was “nasty and mean,” chased Noem’s children (why were they in the goat pen?), and smelled “disgusting, murky and rancid” (in other words, like a goat.) Summing up, she says that the killings were an “unpleasant job [that] needed to be done,” implying that she has the necessary toughness to do other “unpleasant jobs” in the political arena.
Like most of what happens in the GOP, this whole incident is bizarre and disgusting, but it’s also extremely serious. Typically, cruelty to animals is considered a very bad warning sign that a person lacks empathy for living beings in general, and might eventually go on to harm humans. In the past, politicians like Mitt Romney have been pilloried for mistreating their pets, and rightly so. A person who would casually shoot a goat for the crime of smelling bad can’t be trusted to govern. If this is how Noem treats animals who mildly inconvenience her, how would she deal with people from a position of national power? Let’s never find out.
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❧ The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, always a pretty corny affair, was especially grim this year. At the traditional Presidential chuckle-fest, Joe Biden got lightly roasted by Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost, and threw off some jokes of his own at Donald Trump’s expense. John Fetterman was in the audience, clad in the novelty tuxedo hoodie he has instead of a conscience.
But as Patrick Martin writes for the World Socialist Website, the whole event stank of death. Although the White House Correspondents’ Dinner claims to be a celebration of free speech, it took place as Julian Assange—probably the most important journalist and publisher of the 21st century—languishes in a maximum-security prison for his work exposing U.S. war crimes. And the esteemed members of the press swilled their wine and chortled at the punchlines while the Israeli military is actively targeting and killing their fellow journalists, at least 97 of whom have died in Gaza since October 7th.
As the Associated Press has reported, journalists in Gaza even wrote an open letter to their counterparts in the U.S., pleading with them to boycott the event. Most refused, and Jost even had the nerve to praise Biden for being a “decent man” from the stage, all while the bombs continue to fall. What a sickening display.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The DEA is about to reclassify marijuana, according to the Associated Press. Citing five sources in the agency who spoke anonymously, the AP reports that marijuana will soon be reduced from a Schedule I drug (where it sits alongside things like heroin and LSD) to Schedule III (a classification that includes “softer” drugs like testosterone and small amounts of codeine.) This move comes on the heels of a memo released by the Department of Health and Human Services back in August, which recommended exactly the same change.
But it’s pretty obvious that this is also a political decision by Joe Biden and his allies to curry favor with voters—57 percent of whom say marijuana should be legal, even for recreational use—in the lead-up to November’s election. Rescheduling weed probably will gain Biden a few votes, and it may even help reduce criminal penalties for ordinary people who smoke or sell it. Importantly, though, the DEA hasn’t descheduled marijuana, which would effectively legalize it nationwide. People will still be arrested and thrown in jail. Coming from the Biden administration, though, we probably shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Vice President Harris prosecuted more than 1,900 marijuana cases during her time as San Francisco’s DA; once a cop, always a cop. And the Biden White House itself notoriously fired five staffers in 2021 who merely admitted on a survey that they had once smoked weed.
Now, in typical liberal fashion, the administration has come up with a watered-down half-measure. The DEA can reduce the penalty for owning a plant, but not admit that “forbidden plants” are a stupid concept to begin with, or that people’s bodily autonomy includes a right to alter their own state of consciousness. For a man of the 20th century like Joe Biden, that would just be going too far.
⚜ LONG READ: In The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein writes about his unnerving dinner with the Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen:
Recently, I read about venture capitalist Marc Andreessen putting his 12,000-square-foot mansion in Atherton, California, which has seven fireplaces, up for sale for $33.75 million. This was done to spend more time, one supposes, at the $177 million home he owns in Paradise Cove, California; or the $34 million one he bought beside it; or the $44.5 million one in a place called Escondido Beach. Upon reading this, I realized it was time to stop procrastinating and tell you all a story I’ve been meaning to set down for a long time now about the time I visited that house (the cheap $33.75 million one, I mean). Strictly on a need-to-know basis. Because you really need to know how deeply twisted some of these plutocrats who run our society truly are.
It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book Nixonland with his book club, which also happened to be Marc Andreessen’s book club[…]
Andreessen, I learned, was “Tomorrow’s Advance Man.” He superintended the “newest and most unusual” venture capital firm on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road. He “seethes with beliefs” and is “afire to reorder life as we know it.” His enthusiasms included replacing money with cryptocurrency; replacing cooked food with a scheme called, yes, “Soylent,” and boosting the now-invisible Oculus virtual reality headset.
Zero for three when it comes to picking useful inventions to reorder life as we know it, that is to say, though at no apparent cost to his power or net worth, now pegged at an estimated $1.7 billion. Along the way, I also learned he was a major stockholder in Facebook and a member of the civilian board that helped oversee the Central Intelligence Agency. Much later, it was in a tweet of his that I first saw the phrase “woke mind virus.” (He’s not a fan.) […]
I knew from The New Yorker that Andreessen had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered.
It’s a libertarian commonplace, a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job: If you don’t like it, you can leave. If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault.
I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …
And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
I’m taking the liberty of putting it in quotation marks, though I can’t be sure those were his exact words. Marc, if you’re reading, feel free to get in touch and refresh my memory. Maybe he said “quiescent,” or “docile,” or maybe “powerless.” Something, certainly, along those lines.
He was joking, sort of; but he was serious—definitely. “Kidding on the square,” jokes like those are called. All that talk about human potential and morality, and this man afire to reorder life as we know it jokingly welcomes chemical enslavement of those he grew up with, for the sin of not being as clever and ambitious as he.
There is something very, very wrong with us, that our society affords so much power to people like this.
Ken Bone is back! And he’s got a bone to pick.
Here’s a name we bet you haven’t thought of in a while: Ken Bone.
For a brief moment during the slow-motion car wreck of the 2016 election this amiable besweatered “undecided voter” became one of the most famous names in America after appearing at the second debate to ask Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton a question about how to balance meeting energy needs with environmental friendliness.
Amid an acrimonious election season between two widely despised candidates (Remember, this was the same debate in which Trump first threatened to throw Clinton in jail), Bone was a sort of comforting anachronism that the country latched onto as a symbol for some fanciful “middle ground”-inhabiting everyman—a “Joe Sixpack” who dressed like Mr. Rogers.
He became arguably the defining meme in an election cycle dominated by perhaps the two most meme-able people to ever run for president. But in an America that would soon have to reckon with a President Trump, Bone Fever quickly subsided, as it became clear that “Aw shucks” wouldn’t cut it in a time that required moral certainty. But while Ken Bone’s celebrity status quickly fell off, he never went away, continuing to be semi-active on Twitter. And nearly eight years after his famed debate appearance, he has returned to the limelight with a new set of convictions.
As students around the country have protested Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, countless politicians and media figures have cheered on the police as they have brutalized peaceful demonstrators. Not Ken Bone, a man with no patience for those who unquestioningly worship authority:
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Iran has joined in the disturbing tradition of jailing rappers for song lyrics. A court there has sentenced the beloved rapper Toomaj Salehi—called the “Tupac of Iran”—to death for his lyrics criticizing Iran’s theocratic regime. Salehi was arrested in October 2022 as the country rose up in outrage after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the nation’s “morality police” following her arrest for wearing a loose headscarf. Salehi’s song, “Soorakh Moosh” (“Rathole”), which contains strident criticism of the Islamic Republic’s leaders, went viral with lines like, “Iran has so many prisons that you would all fit in” and became a rallying cry for dissidents around the country. After being released from prison in 2023, he continued to speak out against the government and his treatment while incarcerated—he says he was tortured and placed in solitary confinement for eight to nine months. He was promptly arrested again for just two weeks later for propaganda against the state.
Last week, it was announced that he’d been sentenced to death, something his lawyer confirmed. The news has been met with outrage not just in Iran, but in America’s hip-hop community as well. American rapper Meek Mill, who has spoken out in the past against rap lyrics being used as evidence in American legal cases, wrote “Free Toomaj!” saying he “got sentenced to death over a song free that man wtf,” on Twitter. Salehi is not the first Iranian to face execution in connection with the recent protests—last year, Iran executed 834, at least eight of whom were connected with the movement, according to the UN. A statement from the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner says:
Toomaj Saleh’s harsh sentencing takes place against a backdrop of severe restriction on artistic freedom and other forms of expression in the country. “We have received allegations that it is increasingly common for artists, activists and journalists to be arrested and detained on charges such as ‘publishing false news’ or ‘propaganda against the state’,” [a group of UN experts] said.
❧ Ansar Allah, more commonly known as the Houthis, say they’ve shot down an American MQ-9 Reaper drone over Yemen. It’s the fourth time they’ve done this, after taking down two Reapers last November and another in February. Each time, the United States loses around $30 million, the estimated cost of one of the drones—and that’s on top of the millions of dollars it takes to shoot down Ansar Allah’s own drones with surface-to-air missiles each time they’re deployed. In a recent analysis for The Intercept, Murtaza Hussain suggests Ansar Allah may have “checkmated” the Biden administration in the Red Sea region, and he has a point. The costs are only mounting as time goes on, while there’s no clear way to stop the Houthi attacks without waging an all-out war in Yemen. No way, that is, except one: Ansar Allah’s leadership have said that they would “reassess” their campaign only “when the Israeli aggression on Gaza and the siege stop.” If the Biden administration were serious about restoring peace to the Red Sea (and its all-important shipping lanes), they’d be pushing for exactly that.
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BIRD FACT OF THE WEEK
The Marvelous Spatuletail has tailfeathers longer than its body!
Scientifically speaking, the Spatuletail (Loddigesia mirabilis) is a hummingbird—but a very special one. Uniquely, it has four extremely long tail feathers that make up its “marvelous” tail. In most cases, these are significantly longer than the bird itself. Two feathers are thin and pointy, while the other two have fan-like purple spots (the “spatules”). Like peacocks, male Spatuletails use their specialized feathers to put on elaborate courtship displays, flicking and swishing all over the place in hopes that a potential mate will find it impressive.
Unfortunately, they’re also terribly endangered. By some estimates there may only be 250 to 999 adults left in the wild, and the number is decreasing, thanks in part to deforestation in their native Peru. The American Bird Conservancy has set up safe habitats and begun the work of reforestation, but there’s still a long way to go, and the Spatuletails’ future is uncertain.
Like with many birds, we can learn a lot from the Marvelous Spatuletail. Having trouble finding romance in today’s hectic world? Just paint a couple of ping-pong paddles bright purple and waggle them frantically behind you. Your date will get the idea.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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