Jan. 30, 2024 ❧ UN Palestinian aid defunded, Ben Shapiro's terrible rap, and Biden's brutal border bill
Plus Pelosi calls pro-Palestinian protesters Russian "plants," how AI image generators violate women, Alabama's gas chambers, more war risk with Iran, and Technicolor squirrels.
I gave you all the news, Mister Police
BIG STORY
US AND OTHER COUNTRIES CUT FUNDING FOR CRITICAL UN PALESTINIAN AID AGENCY
The US, UK, and seven other countries have suspended aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees after Israel accused 12 of its employees of having participated “either directly or indirectly” in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel. Nine of the accused employees have been fired. Israel has not made the evidence for its allegations public. But given other salacious claims they have made to justify attacks on civilian life in Gaza which have later turned out to be false—such as the supposed existence of a vast “Hamas HQ” beneath the Al Shifa hospital or the claim that Palestinian militants “beheaded 40 babies” in an Israeli kibbutz— we should treat this claim with the utmost skepticism.
Defunding the UNRWA will have dire consequences for everyone living in Gaza. According to Reuters, ”Nearly the entire Gazan population now relies on UNRWA for basic necessities, including food, water and hygiene supplies.” After being defunded by some of its largest donors, the agency could run out of funding by February, making an already catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza—which includes a famine that has caused the majority of families in Gaza to go entire days without eating—even worse. In a statement on Saturday, Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA chief, said:
“It would be immensely irresponsible to sanction an Agency and an entire community it serves because of allegations of criminal acts against some individuals, especially at a time of war, displacement and political crises in the region.”
To haphazardly cut off funding to such a critical organization without taking the time to investigate Israel’s claims is unconscionable. We know that discrediting the UNRWA has been a major goal in Israeli politics for years, as it is the only UN agency with the specific goal of protecting Palestinian rights. Israeli politicians often call openly for its destruction, and more than 150 UNRWA members have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since October 7. Testimony from its employees was also a major factor in the International Court of Justice’s recent ruling that Israel must prevent a genocide in Gaza.
So far, Israel has not provided the underlying evidence for its claims (though the US government has been briefed on it, according to The New York Times). One senior intelligence official told Axios that “a lot of the intelligence is a result of interrogations of militants who were arrested during the Oct. 7 attack," but Israel then changed its claim to state that it was obtained through “surveillance,” which should immediately raise eyebrows. As The Intercept’s Ryan Grim points out: “Because Israel has long been criticized by human rights groups for abusing and torturing detainees, the optics of that explanation were awkward in the West.”
This doesn’t mean we should dismiss the allegations either — if Israel is correct and members of the UNRWA were indeed involved in an attack on civilians, those people should absolutely not be allowed to work for the organization, and it’s fair to suspend any other members suspected of military involvement until they can be investigated. But there is no good reason that in the midst of a world-historic humanitarian catastrophe, the more than 30,000 staff employed by the UNRWA should not be allowed to continue their vital work because of allegations against a small fraction of them.
Additionally, we should take a minute to consider the unfathomable hypocrisy of the United States and its allies here. Israel’s war in Gaza has, in under four months, killed more than 26,600 people—the vast majority of whom are civilians. But the United States has not once threatened to even partially curtail military funding to Israel—in fact, Biden is seeking a dramatic increase in its funding for the war machine. But when faced with allegations that a dozen UN aid workers out of tens of thousands may have been involved in an attack on Israel, the US summarily cut the entire organization’s budget without even taking the time to investigate, with no regard for the destruction it will assuredly cause. It’s the latest demonstration of how Western governments are treating the lives of Palestinians as fundamentally less important than the lives of Israelis.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ In a news interview on Sunday, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the insane, evidence-free statement that supporters of a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza were in the pocket of Vladimir Putin. “For them to call for a ceasefire is Mr Putin’s message,” Pelosi said during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see… I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia.” She went on to say that pro-Palestinian groups were Russian “seeds or plants. I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.” Leaving aside the casual authoritarianism of asking the FBI to investigate everyone who disagrees with her political opinions, can someone please tell Pelosi that she just insinuated that more than three-quarters of Democratic voters were potential Russian plants? That does not seem like a smart election-year strategy.
❧ Democrats and Republicans have reportedly agreed to a new immigration bill that would give the president sweeping new powers to turn away asylum seekers. The bipartisan bill has been paired with another round of aid to Ukraine. If passed, it would give the president the power to begin summarily deporting people without due process if the number of migrant encounters reaches above 4,000 per day, and it would require deportations if the number reaches 5,000 per day. President Biden has pledged to “shut down the border” the day the law is passed. This bill would essentially revive President Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, but Trump is actually the number one obstacle to its passage because he wants to use the border as an issue to defeat Biden in November. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) has basically said as much when he told CNN that a “border deal that actually reduced the flow of illegal immigration, that would be good for [President Biden] politically.” Usually the naked, cynical political ambitions of Republicans lead to nothing but death and destruction, but here, it could end up killing a bill that would have been horrendous for migrants. As a letter signed by nearly 200 human rights groups to Biden says:
These proposals, including statutory changes to asylum law and major funding expansions to detain and rapidly remove people seeking asylum, would lead to violations of international law, and would violate your campaign commitment to restore the asylum system after the prior administration decimated it. Most importantly, if these proposals are implemented, more people who have no choice but to flee for their lives will be sent back to once again face persecution and harm. Some will die.
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“We Need To Make The Moral Case For Immigration” by Nathan J. Robinson
Joe Biden has shown few consistent political principles across his career, with his policies tending to shift in response to outside pressure. The Times tells us that the Biden shift on immigration (when campaigning, he described Trump’s policies as inhumane and promised to reverse them) is in part because “some of the country’s most prominent Democratic governors and mayors, whose communities are being stressed by the cost of providing for migrants, have put pressure on Mr. Biden.” There are “a record number of migrants heading north to escape gang violence, poverty and natural disasters,” and so there is a growing desire to send them back to face gang violence, poverty, and natural disasters… Immigrant rights groups and prominent Democratic Latino politicians have been especially horrified that Biden is considering Trumpian immigration restrictions.
They’re right to stand firm against this. Keeping families in prisons while their claims are processed is totally inhumane and unnecessary. Deporting people without hearings denies them basic due process and will result in people with legitimate asylum claims being sent back to their deaths. There have been horrible cases where migrants denied asylum and deported by the U.S.have been murdered (just as they said they would be). “Raising the evidentiary barrier” to asylum claims means disbelieving more people who say they are going to be murdered and is virtually guaranteed to result in more deadly “errors” (I hesitate to call them that, since they will be the predictable result of the policy, and therefore hardly a mistake.)
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The state of Alabama has executed Kenneth Smith. In a previous News Briefing, we told you how Governor Kay Ivey and other Alabama officials were pushing forward with capital punishment in Smith’s case, despite warnings that the method of execution—asphyxiation by nitrogen gas—was untested, experimental, and likely to cause unnecessary pain and suffering. On the 26th, the killing was carried out, and eyewitness accounts suggest the warnings from human rights advocates were completely warranted. Smith’s execution took 22 minutes, and he reportedly “convulsed on the gurney for several minutes,” showing clear signs of fear and pain. Lee Hedgepeth, a journalist working with the BBC’s Newsday, said that he’d “been to four previous executions and… never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas.” Before being strapped down, Smith’s last words included “Today, Alabama caused humanity to take a step backward.” If the admonitions of United Nations experts and members of the clergy weren’t enough, we now have empirical evidence that nitrogen-gas executions are cruel and unusual—but lawmakers in Ohio have already begun to follow in Governor Ivey’s shameful footsteps, with Attorney General Dave Yost speculating that nitrogen hypoxia could “break the impasse of unavailability of drugs for lethal injection” in that state. For the sake of human dignity and human rights, people like Yost and Ivey need to be fought at every turn, and this barbaric practice banned outright. Several rabbis and other members of the Jewish community have circulated a petition against “the introduction of the gas chamber as a form of execution;” why not take a moment to add your signature to the more than 19,000 they've collected?
❧ Officials in Wyoming are placing harsh new restrictions on the right to vote. Last Friday, Secretary of State Chuck Gray announced new rules about voter ID in Wyoming, which would not only require voters to show a state-issued drivers’ license or ID card at the polls, but require the address on that card to match a person’s current residential address before they can register to vote in the first place. Speaking in support of the change, Representative Tamara Trujilo said it would “help stop various types of fraud”—but even by the conservative Heritage Foundation’s reckoning, there have only been three cases of voter fraud in Wyoming since the year 2000. Instead, these rules would make it harder for legitimate voters to have their voices heard, especially if they can’t afford to pay the fees to have an ID processed, move around frequently for work, or don’t have housing at all. It would set up a barrier of red tape, discriminating directly against lower-income citizens. Secretary Gray himself denies the result of the 2020 election, and was endorsed by Donald Trump when he ran for office, so it’s pretty obvious that it’s right-wing ideology, not genuine concerns about election security, behind his actions. The only question is, how long will Wyoming voters tolerate this transparent attempt to roll back their rights?
LONG READ: This past week AI-generated deepfake porn of Taylor Swift proliferated across social media. In Vice, Janus Rose explains how the use of AI image generator technology to violate women was entirely predictable and how our lawmakers and tech companies have failed to prepare for this new form of sexual exploitation:
On X—which used to be called Twitter before it was bought by billionaire edgelord Elon Musk—the account which initially posted the AI nudes has been suspended. But the images are still widely available via a quick search of the platform—as are various “nudify” apps that allow users to virtually undress women with generative AI. On Thursday afternoon, the Swift images were still being shared widely by various accounts with blue checks—a meaningless label that used to indicate verified accounts, but is now given to anyone who pays to subscribe to Musk’s platform…
This was all easy to see coming. Taylor Swift is probably the single most visible woman of this century, so it makes sense the chart-topping pop star would be the most obvious target for AI-generated nastiness. Last month, a viral TikTok scam imitated Swift’s voice and likeness to advertise a fake offer for free cookware sets. The Swift brand is simply too big and too ubiquitous to not be defiled by mouth-breathing internet goblins who get off by publicly fantasizing about having sex with female celebrities.
This doesn’t bode well for other, less-famous women and femme-presenting people, either. In many ways, this is a nightmare scenario for anyone whose bodies are routinely sexualized and exploited—and especially for teenagers who are most likely to be harmed by AI nudes. Most recently, teenage girls in New Jersey reported that bullies had begun spreading AI-generated nudes of them in their school. And there have been various other incidents where abusers have used “nudify” apps to generate explicit pictures of classmates and online influencers…
The sad but entirely predictable proliferation of non-consensual AI porn is just one obvious consequence of the rise of AI-generated content, enabled by large corporations which profit from AI tools with virtually zero accountability. Indeed, deepfakes originated explicitly to create AI porn of real women, a malignant strain of the technology's DNA that has yet to be excised.
Companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft have attempted to mitigate the production of harmful content with filters that block users from generating abusive and illegal stuff. But this has proven to be a cat-and-mouse game, largely because the systems themselves are trained on billions of nonconsensually obtained images scraped from the internet….
More recently, lawmakers across the US have proposed bills that would explicitly make it illegal to generate nonconsensual AI nudes. But experts note the bills seem mostly geared toward protecting the intellectual property rights of rich celebrities like Swift, and it remains to be seen whether these laws would do anything to protect the rest of us.
BEN SHAPIRO SAYS RAP ISN’T MUSIC, THEN RAPS
Really, we’re doing Ben a favor by talking about this, since it’s obviously a desperate plea for attention—but some things are just so ridiculous, it’s hard to look away. Shapiro made his hip-hop debut last weekend on a song called “Facts,” with Canadian rapper Tom MacDonald. If you haven’t heard of MacDonald, we don’t blame you: since his mainstream career flopped in 2014, he’s rapped almost exclusively about right-wing politics, with song titles like “Fake Woke” and “Sheeple.” (Yes, those are really his titles.) “Facts” is basically just more of the same: using the one flow he seems to be capable of, MacDonald says that “I don’t care if I offend you,” complains that the American flag has been “replaced with BLM flags or a rainbow” (we repeat, MacDonald is Canadian,) and tries his best to sound menacing, saying that “You defunded the police, now there’s no one to protect you.” (Virtually no police departments have actually been defunded, and 83 percent of police budgets are higher than ever.) He’s joined by Shapiro, who raps lines that are both crude and groan-inducing, including “My money’s like Lizzo, my pockets are fat.” This is a strange move for Shapiro, because he’s on the record saying that rap isn’t music—an idea that’s been thoroughly debunked by music theory PhD Jeff Williams in the pages of Current Affairs. Apparently, though, rapping is okay if he’s the one doing it. Like most projects Ben Shapiro touches, “Facts” is deeply racist: in the chorus, MacDonald raps that “We won’t turn your sons into thugs or your daughters into hoes,” implying that regular, non-conservative, non-white rap is some kind of evil, corrupting influence. Despite its embarrassing and repulsive nature, “Facts” has reached #1 on iTunes, a fact Shapiro has spent several days boasting about, and he’s even been congratulated by Nicki Minaj. But since most people under the age of 50 stream their music and don’t buy individual songs from iTunes, that doesn’t actually mean much. We’d suggest that Ben be careful here, because when you release a song that’s blatantly disrespectful to hip-hop and Black culture in general, actual rappers might respond—and he probably doesn’t want that.
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Check out Alex Skopic’s “Brief Cultural History of the White Rapper,” featuring Mr. MacDonald himself:
There’s really no clever critique to be made here, no nuance to uncover. MAGA rap is exactly as stupid as it sounds. Tom MacDonald and Forgiato Blow are anti-artists, black holes of talent and creativity. They rap about conservative politics because without them, they’d have no ideas at all. Neither of them has produced an interesting beat, or rhymed an unexpected combination of words, in their lives, and they don’t need to. Their target audience isn’t even fans of rap, just conservatives with too much time and money on their hands who might spend a chunk of it on hastily churned-out, repetitive music.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Three American troops were killed in Jordan over the weekend in a drone strike by what President Biden called “radical Iran-backed militant groups.” Iran, for its part, denies any involvement in the attack. It’s the first time American service members have been killed as a result of the spiraling Middle Eastern conflicts that began with the war between Israel and Gaza in October 2023. While many Americans are presumably sitting around saying to themselves wait, why do we have troops in Jordan in the first place?, American politicians are now, more furiously than ever, calling for the US to go to war with Iran. The Biden administration has said it does not desire a war with Iran, but has vowed to launch a retaliation. Of course, Biden has continued to retaliate against Yemen’s Houthi militias in an attempt to deter them from attacking shipping vessels in the Red Sea, but he has even admitted that those strikes are not working: In a startlingly candid conversation with a reporter he said “Well, when you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.” So, it seems unlikely that more strikes would do anything but escalate the conflict further.
Ironically, the one thing that has actually stopped attacks from Iranian proxies has been a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza. The Houthis have said they will stop firing upon US bases and shipping vessels when Israel stops firing on civilians. And there’s reason to believe they’d follow through. As Trita Parsi wrote in Time:
When a temporary truce did reign in Gaza from Nov. 24 to 30 of last year, the number of confirmed Houthi attacks in the Red Sea significantly diminished, according to the Institute for the Study of War. (Iraqi militias also completely ceased attacks on U.S. troops during the truce.) The Houthis issued a statement on the last day of the truce, reaffirming their “full readiness to resume its military operations” when fighting resumed in Gaza.
A ceasefire would be the right thing to pursue irrespective of what was going on the wider region. But it may also be the only thing keeping us out of a wider Middle Eastern war that could include Iran and which would almost certainly be catastrophic.
❧ The Italian government is pushing to remove same-sex parents from birth certificates. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni makes no secret of her homophobia, publicly saying things like “Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby,” and the Italian government has started to put these bigoted views into practice. Last year, Meloni ordered local councils to register only biological parents on birth certificates, leaving the children of many gay and lesbian couples “orphaned by decree.” Now, a state prosecutor in Padua has gone further, attempting to remove same-sex parents from 33 birth certificates that have already been issued. The attempt has gone to court, with a verdict expected in the coming weeks. If the state is successful in stripping away parental status from these families, it could have traumatic consequences, as Daniela Ghiotto, a lesbian mom from Padua, explains:
“If my name was deleted from my daughter's birth certificate, I would always need Valentina's written authorisation. For example, to pick her up from school or to take her to a doctor's appointment,” says Daniela, the non-biological mother. “I couldn't authorise life-saving medical procedures and in the worst case, if Valentina passed away, Caterina would be declared an orphan and could be adopted,” she added.
Italy is already lagging behind most of western Europe when it comes to LGBTQ rights, since it only allows civil unions and not marriages; now, it appears Meloni and her far-right associates are trying to drag its society back even further, into what critics call a “medieval vision” of sexuality and gender roles. It’s high time for a strong left-wing opposition to block these homophobic proposals, and remove Meloni’s crypto-fascist political party from power.
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❧ Keir Starmer is taking on the U.K.'s most important issue: ninja swords. In an exclusive new report, the Sun says the Labour Party leader is “horrified” by how easy it is to buy the swords online, following a case where a teenager named Ronan Kanda was murdered with one in Wolverhampton, and intends to “crack down on online knife sales” if he’s elected Prime Minister. Generally speaking, the Sun is a tabloid rag—but in this case, Starmer himself has chimed in to say their reporting is correct, and he really is determined to ban ninja swords. Since the mid-2000s, British politicians have been obsessed with policing so-called “knife crime,” which isn’t actually as common as papers like the Sun claim, and is often used as an excuse to search and surveil young men of color. Usually, though, it’s the more conservative MPs who really focus on the issue. But then, Keir Starmer is a conservative; he just happens to be taking up space in the Labour Party. The war on ninja weapons isn’t even his most egregious “tough-on-crime” policy. Last April, the Labour Party announced plans to introduce 13,000 more cops to British neighborhoods, and give them the power to hand out “respect orders” punishing people for alleged “antisocial behavior” that isn’t even illegal. (These already existed in the U.K. at one point, under Tony Blair. They were called “ASBOs,” for “antisocial behavior order,” and were used to ban all kinds of arbitrary things the cops deemed “antisocial,” like practicing parkour, swearing, saying the word “grass,” or being outside after 11pm in certain neighborhoods.) It’s beyond absurd that Starmer is focusing on this kind of thing, at a time when Britain’s National Health Service has been devastated by funding cuts and grocery prices are so high a record number of people are using food banks. Then again, he worked as Director of the Crown Prosecution Service for several years, so maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that policing and punishment are his first instincts. One thing, though, is certain: his time as the head of Labour has been a monumental downgrade from the principled socialist leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
SQUIRREL FACT OF THE DAY
Malabar Giant Squirrels are not only huge, but multi-colored!
These incredible rodents—known to scientists as Ratufa Indica—live in the forests of southern India, where they snack on tropical fruits and nuts. The word “giant” in their name is no joke: some individuals can grow up to 3 feet long, including tails longer than their actual bodies, and weigh as much as 4 pounds. (That’s roughly twice the size of the common gray squirrel!) Malabar squirrels are the most colorful of four closely related species of giant squirrel that live in the area, and zoologists speculate that their distinctive patchwork of black, tan, and reddish fur helps them “blend in with the contrasting hues of the forest’s canopic covering, or perhaps attract a mate’s attention.”
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Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. 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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