• Opinion | In the Israel-Gaza War, We Must Not Kill Some Children to Protect Others - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/opinion/israel-gaza-palestine-children.html

    By Nicholas Kristof
    Opinion Columnist, reporting from Tel Aviv

    The crisis in the Middle East is a knotty test of our humanity, asking how to respond to a grotesque provocation for which there is no good remedy. And in this test, we in the West are not doing well.

    The acceptance of large-scale bombing of Gaza and of a ground invasion likely to begin soon suggests that Palestinian children are lesser victims, devalued by their association with Hamas and its history of terrorism. Consider that more than 1,500 children in Gaza have been killed, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, and around one-third of Gaza homes have been destroyed or damaged in just two weeks — and this is merely the softening-up before what is expected to be a much bloodier ground invasion.

    I’ve flown into beautiful, sun-washed Tel Aviv, where the graffiti reads “Destroy Hamas.” Israelis have been shattered by the Hamas terrorism and kidnappings, an attack that felt existential and explains the determination to dismantle Hamas, whatever the cost. The anxiety in Tel Aviv is palpable, peaceful though it seems, while Gaza is an inner ring of hell and probably on a path to something much worse.

    The United States speaks a good deal about principles, but I fear that President Biden has embedded a hierarchy of human life in official American policy. He expressed outrage at the massacres of Jews by Hamas, as he should have, but he has struggled to be equally clear about valuing Gazan lives. And it’s not always evident whether he is standing four-square with Israel as a country or with its failed prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a longtime obstacle to peace.

    What are we to make of the Biden administration’s call for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel and simultaneous call for humanitarian aid for Gazans? Defensive weapons for Israel’s Iron Dome system would make sense, but in practice, is the idea that we will help pay for humanitarians to mop up the blood caused in part by our weapons?

    What are we to tell Dr. Iyad Abu Karsh, a Gaza physician who lost his wife and son in a bombing and then had to treat his injured 2-year-old daughter? He didn’t even have time to care for his niece or sister, for he had to deal with the bodies of his loved ones.

    “I have no time to talk now,” he told a Times colleague, his voice trembling over the phone. “I want to go bury them.”

    In his speech on Thursday, Biden called for America to stand firmly behind Ukraine and Israel, two nations attacked by forces aiming to destroy them. Fair enough. But suppose Ukraine responded to Russian war crimes by laying siege to a Russian city, bombing it into dust and cutting off water and electricity while killing thousands and obliging doctors to operate on patients without anesthetic.

    I doubt we Americans would shrug and say: Well, Putin started it. Too bad about those Russian children, but they should have chosen somewhere else to be born.

    Here in Israel, because the Hamas attacks were so brutal and fit into a history of pogroms and Holocaust, they led to a resolve to wipe out Hamas even if this means a large human toll. “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” declared Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israeli National Security Council. “There is no other option for ensuring the security of the State of Israel.”

    I think that view reflects a practical and moral miscalculation. While I would love to see the end of Hamas, it’s not feasible to eliminate radicalism in Gaza, and a ground invasion is more likely to feed extremism than to squelch it — at an unbearable cost in civilian lives.

    I particularly want to challenge the suggestion, more implicit than explicit, that Gazan lives matter less because many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas. People do not lose their right to life because they have odious views, and in any case, almost half of Gazans are children. Those kids in Gaza, infants included, are among the more than two million people enduring a siege and collective punishment.

    Israel has suffered a horrifying terrorist attack and deserves the world’s sympathy and support, but it should not get a blank check to slaughter civilians or to deprive them of food, water and medicine. Bravo to Biden for trying to negotiate some humanitarian access to Gaza, but the challenge will be not just getting aid into Gaza but also distributing it to where it’s needed.

    A prolonged ground invasion seems to me a particularly risky course, likely to kill large numbers of Israeli soldiers, hostages and especially Gazan civilians. We are better than that, and Israel is better than that. Leveling cities is what the Syrian government did in Aleppo or Russia did in Grozny; it should not be an American-backed undertaking by Israel in Gaza.

    The best answer to this test is to try even in the face of provocation to cling to our values. That means that despite our biases, we try to uphold all lives as having equal value. If your ethics see some children as invaluable and others as disposable, that’s not moral clarity but moral myopia. We must not kill Gazan children to try to protect Israeli children.

    #Gaza #Nicholas_Kristof

  • #Nicholas_Kristof : LES ENFANTS DE #PORNHUB
    https://tradfem.wordpress.com/2020/12/08/les-enfants-de-pornhub

    Des vidéos de Nicole nue à 15 ans ont été postées sur Pornhub. Maintenant âgée de 19 ans, elle essaie depuis deux ans de les faire retirer.

    « 

    Pourquoi des vidéos de moi filmées quand j’avais 15 ans et soumises à du chantage, c’est-à-dire de la pornographie enfantine, sont-elles continuellement remises en ligne ? Nicole a protesté plaintivement auprès de Pornhub l’année dernière, en leur écrivant. « Vous avez vraiment besoin d’un meilleur système. … J’ai essayé de me suicider à plusieurs reprises après m’être retrouvée téléchargée à nouveau sur votre site. »

    L’avocat de Nicole, Dani Pinter, dit qu’il y a encore au moins trois vidéos de Nicole nue à 15 ou 16 ans sur Pornhub, qu’ils essaient de faire retirer.

    « Ça ne finira jamais », a déclaré Nicole. « Ils tirent tellement d’argent de notre traumatisme. »

    Pornhub a introduit un logiciel qui est censé pouvoir « prendre les empreintes digitales » des vidéos de viol et empêcher qu’elles soient à nouveau téléchargées. Mais le magazine Vice a démontré à quel point il est facile de contourner ce dispositif sur Pornhub.

    Un des scandales qui ont discrédité Pornhub concernait la société de production Girls Do Porn, qui recrutait des jeunes femmes pour des contrats de mannequinat en vêtements et les poussait ensuite à se produire dans des vidéos sexuelles, en prétendant que les vidéos ne seraient vendues que sous forme de DVD dans d’autres pays et ne seraient jamais mises en ligne. Rassurées que personne ne le saurait jamais, certaines des femmes ont accepté – et ont ensuite été brisées lorsque leurs images ont été agressivement commercialisées sur Pornhub.

    Version originale : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html
    Traduction : #TRADFEM

  • The Rise of the Thought Leader | New Republic
    https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-how-superrich-funded-new-class-intellectual

    Writing in one of Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, the Italian Marxist Antonio #Gramsci jotted down the fragments that would become his theory of intellectuals. New classes, like the European bourgeoisie after the Industrial Revolution, he proposed, brought with them their own set of thinkers, which he called “organic intellectuals”—theorists, technicians, and administrators, who became their “functionaries” in a new society. Unlike “traditional intellectuals” who held positions in the old class structure, organic intellectuals helped the bourgeoisie establish its ideas as the invisible, unquestioned conventional wisdom circulating in social institutions.

    Today, Gramsci’s theory has been largely overlooked in the ongoing debate over the supposed decline of the “public intellectual” in America. Great minds, we are told, no longer captivate the public as they once did, because the university is too insular and academic thinking is too narrow.

    #Thomas_Friedman #Nicholas_Kristof etc.. et même #Daniel_Drezner #chiens_de_garde #fausses_pistes

  • #Nicholas_Kristof Discovers #Angola
    http://africasacountry.com/nicholas-kristof-discovers-angola

    The New York Times’s white savior extraordinaire is at again! The man we love to hate to write about has discovered Angola, and Isabel dos Santos (never mind that much had.....

    #AFRICA_IS_A_COUNTRY #JOURNALISM #White-Savior

  • Shameless Self Promotion : T.O. Molefe makes New York Times debut
    http://africasacountry.com/shameless-self-promotion-12

    #The_New_York_Times gave us Kristof, Friedman and Brooks. We gave them the Rt Hon T.O. Molefe. Africa is a Country’s T.O. Molefe, one of two dozen new columnists, made his debut in The International New York Times today.

    #JOURNALISM #MEDIA #African_National_Congress #Cape_Town #David_Brooks #Helen_Zille #Nicholas_Kristof #South_Africa #Thomas_Friedman

  • George Bush, #Nicholas_Kristof and the Hunger Games
    http://africasacountry.com/george-bush-nicholas-kristof-and-the-hunger-games

    They’re ba-a-a-ack! Those wonderful white men in their (f)lying machines, the Good White Men who brought us the most recent instantiation of “Africa is a country” have returned. As you know, Africa Is a Country is “the blog that’s not about famine, Bono, or Barack Obama.” But we’re all over George W. Bush and Nicholas D. Kristof when [...]

    #MEDIA #POLITICS #George_W_Bush

    • Nothing about discussions and actions concerning sustainable agriculture, in Mali or elsewhere on the continent. Nothing about how small hold farmers, mostly women, used to keep whole regions alive and relatively healthy until they were run out of field and farmhouse by mega-agro-corporations, encouraged and sponsored by the policies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Tony Blair. Nothing about the widespread devastation of public services thanks to policies emerging from Washington, DC, New York, London, and beyond. Basically, nothing about “Africa”, but a whole lot about, you guessed it, Barack Obama, Bono, and famine.

      #presse #afrique #clichés #flagrant_délit