The UN Office of Human Rights, headed by Volker Türk, on Wednesday issued an extensive report on the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank in which it for the first time described Israeli policies there as Apartheid. The executive summary says, “The report warns that Israel is violating international law requiring States to prohibit and eradicate racial segregation and apartheid.”

Türk told the UN, “There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank. Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives – every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices.”

“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before.” He is referring to racial discrimination in Apartheid South Africa from the late 1940s through the early 1990s.

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Ben-Gvir has also previously suggested the building of a synagogue on the mount, which drew condemnation from Washington, albeit under the Biden administration.

Then-State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at the time: “The ongoing reckless statements and actions of this minister only sow chaos and exacerbate tensions at a moment when Israel must stand united against threats from Iran and its proxy terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

“They directly undermine Israel’s security.”

Netanyahu’s comments came after he reportedly clashed with Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon during a cabinet meeting on Sunday after the legal official demanded Ben-Gvir be sacked over alleged interference in police matters – a claim Ben-Gvir has strongly denied.

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Sequence of induction based on age

“The first to receive induction orders are those whose 20th birthday falls during the year of the lottery,” outlines the chain of events for the Selective Service.

Should extra lotteries become necessary, the order would kick off with individuals celebrating their 21st birthday during that year, then climb progressively through ages up to 25. Subsequently, a lottery for those turning 19 would take place, followed finally by 18.5 year-olds.

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Reporting such secrets is akin to the Necessity Defense. (The CIA’s secret wars in Latin America became so egregious that activists eventually found a legal weapon to expose them: the necessity defense, a legal doctrine that allows defendants to argue they broke the law to prevent a greater harm. In the 1980s, Abbie Hoffman successfully used this defense in his trial as an anti-CIA activist on the campus of UMass-Amherst, transforming the courtroom into a forum where evidence of CIA atrocities in Latin America was presented to the jury, effectively putting the Agency itself on trial for its crimes against democracy.)

This formulation is crucial. The point of a classification violation is accountability. Hersh operates according to a higher law than the state’s obsession with secrecy. He identifies what he calls “self-censorship by the press” the greater threat: “I think what you have in America is not so much censorship but self-censorship by the press.” It is the internalization of the state’s priorities by journalists themselves that makes stenography so effective.

Realpolitik and the 40 Committee

The meat of the film concerns the “Kissinger Doctrine.” Poitras uses archival snippets to bring us into the heart of the 40 Committee, the secret body that oversaw the subversion of foreign democracies. Here, we discover the soul of American Realpolitik: Kissinger’s infamous 1970 proclamation regarding the election of Salvador Allende (and its wider implication about democracy, in general):

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

This doctrine remains the definitive modus operandi of modern foreign policy. (One can see how it functions today in the destabilization of the Venezuelan government and the subsequent kidnapping of its leadership). It is the “Abyss” that Senator Frank Church warned of in 1975—a surveillance apparatus so powerful that it creates a tyranny from which there is “nowhere to hide.”

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His fear of dissent, people of color, and the very idea of law is not merely rhetorical; it is visceral. It surfaces in his permanent war mentality, his embrace of imperial aggression, and his eagerness to militarize both domestic governance and foreign policy. His unhinged defenses of the invasion and political abduction in Venezuela, along with his casual assertion that Greenland “rightfully” belongs to the United States, reveal a fascist worldview in which legality is meaningless and sovereignty collapses before brute force. For him, law does not restrain power; it sanctifies it. This contempt for ethical and political responsibility is laid bare in his declaration on CNN that the world is governed not by justice or rights but by “strength,” “force,” and “power,” which he calls, with totalitarian assurance, the “iron laws” of history.

Taken together, these claims form not only the language of realism; they also constitute the creed of an emerging fascist politics. It echoes the vocabulary of Hitler and the Third Reich, where politics was reduced to struggle, morality dismissed as weakness, and domination elevated to destiny. In this worldview, force turns out to be truth, violence becomes virtue, and the rule of law is replaced by the racialized mythology of survival through conquest. In Orwell’s warning that when the clock strikes thirteen, something has gone terribly wrong, Miller’s language marks precisely that moment—when power openly declares itself the only truth, domination becomes common sense, and fascist lies no longer bother to disguise themselves as reality.

Miller’s hatred of dissent is most fully revealed in his relentless effort to seize control of public culture, not as a secondary battlefield but as the central terrain on which authoritarian power is forged and sustained. He operates with the clear understanding that domination requires more than repression, it demands the production of compliant fascist subjects and the systematic erosion of the cultural institutions capable of nurturing critique. As the chief architect of book bans, the hollowing out of schools and universities, and the destruction of culture as a site of democratic possibility, Miller wages war on the very conditions that make resistance thinkable and culture a vital sources of social change. His assault on critical consciousness, historical memory, and critical pedagogy reproduces the racial logic of colonial rule, a politics designed to manufacture terminal zones of exclusion, enforce the violence of organized forgetting, and cultivate a colonized imagination trained to mistake obedience for order and silence for civic virtue.

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The monitor stressed that the “deadliest repression” took place in the provinces of Lorestan and Ilam, home to Kurdish and Lur ethnic minorities.

A clash erupted on Sunday in Malekshahi in Iran’s Ilam province, where security forces opened fire on protesters with heavy weaponry, prompting protests of solidarity across Iran’s Kurdish-inhabited western regions (Rojhelat), culminating in a general strike on Thursday across Rojhelat.

Amnesty said that at least “28 protesters and bystanders, including children,” were killed across eight provinces as of Saturday, while the Oslo-based Hengaw Human Rights Organization on Friday identified 42 protesters “killed by direct fire from government forces” during the recent nationwide protests.

Iran has intensified its crackdown on protesters as demonstrations continue to expand, despite government claims of a softer approach.

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She started looking for data on how many women in the United States were murdered by men each year. She wanted to put a link in her online comments, a gateway to a definitive account of the information she thought might make people see what she saw: a national crisis. “Look at all these freaking women!” she remembers wanting to scream. “Pay attention to this!”

But the data wasn’t there. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked murders using a reporting system with hundreds of potential attributes, such as whether domestic violence was a factor, but the information wasn’t publicly accessible. FBI figures relied on voluntary reporting from thousands of law-enforcement agencies, and some years yielded more robust data than others.

Wilcox also considered the data grossly incomplete because it was anonymous; it didn’t include information about who the victims were. Someone needed to document the women—to name them, describe them, and honor them. And if no one else was doing it, Wilcox decided that she would.

She opened a spreadsheet and got to work. Each successive row would contain the details of a woman’s murder. Wilcox started labeling columns: Name, age, location of death. Whether there were postmortem injuries, and whether the crime was a murder-suicide. The killer or suspected killer’s name—if it was available—and his relationship to the victim. Soon Wilcox had labeled more than thirty columns.
[…]
Femicide entered the lexicon in 1976, when radical feminist scholar Diana Russell used it to describe “the killing of females by males because they are female.” Russell wanted to push back against the normalization of women’s murders, especially in a domestic context, as private misfortunes or crimes of passion. In much the same way that defining genocide clarified the intent behind an atrocity, describing misogynistic murders as femicide demanded that the crimes be recognized as uniquely motivated. “We must recognize the sexual politics of murder,” Russell wrote. “From the burning of witches in the past, to the more recent widespread custom of female infanticide in many societies, to the killing of women for ‘honor,’ we realize that femicide has been going on a long time.”

Almost as soon as the term was coined, women began tabulating femicides. Between January and May 1979, twelve Black women were murdered in Boston, six within a two-mile radius, prompting an activist group called the Combahee River Collective to publish a pamphlet entitled “Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?” The public feared a serial killer, but the victims were bound by their gender, race, and personal circumstances, not by who took their lives. Just two of the women were killed by the same man. With each printing, the collective struck out the old number in the pamphlet’s title to reflect new murders of Black women in the city. A decade later, in 1989, a man shot and killed fourteen women, most of them engineering students, in Montreal. Before the massacre he yelled, “I hate feminists.” In response, activist Chris Domingo created the Berkeley Clearinghouse on Femicide, where she collected stories about similar killings.
[…]
As Women Count USA gained recognition, researchers asked Wilcox to track keywords or trends for their own work. In 2020, Danielle Pollack, a policy manager for the National Family Violence Law Center, requested that she flag cases of girls killed by fathers from whom their mothers had separated. Pollack wanted to use the figures to lobby for changes in family-court systems to protect children. More recently, Alison Marganski, a criminology professor at LeMoyne University, began reviewing Wilcox’s data. She was looking for trends in coercive control, stalking, and abuse that preceded murders—behaviors that, if properly identified, could have prompted police or other individuals to reach out to victims before it was too late.

Marganski told me that she admired Wilcox’s research because it presented a fuller picture of femicide than government data did. That quality gap could widen further. In 2025, the Trump administration removed questions related to gender identity from the National Crime Victimization Survey, a project of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Federal agencies have deleted thousands of online datasets, including ones related to public health and safety. It’s uncertain to what extent, and how reliably, the federal government will continue to collect crime data. “It’s a very precarious time,” Marganski said, “which maybe makes the case for the grassroots stuff to have a particular role.”

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Overall, the current situation in Iran represents far more than a spontaneous outbreak of unrest. It signals a profound crisis of legitimacy, the collapse of public trust in governing institutions, and a critical phase in the confrontation between society and the ruling order. The trajectory of this moment will depend on the balance between social resistance, state repression, and the capacity of people to organize independently outside both state power and elite opposition forces.

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Any political order that emerges amid destruction on this scale must be understood not simply as a governance choice, but as an existential response to chaos. History is not written solely in the language of destruction. At certain moments, order emerges unexpectedly from within disintegration itself. Recent world history is replete with such examples.

The Latin phrase Ordo ab Chao (order born from chaos) is not a randomly chosen metaphor to describe the experience of Rojava and Northern Syria. The structure that emerged from 2012 onward was not a predesigned state project, but the outcome of society’s effort to preserve its existence and generate continuity in the absence of the state.

Developing amid security vacuums, sectarian violence, and forced displacement, this experience did not seek to impose order by suppressing chaos; rather, it aimed to build order by recognizing chaos, internalizing its parameters, and managing it.
[…]
The economic policies adopted in Rojava and Northern Syria rest on micro-level but highly decisive measures. Ensuring that essential commodities such as sugar, fuel, and basic foodstuffs remain accessible at controlled prices; preventing strategic resources like oil from being surrendered to market speculation; and above all, organizing healthcare services to be entirely free or provided without regard for payment—these are the concrete expressions of this political rationality.

These are not grand ideological claims, but vital balancing mechanisms that prevent social disintegration, displacement, and collapse.

It must be emphasized: this approach is not a romanticized “alternative economic model.” Capitalist reflexes, market relations, and irregular practices persist in this geography as well. This is inevitable. What is decisive is preventing these reflexes from becoming destructive to the political and social fabric. Rather than surrendering the economy to the absolute dominance of the free market, the governing rationality in Rojava has focused on preserving the minimum balance points necessary to keep society standing.

For this very reason, the economic pillar constitutes the sustainability test of the order beyond military and political momentum. A ground where people can receive treatment, access basic needs, and are not pushed into absolute uncertainty about the future serves as the silent but vital carrier of political order. Rojava’s survival to date has been possible because this carrying rationality has been preserved despite immense pressure.

Today, signals from the field indicate that this capacity is being directly targeted. The process conducted under the discourse of “integration” is turning into a liquidation line advancing through unilateral impositions rather than mutual and binding agreements. Turkey’s “multi-instrument pressure” strategy—simultaneously deploying diplomacy, security, and political coercion—aims to appropriate the military, political, and social accumulation built over more than a decade.

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“The world’s most powerful country is in the throes of a political revolution. In our lifetimes, we have never witnessed an American president so committed to and so capable of changing the political system and, accordingly, the United States’ role in the world.”

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