Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan This year, the presidential inauguration took place on the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. President Trump fully exploited the opportunity, hijacking King’s memory to advance his agenda. In his inaugural address, Trump took immediate aim at diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. The bigotry embedded in Trump’s plans to “Make America Great Again” is stark–purging people of color and LGBTQIA people, not only from employment in the federal government, but from public life. But people have fought for too long, and too many have died, in the fight for equality. “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” refers to a system of policies and practices that promote fair treatment, full participation, and full access to employment and opportunities for all, especially for people from historically marginalized communities. Trump is, in effect, attempting with the stroke of a pen to undo over 60 years of hard-won progress in overcoming racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry. “Today is Martin Luther King Day,” Trump said in his inaugural speech in the Capitol Rotunda, one of the only factually accurate statements he made. He went on, “In his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.” Moments later, though, he pledged, “This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.” Following the speech, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders. Within hours, a form letter was emailed to federal departments, ordering the suspension, by end of day Wednesday, of any staff working on DEI initiatives, and giving remaining staff ten days to report any ongoing “disguised” DEI activity, ie, to rat out colleagues. While Trump spoke at his inauguration, a different gathering was taking place just a few blocks from the White House. Hundreds packed into the historic Metropolitan AME Church, the storied Black church that abolitionist Frederick Douglass attended, and where his funeral took place. In 2005, after Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol, her casket was moved to Metropolitan AME, for a memorial service. Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton was speaking at the same moment as Trump. Hearing that Trump had invoked King’s name in his speech, Sharpton responded: “Donald Trump just said that he is going to end DEI this week, he’s gonna put out his executive orders. You have all these corporations that are saying they’re gonna back off DEI. Why do we have DEI? We have DEI because you denied us diversity, you denied us equity, you denied us inclusion. DEI was a remedy to the racial institutional bigotry practiced in academia and in these corporations. Now you want to put us back in the back of the bus? We’re going to do the Dr. King/Rosa Parks on you. We will call you out one by one, and we will shut you down.” Later on King Day, Trump held a rally where he signed the first stack of executive orders, including a blanket rescission of many of President Biden’s executive orders, including at least 15 that advanced diversity, equity and inclusion. Later, Trump signed a much broader order calling for the termination of all “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government,” and to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions.” The “A” in DEIA stands for “accessible,” thus extending Trump’s war on fellow citizens to include the disabled. Sharpton and other speakers invoked not only Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, but the whole sweep of history, from the first arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619, to Frederick Douglass, to the role of freed slaves fighting in the Civil War, through the protests in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd. Marc Morial, President of the National Urban League, convened an emergency “Demand Diversity” roundtable in Washington DC on Wednesday. While Trump was inaugurated on King Day, Morial pointed out that Trump is no king: “These executive orders are unlawful, they are unconstitutional, and they seek to do what we always suspected. This is not a monarchy. You can’t rule by decree or edict. This is a constitutional democracy…we have to remember this as we go into this very important battle.” Participants in the roundtable, representing over 20 national civil rights and human rights organizations, form the core of a coalition committed to fighting Trump’s agenda. The coalition is guided and inspired by the memory and the lessons of Martin Luther King, Jr. Organize, boycott, resist. These are the struggles, ultimately, that history will remember as great.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The devastating fires burning Los Angeles stand as a monumental example of nature’s profoundly destructive potential when accelerated by human-caused climate change. The Palisades fire and the Eaton fire have together burned almost 40,000 acres, and damaged or destroyed over 12,000 homes and other buildings, killing at least 25 people. These fast-moving fires vaporized entire neighborhoods in hours, even minutes, forcing residents to flee with what they could carry. These climate-fueled fires have also drawn renewed attention to the writing of the late Octavia Butler, who broke ground as a Black woman science fiction writer, and her novel, The Parable of the Sower, a dystopian tale set in California. In the book, climate change has completely disrupted society as we know it. Wealth inequality has spurred crimes of desperation and driven neighborhoods to wall themselves off and form armed self-defense groups. A new, populist pro-business, anti-regulation president gets elected, enacting policies that intensify inequality. Written in 1993, Butler’s prophetic book is set in the years 2024 through 2027. The Parable of the Sower is told via diary entries of a Black teenage girl, Lauren Olamina. Lauren lives with her family near Los Angeles, in a walled enclave shared by eleven families. Octavia Butler grew up in Pasadena with her widowed mother, who worked as a maid for wealthy white families. The book’s fictional community of Robledo is similar to Altadena, neighboring Pasadena. As a result of racist redlining throughout L.A.’s history, Altadena developed as a largely middle class Black community, on LA’s northern edge. The Eaton fire has destroyed much of Altadena. Lauren Olamina, in one of her diary entries, describes how even the modest comforts of their walled cul-de-sac proved to be a target for those with less: “[E]verything was getting worse: the climate, the economy, crime, drugs, you know. I didn’t believe we would be allowed to sit behind our walls, looking clean and fat and rich to the hungry, thirsty, homeless, jobless, filthy people outside.” Violent attacks on the neighborhood increased, and, after one in which her family and most neighbors are killed, Lauren flees with two others, heading north. In one passage during their flight, she writes, “Fires are illegal. You can see them flickering all over the hills, but they are illegal. Everything is so dry that there’s always a danger of campfires getting away from people and taking out a community or two. It does happen. But people who have no homes will build fires.” As early as 1993, Octavia Butler saw the threat of climate change. The Parable of the Sower was to be the first in a series of Parable novels. It was followed by The Parable of the Talents (in which a Christian nationalist is elected president, promising to “Make America Great Again”). Butler died in 2006, after an accidental fall, leaving the rest of the series unwritten. She is buried in Altadena. In 2005, in one of her last recorded interviews, Octavia Butler said on the Democracy Now! news hour, “I wrote the two Parable books back in the '90s … books about what happens because we don't trouble to correct some of the problems that we’re brewing for ourselves right now. Global warming is one of those problems. I was aware of it back in the ’80s. I was reading books about it. A lot of people were seeing it as politics, as something very iffy, as something they could ignore because nothing was going to come of it tomorrow.” Octavia Butler continued, setting the scene then reading an excerpt from The Parable of the Sower: “I have a character in the books who is … taking the country fascist and who manages to get elected president …Here is one of the things that my character is inspired to write about this sort of situation. She says: Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” We write this days before the second inauguration of Donald Trump, who has threatened to withhold federal disaster aid for California unless the state enacts policies demanded by Republicans. Of course, the climate catastrophe doesn’t recognize borders, nor cares if a state is red or blue – look no further than hurricane damage in North Carolina and Florida. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, fires still burn as authorities try to locate and identify the dead. In a city known globally for its creative output, life is now, sadly, imitating the art of Octavia Butler.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The time has come to shutter the prison at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where men are held far offshore the mainland U.S. in an extrajudicial hell. There, men imprisoned for over 20 years, without charge, without trial, and who have been cleared for release, remain caged, virtually forgotten. President Biden, thankfully, hasn’t forgotten. Eleven long-term Guantánamo prisoners were recently released, transferred to Oman to live free. Fifteen men remain imprisoned in Guantánamo. Of those 15, six have never been charged with a crime, and three have been cleared for release. Biden can deliver a measure of justice to all those remaining in Guantánamo. He should release those who’ve been cleared, and transfer those who remain charged or convicted to a facility inside the U.S. He should then order the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison to be shut down, once and for all. Overall, 780 men were imprisoned at Guantánamo since 2002, most without charge. A handful of U.S. attorneys have advocated for them, some for almost a quarter century. Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York, is one of these lawyers. “Moath al-Alwi is a Yemeni national,” Ramzi Kassem said on the Democracy Now! news hour, describing one of his clients who was just released to Oman. “He’s one of the very first prisoners who arrived at Guantánamo. The prison was opened on January 11th, 2002. He was on the second or the third plane. You could tell by his low internment serial number, 028. He was never charged with any crime. He was, like the majority of prisoners at Guantánamo, sold for a bounty, $5,000 to $15,000, that the U.S. government was paying to tribes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region for so-called Arabs out of place. By the government’s own allegations, Mr. al-Alwi never so much as fired a shot at U.S. forces or their allies. Still, he spent 23 years, over half of his life, at Guantánamo.” Ramzi Kassem described another of those prisoners recently released from Guantánamo: “Sanad al-Kazimi survived the CIA black sites. He was disappeared in the United Arab Emirates, survived severe forms of physical and psychological torture at a prison that the prisoners who survived it called ‘the prison of darkness’ or ‘the dark prison.’ The CIA called it the ‘Salt Pit’ or ‘Cobalt’ in the Senate’s report about the torture that happened there. He was brought to Guantánamo in 2004. He was also never charged with a crime. He has four kids that he hasn’t seen for the better part of their lives.” Multiply these stories hundreds of times, and you begin to grasp the scale of injustice that has dominated the 20-plus year stain of Guantánamo on the U.S. justice system. Sharqawi Al Hajj is another of the Yemeni prisoners just released to Oman. He has long been represented by Pardiss Kebriaei, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). “Sharqawi is 51. He’s been inside since he was captured when he was 28, 29,” Kebriaei said on Democracy Now! “Guantánamo was set up as an intelligence-gathering operation. The point of it was to establish a place offshore where people could be held outside the bounds of the law, without access to courts, incommunicado, and where they could be interrogated.” Despite years of interrogation, including two years before Guantánamo, when Sharqawi Al Hajj was imprisoned at a CIA dark site in Jordan and at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, which was dubbed “Gitmo East” as the brutality inflicted on prisoners there paralleled that suffered at Guantánamo itself. “The release of these people and their freedom for the first time after all of this time, the chance to reunify with their families and begin to recover and rebuild, it’s hard to overstate the enormity of that for them,” CCR attorney Pardiss Kebriaei said. It seems at best unlikely that the remaining prisoners would see anything under the incoming Trump administration other than a continuation of their lives in the legal black hole that is Guantánamo Bay. For example, Moath al-Alwi became an accomplished artist while imprisoned. Following a 2017 New York exhibit of art by him and other Guantánamo prisoners, the first Trump administration declared their artwork “government property,” telling lawyers it would be destroyed. The policy was reversed under President Biden. Perhaps, if Trump’s federal budget-cutting duo of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were to consider Guantánamo, it would be closed. After all, the government spends half a billion dollars a year keeping the prison and the court at Guantánamo open – now, for just these 15 men. President Barack Obama pledged to close Guantánamo as far back as 2009, but failed to do so. President Biden still has the power to close it, he has the authority, and he still has the time. But does he have the will?

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan People around the globe have been watching the blockbuster musical film “Wicked” this holiday season. Based on the Broadway musical, it serves as a backstory to the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, casting that film’s villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, in a positive light, as a misunderstood and bullied child who goes on to challenge authority and expose wrong-doing. From the mid-1950s until the early 1990s, long before streaming platforms and video on demand, television audiences dependent on just a few major broadcast networks had to wait for the annual chance to see The Wizard of Oz. The much-anticipated special broadcast would typically air between Thanksgiving and Christmas, attracting millions of viewers across the country. This shared cinematic tradition popularized the fantastic tale of Dorothy, her dog Toto, and the Scarecrow, Tinman and Lion. The film also brought global acclaim to its musical score, with iconic songs like “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” and “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” and the world-renowned classic, “Over the Rainbow.” Less well-known is the writer of the lyrics to those songs: E.Y. “Yip” Harburg. In an era of rising authoritarianism, growing inequality and an ascendant billionaire class, Yip Harburg’s socially-conscious songs, and his own struggle to overcome poverty during the Great Depression and then blacklisting during the McCarthy era – even as “The Wizard of Oz” gained fame – serve as both an inspiration and a warning. Yip Harburg was born in 1896 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to poor Jewish parents who fled the anti-semitic pogroms of eastern Europe along with so many others. In high school, he was seated alphabetically next to Ira Gershwin. They began a friendship that lasted a lifetime and shaped 20th-century American song and culture. Ernie Harburg, Yip’s son and co-author of the biography “Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?,” said in a 1996 interview on the Democracy Now! news hour, “Yip knew poverty deeply … it was the basis of Yip’s understanding of life as struggle.” Yip Harburg was deep in debt after the 1929 Wall Street crash. Gershwin suggested Harburg write song lyrics. Before long, he wrote the song that captured the essence of the Great Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which became a national hit and remains a timeless anthem for hard times, corporate greed and the dignity of working people: Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime? “The Wizard of Oz” was based on the 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum. Prior to the commercial success Baum enjoyed from the book, he worked an array of jobs, including a stint in South Dakota owning the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer newspaper, from 1890-91. There he wrote editorials, including two that called for genocide against indigenous people. Just days after the Wounded Knee massacre of December 29, 1890, in which an estimated 300 Lakota elders, women and children on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation were slaughtered by the US Army, Baum wrote, “Our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians…wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.” Yip Harburg’s writing, conversely, dignified the downtrodden, the working class, immigrants and other marginalized groups. These themes were central to the two Broadway hits Yip wrote, Bloomer Girl, about the women’s suffrage movement, and Finian’s Rainbow, which celebrated immigrants and the struggle against racism. His lyrics attracted the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy who led a deeply destructive “hunt” for communists within the government and leading institutions, including Hollywood studios. McCarthy was aided by the red-baiting lawyer Roy Cohn, who would later serve as mentor to a young Donald Trump. Yip Harburg was among hundreds of writers, actors and others banned from working in film and television for the duration of the 1950s. McCarthy and his anti-communist crusade were eventually discredited, and Harburg continued his creative human rights work, until his death in 1981, aged 84. Yip Harburg’s best-known and most loved work remains his lyrics for “The Wizard of Oz.” The film was released in the tumultuous year of 1939. Fascism was on the march in Europe and Asia, the economic impacts of the depression still plagued the working class, and racist Jim Crow laws oppressed millions of people of color. With just weeks from Donald Trump’s inauguration to his second term as president, and with a timely focus on challenging authority ushered in by the hit movie “Wicked,” now is a good time to recall the incredible work and lyrical lessons of Yip Harburg, the man who put the rainbow in the Wizard of Oz.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Christmas marks the birth of Jesus of Nazareth over 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem, Palestine, in what is now the Israeli Occupied West Bank. The occasion is both solemn and celebratory. The Church of the Nativity now stands on the site considered to be Jesus’ birthplace, in an animal stable, where the newborn is believed to have been placed in a feeding trough, or manger, as depicted in creches the world over. “Christ in the Rubble” is the name of one such creche, located a short walk along an ancient stone-paved street from Jesus’ recognized birthplace, inside Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church. There, the baby Jesus, swaddled in a Palestinian keffiyeh, rests atop a pile of rubble, depicting Israel’s relentless attack on the people of Gaza. Last year, the pastor of that church, Reverend Isaac Munther, gave a sermon that went viral, called “Christ in the Rubble.” As the bombardment of Gaza nears its 450th day, and with well over 45,000 Palestinians killed there since October, 2023, Munther’s latest Christmas sermon was titled, Christ is Still in the Rubble. “‘Never again’ should mean never again to all peoples,” Munther said in his sermon. “‘Never again’ has become ‘yet again’ — yet again to supremacy, yet again to racism and yet again to genocide. And sadly, ‘never again’ has become yet again for the weaponization of the Bible and the silence and complicity of the Western church, yet again for the church siding with power, the church siding with the empire.” The reports from Gaza are grim. Israel continues to attack the besieged enclave’s ailing healthcare system, detonating remote-controlled explosives just outside the Kamal Adwan Hospital and forcing the removal of sick and wounded patients from the Indonesian Hospital. Israel also shelled the Al-Awda Hospital, one of the Gaza Strip’s main obstetric facilities. Jesus’ mother, Mary, was lucky to find a quiet stable in which to give birth. Now in Gaza, babies are delivered with a complete lack of sanitation, clean water, or proper medical care. Most agricultural infrastructure, including stables and mangers, have been systematically leveled in Gaza, in what Oxfam has labeled “the late stages of ethnic cleansing.” “So, today, after all this, of total destruction, annihilation,” Munther continued, “Gaza is erased — millions have become refugees and homeless, tens of thousands killed. And why is anyone still debating whether this is a genocide or not?” Expanding on his sermon, Rev. Issac Munther spoke on the Democracy Now! news hour. He said, “We’re still seeing images of children pulled from under the rubble. It’s unthinkable to me that it’s been more than 14 months now into this genocide, and we’re still seeing the same images. It seems like we’re powerless, and it seems that the world is content with letting this go on. And here in the West Bank, as we watch from Bethlehem what’s happening in Ramallah or Hebron, we wonder, 'Are we next?' Israel has made it clear they plan to annex the West Bank next year. What would this mean on the ground?” He added, “Our fear here in Bethlehem is that there is no one who’s going to hold Israel accountable.” Israel notoriously ignores international law, with full support, militarily and diplomatically, from the United States. South Africa, joined now by 14 other nations, has a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, while the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for crimes against humanity, against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Gallant recently made a trip to Washington DC, where he met with high-ranking Biden administration officials, all of whom ignored the arrest warrant. Netanyahu, however, reportedly won’t attend the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, given that Poland says it will honor its obligations to enforce ICC arrest warrants. Israeli columnist Gideon Levy, wrote this week in the newspaper Haaretz, “Eighty years ago, Jews were given a choice between two legacies: Never again, the Jews will never face a similar danger, or – Never again, no one in the world will ever face a similar danger. Israel clearly chose the former option, with a fatal addition: After Auschwitz, Jews are permitted to do anything. Israel has implemented this doctrine in the past year as it never has before.” In one of only a handful of times in the last century, Christmas this year coincides with the first day of Chanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. In that spirit, let there be light. Let there be life. There must be a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, now.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Water is Life” became the anthem of the water protectors protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016. Now, a cruel negative variant of that phrase applies to Gaza: “No water is death.” Two million Palestinians trapped in Gaza have been subjected to an Israeli military assault for close to 14 months, including the purposeful denial of water. On Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a damning, 184-page report on this manufactured water crisis, titled, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.” The report details how Israel has systematically deprived water to Palestinians in Gaza, and quotes Israeli officials who, in their own words, define this crime as official policy. Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for example, said on October 9th, 2023, two days after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, “We are imposing a complete siege…No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and must act accordingly.” The Israeli military dutifully followed its orders, so much so that, on November 21st of this year, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Gallant and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity and war crimes. “What that statement of his [Gallant] and statements by other senior Israeli leaders in positions of control and command in the Israeli army over this issue of denial of access to water, their statements are evidence of an intent, and they were also carried out by the military and by the authorities,” Bill van Esveld, HRW’s acting Israel and Palestine Associate Director, who helped produce the report, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It’s not just they said something and it sounds bad. What they said was actually what they did. That’s extremely serious, and that is part of what led us to the conclusion of extermination. That is a crime against humanity, of deliberately causing mass death. One of the ways that can be committed is by depriving people of what they need to stay alive, such as water.” van Esveld went on to explain HRW’s damning conclusion, accusing Israel of genocide: “Extermination is the same act as one of the acts of genocide listed in the Genocide Convention and indeed in the International Criminal Court statute on its article on genocide, deliberately inflicting conditions of life on people calculated to bring about the destruction of that group.” HRW has made this charge only three times previously in its almost 50 year history, as van Esveld explained: “it is not an accusation that we level lightly…We accused the Myanmar military of genocidal acts against the Rohingya in 2017 and we found full blown genocide against the Kurds in Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign in Iraq in the 80s and we found genocide also in Rwanda.” The report details the many ways that Israel denies water, from its intentional destruction of water infrastructure, holding tanks, pipelines and desalination plants, to actively blocking donated water tanker trucks from entering the Gaza Strip. “The results are horrifying,” van Esveld said. “The lack of water kills you in a million different ways.” Babies die of dehydration, others die after unwashed wounds become infected, all while over a quarter of a million people suffer from skin diseases caused by the inability to bathe. While HRW’s report focuses specifically on the denial of water, their conclusion mirrors one made more broadly two weeks ago by Amnesty International when it became the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza. “It’s a damning indictment of the United States’ failure to stop Israel’s violation,” Budour Hassan, an Amnesty International researcher, said on Democracy Now! when Amnesty’s report was released. “If there is any country that has the capacity, the power and the tool to stop this genocide, it’s the United States. Not only has the United States failed to do so, it has consistently awarded Israel. It has consistently continued to flout the United States’ own laws in order to continue giving Israel the weapons — the very same weapons that are used by Israel to commit the genocide in Gaza.” Efforts to halt US support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza continue. Palestinian American Ahmed Moor and others recently sued the US State Department and Secretary of State Antony Blinken for failing to enforce the Leahy Law, prohibiting military aid to foreign military units accused of human rights violations. “The basic conditions of life in Gaza aren’t being met,” Moor told Democracy Now!, “[a] policy that our government is supporting.” The people of Gaza need a permanent ceasefire now, an end to the flow of US arms to Israel, and a massive flow of clean water and humanitarian aid.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The Syrian government has been overthrown and dictator Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow. Assad, and before him, his father Hafez al-Assad, ruled Syria with extreme brutality for over 50 years. “Syrians have been subjected to a horrifying catalogue of human rights violations that caused untold human suffering on a vast scale,” said Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard in a statement following the government’s collapse at the hands of several rebel factions. “This historic opportunity must be now seized and decades of grave human rights violations redressed.” The people of Syria have taken to the streets, tearing down every visible remnant of Assad’s rule and opening up the regime’s countless prisons, freeing thousands from hellish confinement. The armed group that led the final offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was only a decade ago an al-Qaeda affiliate, and is still considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., the EU, the UK and Turkey. HTS’ leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who now goes by his real name Ahmed al-Sharaa, claims he is focused on rebuilding Syria inclusively. The question is, will the US, and major regional neighbors like Turkey and Israel allow Syrians to build the independent state they deserve? “The general atmosphere is an atmosphere of relief, of joy, of celebration, but also there is this background of apprehension, of uncertainty,” Marwa Al-Sabouni, Syrian architect and writer said on the Democracy Now! news hour, speaking from Homs just days after it was liberated by HTS’ lightning assault. “There are a number of dangers around us, mainly by foreign powers, looking at the map of Syria, proposing division, also planning the future of Syria, mostly by the vacuum and the absence of Syrians from the political scene due to the oppression.” Joseph Daher, Swiss-Syrian activist and scholar, also speaking on Democracy Now!, said, “For the first time in decades, Syrians have a hope for the future to build a more equal, democratic social society. Obviously, there is fear, but fear was existing for the past five decades…there will be a need to rebuild [a] democratic movement, new popular organization, trade unions, feminist organization, and to rebuild, basically, struggle from below, to build the possibility of an alternative political structure.” While the Syrian people react on the streets to their fragile new freedom, Israel has engaged in a fierce assault on Syria, with close to 500 strikes destroying what it says are military targets across the country, as well as sending troops deeper into territory it has occupied for decades, in the Golan Heights and on the slopes of Mount Hermon. “One should not ignore the fateful damage which this ugly pillage could entail in the long run,” Haaretz columnist and editorial board member Gideon Levy wrote on Thursday. “The damage to Israel resulting from seizing this territory is certain to come. These territorial swipes will be the pretext for another war…They end up as a sore that never heals.” Joseph Daher points to Turkey in the north of Syria, attacking the Kurdish population there, and Israel, as imminent threats to a new, free Syria. “Israel has no interest to see a democratization process in Syria, just as in the larger Middle East, because it knows it will bring more solidarity with the Palestinian cause,” Daher said, adding that the military strikes serve two purposes: “To make the future Syrian state weaker, and also send a political message to the future people that will be empowered [in] Syria, that any kind of hostile and belligerent position to Israel will be attacked.” In addition to Syrian factional rivalries and aggression from Israel, and Turkey, Russia has two major military bases in Syria which it hopes to maintain, and the United States also has troops deployed there. The US has occupied Syrian territory since at least 2016, ostensibly training and supplying various forces to combat the Islamic State but also to exert control over Syria’s oil fields. In a December 6th report to Congress, mandated by the 1973 War Powers Resolution, President Biden wrote, “a small presence of United States Armed Forces remains in strategically significant locations in Syria to conduct operations, in partnership with local, vetted ground forces.” Like Israel, the US also bombed sites following Assad’s fall. The Pentagon’s Central Command, or CENTCOM, said in a press release it had “conducted dozens of precision airstrikes targeting known ISIS camps and operatives in central Syria, Dec. 8,” adding its usual claim, “there are no indications of civilian casualties.” The Syrian people are emerging from a half-century of repression and authoritarianism and close to 15 years of civil war that killed at least 500,000 and displaced as many as 14 million people. As Syrians rebuild their society, they will need global solidarity and grassroots support, to ensure that their new state does not fail.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Column — Biden's Pardon Power and the Last Federal Pot Prisoners by Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan While many brace for the return of Donald Trump to the White House, let’s remember that until Monday, January 20th, Joe Biden is still president, with all the power that confers. The Constitution grants the president the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States,” to remedy a criminal justice system riddled with faults. One strong candidate for presidential clemency, as recently called for by Amnesty International USA, is 80-year-old Anishinabe-Lakota elder Leonard Peltier, who has been incarcerated for close to half a century for a crime he maintains he did not commit. This Thanksgiving weekend, when people across the US enjoy a holiday based on the myth of a shared meal between native people of Massachusetts and the English settler-colonists who would later violently displace them, President Biden should free Leonard Peltier. The case of Leonard Peltier encapsulates the modern era of indigenous resistance. After centuries of genocide launched by Christopher Columbus and expanded by successive waves of European settlers, by the 1950s most of the surviving indigenous nations in North America had been contained in isolated and impoverished reservations. Hollywood appropriated, caricatured and monetized the vibrant mosaic of indigenous cultures. Many Native people moved to cities seeking economic opportunity but still faced racism and discrimination. Out of this, and amidst the civil rights and other social movements of the 1960s, the American Indian Movement, or AIM, was born. In 1973, AIM went to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where a corrupt tribal government was working in league with federal and local authorities to violently suppress a growing movement to restore traditional practices – and to block extractive industries from exploiting traditional lands. More than 50 Lakota people and their allies were murdered there over a three year period. On June 26, 1975, Leonard Peltier was present at an AIM camp on the property of a targeted family. The camp was fired upon by unknown assailants, and the AIM members returned fire. In the ensuing minutes, two FBI agents and one young AIM activist were killed. Two AIM members were later arrested for killing the agents. At trial, the jury agreed that they had fired in self-defense and acquitted them. Leonard Peltier, arrested later, was tried separately and convicted. Peltier’s trial was marked by gross FBI and federal prosecutorial misconduct, with the coercion of witnesses, fabricated testimony, and suppressed exculpatory evidence. When Peltier was on trial in 1976, Joe Biden, then a young US Senator, was a founding member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee was created after the explosive Church Committee hearings that investigated the unconstitutional and criminal conduct of the FBI and its “COINTELPRO” operations against civil rights leaders and organizations, including AIM. A global movement grew, demanding justice for Leonard Peltier. Human rights icons like South African President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for his release, as did one of the federal judges involved, and, years later, one of the prosecutors who tried the case. Amnesty International has campaigned for Peltier’s release for decades. The group recently sent a letter to President Biden, reiterating their demand. “Over the decades at Amnesty, we have been calling on administration after administration to do the right thing by Leonard. He was in hospital in June, he was in hospital again in October. It’s time to give him a chance to spend his last days with his family and with his community,” Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. In late October, President Biden traveled to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, to formally apologize for the US government’s treatment of indigenous children forced into boarding schools. “All told, hundreds and hundreds of Federal Indian Boarding Schools across the country. Tens of thousands of Native children entered the system. Nearly 1,000 documented Native child deaths, though the real number is likely to be much, much higher; lost generations, culture, and language; lost trust. It’s horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a sin on our soul,” Biden said. Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Indigenous-led NDN Collective, responded on Democracy Now!, saying, “What this means for Indian Country is that we hope that this is a beginning of an era of repair between the United States government and the Indigenous people, the First People of this land…He [Peltier] was in the Sisseton Wahpeton boarding school, in South Dakota. Leonard Peltier and many people who became leaders in the American Indian Movement were survivors of boarding school. They came out of that era, and then they resisted.” If President Biden’s apology at Gila River was genuine, he could demonstrate it by commu