ICE & Canary Mission

Unsealed court documents this week revealed what Palestine activists in the US have long suspected: that the Trump administrations campaign of harassment, intimidation, and repression against pro-Palestine students and professors has been relying on the conspiratorial and reactionary blacklisting site Canary Mission. The Trump administration, directed by their own wannabe Himmler, Stephen Miller, assembled a “Tiger Team” to comb through more than 5,000 listings on Canary Mission to target students for their opposition to genocide and support for Palestinian liberation. Canary Mission itself is an Islamophobic hate site, linked to an Israeli nonprofit, that attempts to silence and suppress pro-Palestine speech and expression by publicizing the names and pictures of Palestine activists on campus. It has never publicly disclosed its administrators or funding sources. To use its databases as a basis for immigration proceedings makes an absurd mockery of any notion of rule of law or due process.

The nexus of home-grown fascists, hardened supporters of Israel’s exterminationist program, and the federal law enforcement apparatus represents a dangerous escalation in the long history of US participation in the ongoing displacement of the Palestinian people and the domestic repression that necessarily accompanies it. The crackdown on Palestine activists unleashed under Genocide Joe Biden was expressed in the violent repression of the Gaza encampments and the banning of Samidoun. That apparatus has now been turned into a weapon randomly firing at students whose names appear on a shadowy, anonymous website, and lists have been handed over to Trump’s modern day SS thugs.

West Bank Ethnic Cleansing

In the wake of the US-Israel war against Iran, Israel has accelerated its designs for the West Bank; 2,500 Palestinians have been expelled from the Masafer Yatta region, their villages demolished. The Zionist justification for this is that the region lays within IDF free-fire zone 918, one of the many so-called military training areas that make up about one fifth of the West Bank’s total area. Putting aside for the moment the fact that it is immoral to do anything on colonized land – let alone military activity – zone 918, like 80% of the free-fire zones, is merely a pretext for the ethnic cleansing of the West bank; it is not used for military exercises by the IDF.

The genocide of Gaza, the US-Israeli wars with Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, have been made pretext for the expulsion or murder of Palestinians. Marauding bands of settler youths beat, rob, and summarily execute Palestinians at random, while IDF reservists look on, beaming with pride. Per the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972, literally every village in the West Bank has been circumvallated, a labyrinthine network of roadblocks, barricades, machine gun emplacements, and tanks cut residents off from the outside world, from basic necessities.

Mass expulsions of Palestinians from the West Bank by Israel are nothing new – 380,000 Palestinians fled the West Bank as refugees after the territory was conquered by Israel in 1967. Expulsions continued at a steady pace since then, with about 10,000 Palestinians having been forced from their homes between 1995 and 2010 alone.

But this time is worse.

In the past, the ethnic cleansing of the West bank was a deliberate trickle – a rejected building permit here, an arbitrary arrest there – but now the demolition of entire communities has become Israeli policy. Families are given hours to vacate villages which have stood for decades or centuries. Time and again the United States and Israel show us what they are, show us their designs for the world – and the world responds with open letters, toothless marches, initiatives that go nowhere. What is needed is decisive action – courage in the face of unspeakable terror.

Ukraine

Having run for president promising no less than 53 times that he would end the Russia/Ukraine war within 24 hours, Donald Trump announced a new scheme to prolong the war: selling US-made weapons to the Ukrainian government through NATO countries. In continuing the open spigot of weapons to the Ukraine, not only is Trump, the “anti-war candidate” ensuring more war, more suffering, more destruction, he is also ensuring the strengthening of the US dominated NATO alliance. Earlier this month, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte went out of his way to praise Trump’s approach to NATO, saying: “I think when somebody deserves praise, that praise should be given. And President Trump deserves all the praise, because without his leadership, without him being re-elected president of the United States, the 2 percent this year and the 5 percent in 2035 — we would never, ever, ever have been able to achieve agreement on this.”

Trump’s “new” Ukraine policy, weapons over peace, belligerence over diplomacy, is of course identical to Genocide Joe Biden’s policy, with the Trumpian addition of unbridled commerce and strengthening NATO. It has nothing to do with a concern for the Ukrainian people, who are being fed into the meat-grinder of inter-imperialist war by their own US-subservient government, and Russian imperialism, which is waging an unjustified war of aggression against Ukraine.

Brazil tariffs

As part of a new round of tariff threats, Donald Trump turned his attention to Brazil, threatening the country with a 50% tariff for the crime of… offending Donald Trump, the head of US imperialism. In an arrogant violation of the sovereignty of Brazil, Trump wrote “It happened to me, times 10… I’ll be watching the WITCH HUNT of Jair Bolsonaro, his family, and thousands of his supporters, very closely.” Bolsonaro is, of course, the reactionary goon who assumed the Brazilian presidency after the US-backed judicial coup against the Brazilian Workers Party (PT). Bolsonaro came to prominence as a willing participant in Brazil’s military dictatorship, including his support for the death squads. During the vote to impeach Dilma Rousseff, he famously dedicated his “yay” to a convicted torturer.

Following the re-election of Lula de Silva, the Brazilian government indicted Bolsonaro for corruption and attempting another coup against the PT. These are the investigations that have Trump threatening the Brazilian people with tariffs. Not only are these judicial proceedings a matter of sovereignty for Brazil, they are also entirely justified (as a non-abolitionist organization, Behind Enemy Lines fully endorses a long prison term for Bolsonaro), given Bolsonaro’s many crimes against the Brazilian people. Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Brazil is a gross violation of international law and even US laws governing tariffs, and an ugly new phase in the hundreds of years of US imperialism towards the people of South America.