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Trump Rejects Virtual Second Presidential Debate With Biden

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The status of the second presidential debate between President Trump and Joe Biden was cast into doubt Thursday after the commission that organizes the event said it would be held virtually to minimize the risk of spreading the coronavirus.

The Commission on Presidential Debates announced that the second debate scheduled for October 15 in Miami would instead feature virtual appearances by the two candidates, a change the president quickly dismissed as “not acceptable,” kicking off a dizzying day of back-and-forth statements between the campaigns that put the status of future debates in jeopardy.

“I’m not going to waste my time on a virtual debate. That’s not what debating is all about,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo earlier in the morning. “You sit behind a computer and do a debate, it’s ridiculous. And then they cut you off whenever they want.”

Mr. Trump’s decision to forgo the event led the Biden campaign to back out as well, with deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield urging the commission to reschedule the town hall for the following week. Bedingfield said the campaign was prepared to accept the new format, but would now “find an appropriate place to take questions from voters directly” on the day of the debate. Hours later, ABC News announced it would be conducting a town hall event with Biden on October 15, moderated by George Stephanopoulos.

Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager who also recently tested positive for the virus, confirmed the president’s decision after his Fox Business interview. “We’ll pass on this sad excuse to bail out Joe Biden and do a rally instead,” he said in a statement. In a second statement, Stepien agreed that the second debate should be moved to October 22, and the third to October 29.

“We agree that this should happen on October 22, and accordingly, the third debate should then be shifted back one week to October 29,” Stepien said.

But the Biden campaign rejected Stepien’s proposal to push the third and final debate back, with Bedingfield issuing yet another statement saying, “Donald Trump doesn’t make the debate schedule; the Debate Commission does.”

“Trump’s erratic behavior does not allow him to rewrite the calendar, and pick new dates of his choosing,” she said. “We look forward to participating in the final debate, scheduled for October 22, which already is tied for the latest debate date in 40 years. Donald Trump can show up, or he can decline again. That’s his choice.”

Then, on Thursday evening the Trump campaign released another statement calling for the second debate to go forward as planned on October 15. It pointed to the statement of Mr. Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, anticipating the president would be healthy enough to resume public events on Saturday, 10 days after his initial COVID diagnosis. Noting that Saturday is five days before the debate was originally scheduled, the campaign’s statement argued, “There is therefore no medical reason why the Commission on Presidential Debates should shift the debate to a virtual setting, postpone it, or otherwise alter it in any way.”

“[T]he CPD must reverse course and let the debate proceed,” the campaign argued.

The commission rejected this proposal, according to the Associated Press, which reported Thursday night, “The chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates says it is not reconsidering shifting the second debate from virtual back to in-person, despite a request from President Donald Trump’s team.”

In its unexpected announcement early Thursday morning, the nonpartisan debate commission said the second debate would “take the form of a town meeting, in which the candidates would participate from separate remote locations.” The change was made “in order to protect the health and safety of all involved with the second presidential debate,” the group said.

Just after the commission’s statement, Biden’s campaign said he would participate, with Bedingfield saying the former vice president “looks forward to speaking directly to the American people and comparing his plan for bringing the country together.” But Biden himself told reporters he didn’t know what he would do if the president doesn’t participate, before the campaign announced he would also back out.

“I don’t know what the president is going to do. He changes his mind every second,” Biden said on the tarmac before boarding a plane in Wilmington, Delaware. “For me to comment on that now would be irresponsible. I think that if I can follow the commission’s recommendations — if he goes off and has a rally, I’ll — I don’t know what I’ll do.”‘

Mr. Trump told Fox Business that the commission had not informed the campaign of their decision to alter the format of the debate before announcing it publicly. A source familiar with the ongoing debate negotiations told CBS News that the commission did not consult either campaign before making the move, saying the commission “decided this unilaterally.”

The president tested positive for the coronavirus and began experiencing symptoms a week ago, on October 1, according to White House physician Sean Conley. As of Wednesday, the president had been symptom free for more than 24 hours, according to Conley.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends those who become “severely ill” from COVID-19 — including those who require hospitalization and supplemental oxygen, both of which are true for the president — to avoid being around others for at least 10 days after symptoms first appeared, and possibly up to 20 days. The CDC says patients should consult their doctor to see if that period could be shortened if and when they begin testing negative for the virus. The White House doctor has not said whether the president continues to test positive.

Mr. Trump told Fox Business he remains on dexamethasone, a potent steroid, as he recovers from COVID-19.

The first debate between the two candidates last week was a chaotic affair, featuring frequent interruptions by the president that prompted the debate commission to consider new rules allowing the moderator to enforce time limits. The second debate was set to be moderated by Steve Scully of C-SPAN.

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Israel is and will always be a crime against humanity

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Israel is a crime against humanity

Israel, the misbegotten Zionist entity,  on Wednesday, May 5  celebrated the 74th anniversary of its birthday,  an allusion to the usurpation by brutal military force of the Arab-Muslim land of Palestine.

In the process, Zionist gangs, armed and funded by wealthy Jews and colonialist Western powers, such as the UK, carried out a well-devised terrorist campaign of indiscriminate murder and violence against the virtually-unarmed and defenseless  Palestinian community, during which dozens of hideous massacres, like Dir Yasin, were perpetrated by Zionist gangs, like the Hagana, Irgun, Stern, and others.

Also Read: The most brutal massacres of the “Zionist gangs” in Palestine in 1948

 The grisly atrocities forced the vast majority of Palestine’s population at that time, in 1948, to flee their villages lest they face the same fate that the people of Dir Yasin, Tantura, Dawaymeh, and many other hamlets and villages had just faced.

The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when 130 Jewish terrorists from the paramilitary terror groups of Irgun and Lehi stormed Dir Yasin near Jerusalem and murdered 107  Palestinian civilians. Other sources, like New York Times, put the number of victims at 200.

Also Read: Israel having free season on Palestinian civilians including Children and Journalists

In his Memoirs,  the Rvolt, Menachem Begin, the head of the Irgun terror group, who eventually became Israel’s Prime minister,  described the Dir Yasin massacre as a  real miracle because it cast terror in the hearts of the Palestinian populace, prompting them to leave. Even before Dir Yasin, Begin was branded by the British government as “leader of the notorious terrorist organization and banned from entering the UK.”

Since Dir Yasin  74  years ago, Zionist massacres of Palestinians have never really stopped as successive Zionist governments retained and maintained the original Zionist strategy toward the people of Palestine. This genocidal strategy was aimed at achieving three main goals: Expulsion of the bulk of Palestinians.  (There are 7 million Palestinian refugees today), enslaving Palestinians as as “water carriers and wood hewers,”   (apartheid),  or outright physical extermination. This is not propaganda or media hypes. This is the un-official but authentic ideology of the ruling Zionist establishment, even today.

Also Read: Religious Fascism in India & Israel: Tweedledum and Tweedledee

In 1967, Israel launched the 6-days war, during which it seized the rest of mandatory Palestine, namely the West Bank which was under the Jordanian rule, and the Gaza Strip, under the Egyptian rule. Thus, Islam’s first Qibla and third holiest religious place,  al-Aqsqa, fell under the Zionist occupation. 

When East Jerusalem was seized from Jordan, the Israeli army’s rabbi Moshe Goren, strongly advised army generals to blow up the gold-gilded Dome of the Rock, which is part of the Aqsa Mosque. However, a prominent general refused to heed Goren’s exhortations.

Ever since that time, Israel transferred hundreds of thousands of its citizens into the West Bank to live on land that belongs to another people. The purpose of this criminal act is to re-enact the White settlements of the defunct apartheid regime in South Africa and former Rhodesia as well as the Russian demographic presence in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, pending the annexation of the territory and possible expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Also Read: Palestine-Vs. Ukraine: Stark Western hypocrisy  on Palestine and  Ukraine

Numerous UN resolutions were issued, ruling that the settlements were illegal and in a brazen violation of international law. Furthermore, Israel consistently refused to consider the West Bank as an occupied territory, insisting that the region was a “disputed” rather than “occupied” land. The Israeli defiance of the UN and its Security Council’s resolutions is attributed to the almost total American submission to the Zionist entity.

A few years ago during a televised debate with an Israeli official,  I confronted him with the settlements problem as he claimed that it was Israel that really wanted peace and that the Palestinians were the party that displayed intransigence. I asked him rather tersely if he thought that a peace-loving country would build 300 colonies on occupied territories and transfer hundreds of thousands of its citizens to live on land that didn’t belong to them. He was dumbfounded.

Clearly, the brazen Israeli insolence and arrogance of power stem from the absolute, unlimited, and total backing the Jewish state receives from the United States due to the overwhelming influence of American Jewry on the US government, congress, and political life in America.

Also Read: “Jewish State”: A Nazi Concept Implying another final Nakba

I remember one American writer saying half-jokingly that the Palestinians will not be liberated from the Israeli occupation until America is freed from Zionist domination. The Zionist stranglehold on the American government was described amply and analyzed elaborately by the late Jewish intellectual Alfred Lilienthal in his monumental  book “The Zionist Connection: What price peace.”

The Palestinians remain the ultimate reversioner

Despite its military might, economic prosperity, and international connections, Israel still lacks the legal and moral legitimacy.

In ancient times and the Middle  Ages, military conquests gave conquerors sovereignty over occupied territories. However, in the modern era, sovereignty, especially de jure sovereignty, can not be acquired or gained through war. Otherwise, the occupation by Nazi Germany of 8 European states would have been perfectly legal and compatible with international law. The same thing applies to the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait nearly 30 years ago. The same thing can be said about the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

So what makes the Israeli occupation of Palestine, both in 1948 and 1967, different from the Nazi occupation of Europe, the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, and the Russian occupation of Ukraine. In truth, Israel and the Zionist movement have no convincing answer for this crucial question. Instead, they indulge in legalistic sophistry, historical prevarication, and verbal juggling

Also Read: Israel should stop trying to force-feed the Holocaust down people’s throats  as bloody repression of Palestinians  goes on unabated

 Some Zionist apologists try to outsmart themselves by arguing that Israel came under attack and that the occupied territory were won in a  war of self-defense.

However, international law experts make it very clear that coming under attack gives a country the right to repel the attack, but not occupy territories. Thus, the acquisition of territory by military force is absolutely illegal under the international law. This is the reason most countries don’t recognize Israeli sovereignty over both East and West Jerusalem as the city, indeed the entirety of Palestine was conquered by military force, which gave Israel only a de facto sovereignty, but no de Jure sovereign whatsoever.

Needless to say, authentic de jure sovereignty would require all the normal qualifications of sovereignty, which Israel obviously lacks.

Hence, Israel should be viewed as a belligerent occupying power, irrespective of how many countries recognize it and have diplomatic and economic relations with it.

According to Hal Draper ” At the present time Israel is a belligerent occupant of the city (Jerusalem) and is bound by the laws governing such occupation.”

Headly Cook,  an international law expert believes that Israel among all countries of the world possesses not a single inch of territory which she could assuredly proclaim to be her own in perpetuity.(2)

This is why, Palestinians, and Muslims in general, are strongly advised not to ascribe any legal or moral legitimacy to Israel, an entity that has been and continues to be a crime against humanity. (end)

(1)  Draper, Hal.  the Status of Jerusalem,  p. 163

(2)” (Cook, Headly,  Israel: A  blessing and Curse, London 1960, p. 168)

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The US and Israel: The dog versus the wagging tail

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The US and Israel: The dog versus the wagging tail

The US and Israel: The dog versus the wagging tail. By: Khalid Amayreh.

It is an open secret that the United States has been the only country in the world that can prevent Israel from carrying out a holocaust against the Palestinians. Otherwise, the Zionist entity has absolutely no qualms against a full or partial extermination of the Palestinian people. Indeed, the very concept of “Ashmada” (annihilation or extermination) is well-established in the Talmudic literature.

Openly-Nazi Rabbis at the helm of  power in Israel

Several years ago, a Rabbi by the name of  Dov Lior, who holds a Judeo-Nazi ideology advocating the extermination of Palestinian civilians, co-authored a hair-raising book titled “Torat ha’Melekh” (the “Torah of the King”). In the book, he pointed out that there was no such a thing as “enemy civilians” during time of conflict.

Read Also: Is anti-Semitism essential for the survival and growth of Zionism and Jewish peoplehood?

 “The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them.

This is the real moral behind Israel’s Torah and we must not feel guilty due to foreign morals,” he was quoted as saying by the Hebrew newspaper Ma’ariv in 2004.

“A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”

Lior is not a marginal figure in the Zionist religious establishment.

According to the late rabbi Menachem Froman, Lior “is considered among the most learned sages of the Torah in Israel..”

Another Rabbi, David Batzri, told followers that “it is impossible to mix the pure with the impure. They (the Arabs) are a blight, a devil, a disaster.  The  Arabs are donkeys, and we have to ask ourselves why God didn’t create them to walk on all four. Well, the answer is that they are needed to build and clean. They don’t have any place in our schools.”

In May 2007,  Mordechai  Elyahu, a former Chief Rabbi of  Israel, issued an edict that would permit the Israeli army to murder hundreds of thousands of Palestinians .

“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand. And if they don’t stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000.  If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000. Even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”

Read Also: Israel’s intense Practices to Uproot the Palestinians in Jerusalem

Interestingly, these and like-minded rabbis are the actual rulers in Israel today, especially following the formation of the latest government, headed by Benyamin Netanyahu.

How the US sought to restrain Israeli bellicosity

Successive U.S. administrations have always sought to restrain Israel’s genocidal propensity, hoping that the Zionist state would not embark on wholesale genocidal massacres of Palestinians.

Normally, the US would give Israel state-of-the-art of the American technology of death. For example, Israel usually receives some of the latest and most lethal war systems before NATO  members and in some cases before the US armed forces themselves. Thanks to this policy, the Israeli air-force is now only second to the US air-force.

Thus, the Israeli air-force can easily defeat the Royal British air-force, the French air-force, the Russian air-force, and the Chinese air-force.

The US consistently calculated that by aggrandizing the Israeli army, especially its air-force, the Jewish state would adopt relatively moderate policies in the region and be more willing to reach peace agreements with the Palestinians.

However, to the chagrin of the Americans, the political-military establishment in Israel, emboldened by its military might, became ever more extremist, recalcitrant and inflexible as far as the prospects of peace were concerned. Not only that, the Israeli leadership became more disobedient and even more contemptuous of the American government.

Some Israeli political and religious leaders even gasconaded about the tight Jewish domination of the American government, Congress and the two main political parties.

There have been two main consequences of this de facto Israeli defiance of its former master and guardian-ally.

First, the US. Leverage on Israel has never been as low and ineffective as it is today. This is despite America’s unfaltering strategic commitment to Israel’s security and military superiority (qualitative edge) overall Arab-Muslim nations combined). 

In fact, one wouldn’t exaggerate much by arguing that within the frame of the American-Israeli alliance, Israel, not the U.S., now constitutes the centre of gravity.

This observation is vindicated by recent developments following the formation of the most openly-fascist government in Israel’s history, which has effectively scrapped all alleged shared values between the two countries. Thus statements by American officials voicing a modicum of US reservation over the new fascist dawn in Israel have been quite restrained, parsimonious, reluctant, and somewhat bashful.

Second,  Israeli officials, including Benyamin Netanyahu, and broader Likud circles have been quite defiant and contemptuous of American officials, such as President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who reiterated U.S commitment to the two-state solution strategy.

Netanyahu retorted to Biden, saying “Israel doesn’t occupy foreign land.” A pro-Netanyahu writer advised the Americans “to take care of their crumbling democracy before lecturing Israel on occupied territories. More contemptuous is likely to be used by people like Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in reference to the Americans.

Who is the dog and who is the wagging tail?

 The dog versus the wagging tail analogy is used to describe a situation in which a powerful entity like the US is being controlled by someone that is much less important or powerful like Israel. Today, the tail is entrenched in the driver’s seat like never before. The Wagging tail is the State of Israel, and the dog is, or should be, the United States of America. Small, isolated, dependent Israel no more dictates to the imperialist U.S. giant than a tail wags a dog. 

In the past, Israel bullied the governments of the US to abandon erstwhile US policy vis-à-vis Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In the 1970s, for example, the US viewed the settlements as illegal and contravening the rule of international law. Eventually, however, the US came to view these criminal facts as mere “controversial” and incompatible with the aspiration for peace.”  

Now, with the likes of Ben Gvir and Smotrich at the helm of power in Israel, it is more likely that the fascist clique in the Jewish state will eventually pull  American leaders off to the Judeo-Nazi home-turf, not the other way around.

American leaders, whether Trump or Biden,  simply lack the moral immunity to tell Netanyahu, who is merely Ben-Gvir’s and Smotrich’s public relations officer, “enough is enough”! These two words would be sufficient to put an end to the political career of any American president. (end)

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Thousands of US Immigrant Workers Forced Into Modern Slavery

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While, on the one end, thousands of immigrant workers are forced into modern slavery, migrant politics is once again taking center stage in the United States. 

Last Thursday, two buses carrying immigrants and asylum seekers arrived near the residence of vice president Kamla Harris. Texas governor Greg Abbott said that the state of Texas “will continue to send migrants” until the white house comes up with strict policies to secure the border.

Since April, Texas has sent over 7,000 migrants to New York and Washington, DC. Not long before, Florida’s governor sent over 50 undocumented migrants to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

Politicians are, once again, inconsiderately using immigrant men, women, and children as political pawns. But nobody is talking about the suffering and exploitation these immigrants, even with a work visa, are facing.

The Reality of Immigrant Workers: The Operation Blooming Onion

Immigrant exploitation is nothing new in the US. The roots of forced labor — an ugly legacy of slavery — still run deep in the US labor market.

One live example is the recent crackdown in the field of southern Georgia, where 24 people were named in a federal indictment accused of Moder-Day-Slavery. For over three years, the 24 prosecutors trafficked migrant workers from Central America and Mexico and subjected them to horrendous working conditions on the farms in Georgia.

Forced laborers of the operation blooming onion
Forced laborers of the operation blooming onion

On further investigation, the authorities found that the culprits were a part of a transactional criminal organization that has been trafficking immigrant workers since 2015.

The victims were forced to live in cramped, dirty trailers with raw sewage leaking into the trailers, threatened with separation, and detained in a work comp surrounded by a work fence. And this is only a small fraction of thousands of suffering through immigrant exploitation under modern-day slavery.

The Ugly Face of Forced Labor & Modern Slavery in the US

For most natives of developing and under-developed nations, landing a job in the US is a dream come true. The same was true for Jayson, a construction worker in the Philippines, when his boss offered him a handsomely paying job in the states. But it soon became a nightmare. 

Not long after he arrived in the US on a P-1 visa for athletes (as recommended by his recruiter), he realized that he was not here as a worker but as a trafficked laborer.

Jayson
Jayson. Picture by CAST

In the name of safekeeping, the recruiter took Jayson’s passport and asked him to pay $12,000 for a work Visa. Unaware of his rights and visa policies, he worked for the trafficker for nine months (in awful working conditions at a low wage of $400/month) until he was rescued by the FBI.

What’s worst? Jayson is not alone. Lured by the salary, status, and potentially bright future, thousands of temporary migrant workers fall into the trap of forced labor in the US every year.

Read More: Human Trafficking: Modern Slavery Still Exist

The Exploitation of Immigrant Workers in the US

Immigrants from other nations make up a sizeable portion of the forced (enslaved) labor victims in the United States. Most exploited victims suffer because they don’t understand or speak English, nor do they know their rights or the laws.

They decide to immigrate to the United States in the expectation of finding more chances and a better life, putting complete faith in their traffickers, like Jayson, only to find themselves trapped in an unstoppable circle of coercion.

Most immigrants caught in the forced labor trafficking chains come to the United States via student or work (H2A) visa programs. This is where the traffickers exploit the victim’s vulnerabilities, especially when their immigrants are entirely dependent on the exploiters for their basic needs.

The Unfair Power Imbalance

According to recent estimates by State Department, 14,500 to 17,500 immigrants are trafficked into the US every year. But experts believe that the real numbers are much higher since the data on human trafficking are immensely challenging to collect.

As per the Human Rights Center at the University of California, about 10,000 forced laborers are working as slave workers in the US at any given time.

Plus, for the victims who want to take the legal route, the process is complex, arduous, and lengthy. Moreover, the majority of cases are often left unresolved. A recent report by ABC news shows how even skilled immigrant workers suffer from immigrant exploitation and workplace sexual harassment.

All this makes one thing very clear: Immigrant workers are abused, and even after 150 years of slavery abolition, the US is still struggling to eradicate modern slavery.

The Call for Better Visa and Immigrant Protection Policies

In a letter to the government, 18 grassroots legal centers from all over the nation demand essential legislative reforms, such as criminalizing wage theft, enabling migrant workers to take legal action against exploitative employers, and widening the Fair Entitlements Guarantee to every worker, including those with temporary work visas.

But, still, the requests for more robust regulation to prevent the exploitation of immigrants are yet to be addressed.

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