Genesis of Right Wing Islamic Activism

Syed Akhtar Ehtisham

The US believed that Muslims between Greece and China, The Arc of Islam would function as fire wall against the USSR, and might even incite the restive Muslims inside the USSR to open rebellion.

The U.S. and other Western countries and Israel have in turn befriended, manipulated, double crossed and cynically used the Mujahideen as cold war allies. After the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan, they disdainfully ditched the fighters and must accept a major share of responsibility for the emergence of Islamist terrorism.

In the 1950s, the prime nationalist enemies were Nasser of Egypt and Mossadegh of Iran. The US and Britain used Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser, and funded Ayatollahs during the US sponsored coup in Iran in 1953.

In Islam, religion and state are not separate. But the initial Islamic state followed an egalitarian policy. No holds barred Islamism, a more recent political creed, is in fact a perversion of the religious faith. The US supported, organized and funded it. It is variously represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, Ayatollahs, Saudi Wahhabis, Hamas, Hezbollah, Jihadis and Al-Qaida.

9/11 shook Washington to realize that if you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. The pace of Islamist regression since 9/11 attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq has accelerated; extremism, fundamentalism and fanaticism increased immeasurably in the Indian sub-continent and Muslim countries.

During the cold war, the USSR was only an emblem of the enemy of the capitalist society. Nationalism, humanism, secularism, and socialism were also enemies. Muslim fundamentalists collaborated with the West because they too were scared of liberal and secular ideas.

In spite of all the effort of the imperialists and their satraps, Arab socialism and left wing nationalism grew during the 1960s. The US forged an alliance with Saudi Arabia and with Wahhabis, and joined hands with the former in pursuit of an Islamic bloc. Saudis founded the Islamic Center of Geneva (1961), the Muslim World League (1962) and the Organization of the Islamic Conferences (1969).

After the death of Nasser whose image had been tarnished by the 1967 war with Israel, the US actively supported the ascension of Anwar Sadat to unchallenged authority in Egypt. The US funded religious opposition of Bhutto in Pakistan. General Zia of Pakistan could not have gotten away with killing Bhutto without US connivance. Hasan Turabi of Sudan could not have risen to power without the help of the US ally, the Islamic Brotherhood.

The 1979, Iran revolution should have taught the US and its allies that fighting against a nationalist tide was counterproductive. But they went on to spend billions on Afghan jihad. The US looked on as Jordan and Israel aided terrorists in Syria, and Israel helped found HAMAS.

To undermine Carter’s bid for reelection, the neocons even made a deal with Iran not to let the hostages go before the polls. They again made secret deals with Iran in the 1980s.

With the U.S.S.R out of the way, the US and its allies felt that they could sit on their laurels. Political Islam was not regarded as an existential threat. But to keep their hand in, instead of supporting democracy, they favored the army crackdown in Algeria. To keep the satrap Mubarak in line in Egypt, the US covertly supported the Islamists. In Afghanistan they watched unconcerned as the relatively liberal factions were wiped out by the Pakistan supported Taliban.

Post 9/11 Bush panicked. His handlers held his hand and told him that Al-Qaida, which the U.S had nurtured, could be taken care of easily. World public opinion was with the U.S.

The window of opportunity thus opened up had potential. But instead of using it to consolidate support for the anti-terror campaign, they used it to invade Iraq. Iraq was sitting on vast oil reserves. Its Arab allies had gone back on their word to fund the aftermath of the disastrous war with Iran. The US had implicitly given Saddam the go ahead to capture Kuwait. 4. An excuse to invade the country had to be found. It had a secular government so an Al-Qaida link would not be credible. WMDs had to be invented and the support of the Islamic right and Iraqi Shias, who were supported by Iran, had to be garnered.

Post WW I, when the Ottoman Empire finally crumbled, the U.S had actually started casting covetous glances on the Mid-East.

In 1945, FDR went east in search of oil, and met with the king of Saudi Arabia, Ibne Saud on board his ship, which was denuded of all females for the encounter. That started a long lasting relationship.

The U.S academia started launching departments and centers for Middle Eastern studies (discussed in detail elsewhere in the narrative).

Americans believed that the religious fanaticism of Arabs would make them natural enemies of atheistic communism. Islam seemed a better bet than secularism. *But it never dawned on them that the Islamists were qualitatively different from the comprador clerical establishment.*

The advent of the cold war and Founding of the state of Israel empowered the Zionists in the U.S establishment and Middle East scholars found themselves in the backbenches. The U.S was deprived of the insight the scholars could offer.

In the late 1970s, Timothy LaHaye formed California Alliance of Churches, Jerry Falwell launched Moral Majority, and the two dominated the discourse in the Council on National Policy, the Christian Coalition. Pat Robertson’s broadcast empire and James Dobson’s Focus on Family

reinforced the emergence of the religious right as a potent force. Texas and Midwest oil barons lavished funds on the Christian Right.

Islam had been a dominant force for a thousand years. Though there were dissenting voices like Ibne Tammiyya, the religious establishment collaborated with the ruling class. Wahhab was a voice in the wilderness, accepted only by a tribe on the fringe. Wahhabis joined hands with the British and French agents sent out to undermine the Ottoman Empire.

Looking for ways to revive the fortune of Islam, Jamal al-Afghani had created the Pan-Islamic movement in the late 1880s. Hassan al-Banna in 1928 and Maududi in 1940 respectively, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamat e Islami in India.

The Nasserist wind of change was blowing hard across the whole Arab world. It was an existential threat to the Arab rulers. Oil satraps of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf opened their coffers to the Muslim Right. They were deemed natural partners by the Right Wing in the USA. The partnership matured in the Reagan years.

Blinded to irrationality by their hate of secular nationalism, the fundamentalist Christian Right and fanatic Zionists happily threw their whole hearted support behind the fanatic Taliban in Afghanistan.

The biggest hazard is the regression of Muslims, especially the younger individuals, not only in all Muslim countries but also among the Muslim populations all over the world. They are highly vulnerable to the lure of the fantasy land of an after-life surrounded by blooming gardens, with springs of wine, masses of delectable food and seventy two nubile virgins. Women are not offered an equivalent deal.

But the scarcity of suicide bombers in the gender is not just due to their pleasure being restricted to husbands. They are treated as little more than serfs in the tribal-feudal mode prevalent in Muslim countries.

The reaction of the US to 9/11 in Afghanistan was fast, effective and widely applauded. But it morphed into an agenda of colonization of abstract space, encirclement of Iran, and control over the oil in the Mid-East and the former Asian Soviet Republics and keeping a close eye on China.

* Ideas can be combated only with ideas. The term war on terror is a misnomer. It is akin to the British conquering all of India because a few of its soldiers had been killed in an ambush. War in Iraq was akin to FDR attacking Mexico in response to Pearl Harbor.*

Terror is a product of conflict of ideology and a profound feeling of victimization.

The Continued War (in the 12th year end of 2013) in Afghanistan did not destroy Al-Qaida or the Taliban. It only weakened the government, left the general populace at the mercy of marauders of all kinds. They have little choice but to support the resurgent Taliban.

The adventures have dealt a severe blow to the U.S. economy. The Afghan and Iraq wars were tailor made for the Bush policy of empire building and pre-emptive war, and allowed the administration to construct a huge political-military enterprise from East Africa to Pakistan.

The U.S must deal with grievances that push angry Muslims to such organizations as the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S must join the U.N.O, E.U and Russia to help settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with a two state solution and by withdrawal of Israelis from illegally held lands to pre-1967 borders. That would pull the rug from underneath the feet of the Islamic right.

The U.S must abandon its imperial pretensions, withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, dismantle its bases in mid-East and elsewhere (at the last count some 9,000), sharply cut training mission and visibility of its navy and arms sales.

The U.S must refrain from imposing its preferences on the region. Its call for democracy is taken as (and is) a pretext for greater U.S. involvement in the region. The countries have to find a political system they can live with. The US must stop propping up satraps in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

The U.S must give up its tendency to make bellicose threats to nations such as Iran, Syria and Sudan. The true emancipation of the Mid-East will only come from secular and liberal forces, which will offer education, freedom of expression and religion and modernization. Fundamentalism of whatever variety-Islamic, Christian or Jewish, is always a reactionary force.

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The book “God, Government and Globalization”, defines the germination and evolution of the concept of faith, the evolution of government through multiple stages of human civilization and emergence of capitalist corporation domination. The central theme of this book is that religion, except in its pristine stage, has always supported establishment and the ruling elite, whether it be a monarchy, aristocracy or corporations. All religions have advocated aggression against the other, ostensibly in the name of faith, but actually to acquire land and assets. Islam’s early colonization and the crusades are just two examples from history. Capital has changed its essential character from being national to multinational and with the advancement in technology, has ceased to pay even lip service to the working class.

Pegasus Rides Again: The NSO Group, Spyware and Human Rights

Binoy Kampmark

They keep insisting they don’t do it. But companies such as the Israeli NSO Group are global vendors for regimes, whatever stripe or colour, for surveillance tools to spy on those they deem of interest.  The 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden that exposed the warrantless world of mass surveillance by entities such as the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ caused a global rush towards encryption.  Governments, left groping in the dark, sought out private providers of surveillance devices in an unregulated market. Not only could they get effective spyware; they could do so at very affordable prices.

The NSO Group was one such provider.  It sees its mission was a noble thing, marketing itself as a creator of “technology that helps government agencies prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe.”

The company also emphasises their mission to target those “terrorists” and “criminals” who have gone dark.  “The world’s most dangerous offenders communicate using technology designed to shield their communications, while government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies struggle to collect evidence and intelligence on their activities.”  The group insists that its “products help government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies use technology to meet the challenges of encryption to prevent and investigate terror and crime.”

Forbidden Stories, a network of journalists with a mission “to protect, pursue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison, or murder”, sees things differently.  One of the topics that figures prominently in the ranks is the Pegasus project, a collective journalism effort of global proportion coordinated by Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International’s Security Lab.  Its primary purpose: to expose the depredations of the Pegasus spyware, the golden child of the NSO Group.

Pegasus is a rather vicious thing, enabling those deploying it to access a phone’s contents and remotely access its microphone and camera functions, turning into a surveillance device.  It was given a gloss of notoriety in 2018 when it was revealed that Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz had been one of its victims.  Abdulaziz claimed that communications with journalist Jamal Khashoggi, butchered by a Saudi squad of assassins in Istanbul in October 2018, were intercepted by the Saudi authorities because of the spyware.  His lawyers argued that the hacking “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr. Khashoggi.”

On July 18, Phineas Rueckert of Forbidden Stories revealed that some 180 journalists had been selected as targets by some 10 NSO customers across 20 countries.  He begins with the Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, whose phone was “regularly infected with Pegasus” for almost three years.  Ismayilova was baffled on realising how the security of her phone had been compromised.  “I feel guilty for the messages I’ve sent.  I feel guilty for the sources who sent me [information] thinking that some encrypted messaging ways are secure and they didn’t know that my phone is infected.”

Details are then supplied.  Both Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International were given access to a leak of more than 50,000 records of phone numbers selected by NSO clients for surveillance reasons.  The clients are a varied bunch, from those of the autocratic flavour – Bahrain, Morocco and Saudi Arabia – to the more democratic ones, such as India and Mexico.  The NSO Group, in a letter to Forbidden Stories, claimed it could not “confirm or deny the identity of our government customers” for “contractual and national security considerations”.  Rueckert admits that identifying instances where the specific phone number was compromised would be difficult short of actually analysing the device.  But, with the assistance of Amnesty International’s Security Lab, “forensics analyses on the phones of more than a dozen of these journalists – and 67 phones in total – [revealed] successful infections through a security flaw in iPhones as recently as this month.”

The Pegasus project is significant for revealing the sheer scale of espionage.  The Guardian, a participating media outlet, promises to reveal more details about targets that “include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state.”  At this writing, a rather juicy detail has come to light: the potential targeting of French President Emmanuel Macron by Morocco using Pegasus.

The NSO response to the Forbidden Stories report was snootily dismissive. The account was “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability and interests of the sources.”  The company ducks the issue by suggesting that the information gathered on the individuals in question could have been obtained via other services.  “The claims that the data was leaked from our servers, is a complete lie and ridiculous since such data never existed on our servers.”

As for the murder of Khashoggi, old defences are resurrected.  “We can confirm that our technology was not used to listen, monitor, track, or collect information regarding him or his family members mentioned in the inquiry.  We previously investigated this claim, which again, is being made without validation.”

For an outfit such as the NSO Group, such rebuttals have proven to be meaningless.  Twin lawsuits against NSO filed in Israel and Cyprus by a Qatari citizen and by Mexican journalists in 2018 revealed extensive evidence of the company’s complicity in illegal surveillance.  NSO also failed to get the lawsuit by Abdulaziz dismissed, and was ordered to pay his legal costs, with the judge Guy Hyman calling the case “broad, especially in matters of the roots of constitutional values and fundamental rights”.  In 2019, WhatsApp brought an action against the company, claiming that Pegasus had been used to target 1400 user accounts.  For WhatsApp’s chief Will Cathcart, the Pegasus project reporting revealed “what we and others have been saying for years; NSO’s dangerous spyware is used to commit horrible human rights abuses all around the world and must be stopped.”

The Pegasus project has shed more light on the government revolt against encryption, one facilitated by private enterprise.  Left unregulated, the NSO Group and its competitors can operate with vigilante disdain and amoral proficiency.  David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, has wisely called for a moratorium on the sale of such spyware, describing an industry “out of control, unaccountable and unconstrained in providing governments with relatively low-cost access to the sort of spying tools that only the most advanced state intelligence services were previously able to use”.  Control, accountability and constraint have never quite featured in the NSO Group operations manual.

Washington forces reshuffling of Haitian regime

Bill Van Auken

Haiti’s acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph, who claimed power after the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, announced Monday he will surrender power to Washington’s choice, Ariel Henry. Henry had been nominated by Moïse to succeed Joseph, but his installation was interrupted by the early morning raid on Moïse’s private residence in the wealthy Petionville suburb of Port-au-Prince that ended in the death of the president, who was shot 12 times and had his eye gouged out.

In the immediate aftermath of the killing, both the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, Helen La Lime, and the US State Department recognized Joseph as Haiti’s head of state, but on Saturday, the so-called Core Group, comprised of the US, France, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Spain, the European Union and representatives from the United Nations and the Organization of American States, pulled the rug out from under him.

Police patrol the street around the Primature in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

The Core Group issued a statement Saturday that failed to mention Joseph’s name, while urging the formation of “a consensual and inclusive government,” adding, “To this end, it strongly encourages the designated Prime Minister Ariel Henry to continue the mission entrusted to him to form such a government.”

Joseph, Henry and others in Haiti’s ruling kleptocracy of US puppets swiftly responded to their master’s voice. Joseph told the Washington Post that he had agreed on Sunday to step down “for the good of the nation,” adding, “Everyone who knows me knows that I am not interested in this battle, or in any kind of power grab.”

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Joseph announced that he was in control, declared a nationwide state of siege and called for the United States to send in troops.

For his part, Henry issued a pre-recorded message to the Haitian people on Sunday, claiming power and congratulating the population for its “political maturity in the face of what we can call a ‘coup d’état.’”

Finally, Joseph Lambert, the president of the Haitian Senate, which has ceased to function because all but 10 of its members’ terms expired as Moïse blocked elections, dropped his own claim to be the rightful successor to the president. He openly admitted that he had received phone calls from both the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince and the State Department telling him to “stand down.”

In other words, Henry is the hand-picked puppet of Washington. As for the claims that he is forming a “consensual and inclusive government,” he is being installed without the consent of the Haitian people. His claim to office is based upon his appointment by Moïse, who had maintained himself in power in defiance of his constitutional term limit, ruling by decree, having gutted the legislature, local government and the judiciary.

Henry has assembled a cabinet that is controlled by operatives of Moïse’s right-wing ruling P.H.T.K., or Bald Head party. Joseph, whom he accused of carrying out a “coup,” retains his post as Haiti’s foreign minister. Incumbents are also remaining in the ministries of finance, justice and health.

A French and US-trained neurosurgeon, Henry is a trusted servant of imperialist interests in Haiti. He earned Washington’s confidence serving as vice president of the so-called Council of Wise Men, a body formed by the US and its allies to legitimize the US-backed 2004 coup in which President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed and flown to Africa aboard a US military aircraft, with 1,000 US Marines invading the country the next day. The council presided over the creation of an unelected government headed by Prime Minister Gérard Latortue, a right-wing talk show host from south Florida, who oversaw a reign of terror against Aristide supporters and ruled with the backing of a United Nations “peace-keeping” force known as MINUSTAH. This force occupied Haiti for 13 years, quelling unrest in the slums of Port-au-Prince and spreading a cholera epidemic—the first in modern Haitian history—which claimed some 10,000 lives.

Henry subsequently served as minister of interior in the government of President Michel Martelly, overseeing repression of a series of mass protests against price hikes, corruption and crooked elections. A former singer known as “Sweet Micky,” with close ties to Haitian police, ex-military and former members of the hated Tonton Macoutes, the murderous secret police of the Duvalier dictatorship, Martelly was brought to power in 2011 through fraudulent elections engineered by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Moïse, Martelly’s hand-picked successor, also installed with US backing through fraudulent elections, earned Washington’s loyalty by backing the US campaign for regime change in Venezuela.

The bringing to power of the un-elected Ariel Henry is only the latest in the long line of US imperialism’s colonial-style interventions in Haiti, dating back to the 1915 invasion launched by Woodrow Wilson, on the pretext of maintaining order following the country’s last presidential assassination. That invasion was followed by a 30-year occupation and savage repression of popular resistance, the creation of a Haitian army to continue this repression and then the 30-year dictatorship of the Duvaliers, which was supported by Washington until 1986, when the US Air Force flew “Baby Doc” out of the country to escape a mass popular revolt.

The details surrounding the assassination of Moïse, the pretext for the latest political machinations orchestrated by Washington, remain far from clear.

While Moïse’s political successors have tried to attribute the killing to Colombian mercenaries, 18 of whom are in custody, with five allegedly still being sought, Haitian authorities have been compelled to arrest five Haitian police officers, including Dimitri Hérard, the chief of Moïse’s security, who had traveled to Colombia at least five times this year. Questions have been raised as to how Moïse’s assassins were able to evade security checkpoints on the road leading up to his villa, and why not a single member of his security detail suffered a scratch in the attack.

The nexus between US imperialist operations and the assassination is also evident. The Pentagon has acknowledged that an undisclosed number of the Colombian mercenaries were US-trained, while one of the Haitian suspects arrested was a principal FBI and DEA “asset” in Haiti. The firms that recruited the Colombian mercenaries and financed the operation are both based in south Florida, while the individual in charge of recruiting the alleged assassins, Antonio Intriago, has been tied to the February 2019 provocation on the Colombia-Venezuela border involving an attempt to force through a fraudulent aid convoy. He has been linked to prominent right-wing US politicians like Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen as well as to Colombian President Iván Duque, Washington’s closest ally in the region.

Colombian television news channel Noticias Caracol has reported gaining access to statements made by the Colombian mercenaries arrested in Haiti in which they recounted being brought into the country under diplomatic status and escorted by police special forces units. They also testified that Claude Joseph, who assumed power after the assassination, had given the order for the assassination. They said that they had been assured his protection, and therefore had not had a plan for escaping the country after the killing.

While the Biden administration dispatched FBI and Homeland Security personnel to Haiti with the ostensible purpose of aiding in the investigation of the assassination, there is no doubt that Washington will facilitate whatever cover-up is required to consolidate a regime subordinate to US imperialist interests.

The US attempts to cobble together a new puppet government have no support whatsoever in the Haitian population. They will only inflame the mounting social anger of masses of workers and poor against the existing social conditions and political setup in the poorest country of the Americas and against the imperialist powers that stand behind them.

German federal and state governments did nothing despite warnings of flood catastrophe

Elisabeth Zimmermann

The number of confirmed fatalities in the floods in Germany and Belgium has risen to over 200. In Ahrweiler district in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, at least 122 people lost their lives. Many remain missing. In the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, at least 48 people died. In Belgium, the number of dead stands at 31. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for.

The extent of the devastation produced by the worst flooding disaster in Germany since the storm flood on the North Sea coast in 1962 is horrendous. Since the weekend, areas in Bavaria, Saxony, and Austria have also been hit by serious flooding.

Completely flooded villages on the Ahr

Leading politicians who have visited the disaster zones over recent days have hypocritically declared their sympathy. They repeatedly state that the extent of the disaster and the speed with which relatively small rivers like the Ahr and Erft were transformed into raging torrents could not have been foreseen.

These claims are being exposed as lies by internationally-renowned scientists. The high number of fatalities is a direct product of the criminal inaction of governments at the federal and state levels. Although they were informed in advance, they did nothing to warn the people and save lives.

The British Sunday Times newspaper reported that the first indications of the approaching catastrophe were provided nine days in advance by images from a satellite. A team of scientists sent “the German authorities a series of forecasts so accurate that they now read like a macabre prophecy: the Rhineland was about to be hit by ‘extreme’ flooding, particularly along the Erft and Ahr rivers, and in towns such as Hagen and Altena,” noted the newspaper.

Four days prior to the floods, the European Flooding Alert System (EFAS) then warned the German and Belgian governments about floods on the Rhine and Meuse rivers. Although these warnings stated quite precisely more than 24 hours in advance which districts would be affected, nothing happened.

The warnings of extreme rain storms were simply not transmitted to the people in the relevant areas by the responsible governments, authorities, and media outlets. Virtually no precautionary or protective measures were taken, and no evacuations of the worst-affected areas were ordered.

Pictures of destruction in the district of Ahrweiler

Germany got its preparations “badly wrong,” Hannah Cloke, a professor for hydrology at the University of Reading in the UK, told the Sunday Times. “A monumental failure of the system” led to one of the deadliest disasters in Germany’s post-war history.

“When I woke up [on Thursday] morning and saw how many people had died, I just thought: you can do better than this,” said Cloke. “I’m disappointed that particularly in the cities you had people washed away. That suggests that lots of things are going badly wrong.”

There was “certainly time” to have warned larger cities and communities and prepared evacuations. “People should have been receiving warnings; people should have understood the warnings.”

“We should not be seeing this number of deaths from floods in 2021,” Cloke said in an earlier interview. “It’s just unacceptable. There’s something going wrong with the system.”

The former president of the German Firefighters Association, Hartmut Ziebs, levelled serious accusations at the federal government. The government failed to sufficiently involve the population in national disaster protection plans, because they did not want to “burden” the people.

In an open letter cited by the Bild newspaper, he stated, “The federal government has carried out exercises under the name ‘Lükex’ for years. The unthinkable was played out and analysed. Lists of recommendations were prepared. Results? Virtually nil! Can’t happen, won’t happen, we can’t explain it to the population, costs too much money, the list of reasons for rejection was almost never-ending.”

Similar comments were made by Wolfgang Clemen, professor of information systems at the Institute of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. As a member of the so-called protection commission, Clemen advised the federal government for many years on matters of national security and disaster prevention.

“Almost all exercises and scenarios ended with us putting our heads in our hands,” he said, according to Der Spiegel. “When it really comes down to it in Germany, the population is left to fend for itself.” Infrastructure to provide warnings has been dismantled, while warnings and reform proposals from experts have been ignored.

The World Socialist Web Site pointed out in a previous article that the resources for disaster protection were cut back severely over recent years. Neither the necessary measures to tackle climate change nor flood protection systems were financed, even though serious flooding has repeatedly occurred. Instead, hundreds of billions of euros were made available to the banks and corporations, and military spending was increased dramatically.

Social media is full of comments condemning a class that is prepared to sacrifice human lives to secure its class interests. Under the hashtag #Laschetwusstees (Laschet knew it, Armin Laschet is Minister President of North-Rhine Westphalia) and #Dreyerwusstees (Dreyer knew it, Manuela Dreyer is Minister President of Rhineland-Palatinate), people have vented their outrage against the heads of the two worst-affected states.

“Imagine how many people could have been saved if the warnings had been listened to, the population immediately informed, warned, and evacuated. Unfortunately, what we have here is a monumental system failure,” wrote one user. Another with the Twitter handle ShadowFax added, “Not a single warning system worked. Not one. This incredible ignorance towards science runs through all levels of political decision-making. Monumental system failure at all levels.”

The ruling elite has already demonstrated its indifference towards human life during the coronavirus pandemic. In Germany alone, more than 91,000 people have fallen victim to their “profits before lives” policy. The same criminally irresponsible behavior is shown with regard to climate and disaster protection. Scientists and their warnings are ignored. Thousands of workers and their families pay the price for this with their health and even their lives.

French anti-vaccine protests expose right-wing politics of Jean-Luc Mélenchon

Will Morrow

Last weekend, tens of thousands in France took part in protests against the Macron government’s “health pass,” which effectively legally mandates vaccination against the coronavirus. The protests were politically dominated and led by the extreme right. They mobilised both fascistic layers openly opposed to coronavirus restrictions as well as disoriented, libertarian and anti-scientific sections of the middle class opposed to vaccination.

The protests were called by openly neo-fascist parties, including Marion Maréchal Le Pen and Florian Philippot, the leader of the Patriots party. Le Pen and Philippot openly call for ending even limited measures to combat the virus. Underscoring the political forces mobilised in this movement, the weekend of the protests saw two coronavirus vaccination centres in the Isère and Pyrénéees regions attacked.

Jean-Luc Melenchon in Marseille, May 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

But the central role in providing this movement with a “popular” image has been played by pseudo-left tendencies, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (La France Insoumise—LFI).

Macron’s law requires that anyone who enters public spaces, including cafes and restaurants, public transport and shopping centres, carry with them a “health pass,” consisting either of evidence of total vaccination, recent recovery from the coronavirus, or a negative test in the previous 48 hours. Health care workers are legally required to be vaccinated. In a particularly reactionary measure, coronavirus tests will no longer be free.

The Socialist Equality Party does not support Macron’s law, which is not aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus. It is aimed at justifying his policy of fully reopening the economy, ending social-distancing measures, and allowing the coronavirus to spread, in order to support business operations and corporate profits. While vaccination in France stands at only approximately 40 percent, daily cases are already over 10,000, dominated by the more contagious Delta variant. Macron’s policy of herd immunity is preparing a new wave of deaths.

The campaign by LFI against the law, however, has not been aimed at mobilising working class opposition to this policy of herd immunity. Rather, it has supported the same policy by promoting resistance to vaccinations and undermining public consciousness of the necessity for a continued struggle against the pandemic.

Following Macron’s announcement of the new law on Monday, Mélenchon and fellow LFI deputy François Ruffin released statements which dovetailed with the right-wing campaign against mass vaccination. They endorsed the protests to be held on July 17 without acknowledging that far-right forces were leading calls for the protests.

In a video address published last Thursday, Mélenchon attacked the policy of universal vaccination: “A mandatory vaccine seems to be a disproportionate measure, given that, according to the World Health Organisation, not everyone needs one, and that it is pointless to want to vaccinate everyone, when it suffices to vaccinate above all those who are most directly placed in danger by the circulation of the virus.”

This is an outright fabrication of the position of the World Health Organisation, which actively campaigns for the broadest vaccination of the entire population, except those who should not be vaccinated for medical reasons. It has insisted that to prevent the spread of the virus a sufficient percentage of the population—which numerically has not been determined—must be vaccinated. Mélenchon advocates an opposed, anti-scientific policy, involving vaccinating only those most at risk of dying.

The WHO has warned that such a policy provides an ideal breeding ground for the development of new and even more deadly variants. Mélenchon dishonestly uses the phrase “above all” to confuse the question of the prioritisation of vaccines with the overall goal of vaccinating the population.

Mélenchon also opposes the requirement that health workers be vaccinated. “Let’s look at this list—it is abhorrent—of those who must get vaccinated,” he said. “We see health workers. I understand why they would be indignant. For months they were celebrated like heroes and now … we point the finger at them like bastards.”

Health workers work directly with the most vulnerable sections of the population, using the latest developments in science to save lives. It is entirely appropriate that they be vaccinated, for their own safety and that of their patients. Moreover, this has the support of more than 70 percent of the population in France, according to polls. Why health workers would be “indignant” at a requirement that would assist in their efforts to stop the pandemic, Mélenchon does not explain.

François Ruffin has also campaigned to undermine public support for vaccination. In his various interventions, he downplays the danger of the virus, asserting that it presents virtually no danger to himself or anyone his age. While he himself is personally vaccinated, he insists that this is a purely personal choice that he took to reduce the possibility of social distancing restrictions. Downplaying any dangers of the pandemic, Ruffin claimed on BFMTV that “those getting vaccinated now are doing it less out of fear of coronavirus than because they say, I want to go to the bar, to the restaurant in peace, to see my family in hospital.”

In the same interview, Ruffin said vaccination should instead be decided by the individual “when we know that there is a benefit that is superior to the risks.” But this is a fraud. In reality, the benefits of vaccines that cause harmful side effects in only a handful of people per million vaccinated is inevitably far superior to the risks of a virus that kills tens of thousands of people per million infected. Ruffin is effectively arguing against vaccination as a tool to eradicate the virus.

Defending resistance to vaccination, Ruffin argued that compulsory vaccination had “undermined a fundamental medical ethical principle: that we don’t have the right to use one person for another.”

“What is the alternative?” he stated. “Instead of vaccinating everyone, we should massively target the at-risk population.” Making clear that in any case the deadly virus would keep spreading through the population, Ruffin added that, “in any case, that would clearly help stopping the hospitals from overflowing.”

Mélenchon and Ruffin justify their policy of herd immunity using the same argument as the far right—that mandatory vaccination is an attack on their democratic rights and personal liberty.

This is not a defence of democratic rights. Their argument could be used to justify a broad variety of anti-social behaviour, including drunk driving, on the grounds that it is everyone’s “right” to do as they please.

As a point of fact, there are currently 11 viruses for which vaccines are legally mandated in France. The extension of universal vaccination throughout the 20th century, both in the Soviet Union and in western capitalist countries, was a by-product of advances in science and the rise of health care and living standards in the population, won through major social struggles by the working class.

It is worth noting that while LFI participated in Saturday’s right-wing protests against vaccinations, they issued no similar calls for protests and strikes against Macron’s policy of “back-to-work” or the reopening of schools throughout the pandemic.

That is because their campaign against vaccines is part of their efforts to normalise the spread of the virus and justify a policy of herd immunity demanded by the corporate and financial elite.

The Macron government has sought to capitalise on the openly right-wing anti-vaccine protests in an effort to justify its own policy. Thus, spokesman Gabriel Attal denounced Saturday’s rallies of a “capricious and defeatist fringe” that would “be happy to remain in chaos and inactivity.” He counterposed this to “a labouring and voluntary” population that “wants to put the virus behind them and work.” In fact, hesitancy toward vaccination has been exacerbated by Macron’s policies, which have from the outset been aimed at protecting profits and not lives and been marked by a series of lies and 180-degree turns.

Covid-19 infections soar 500 percent: a social crime of the Dutch ruling class

Parwini Zora

Coronavirus infections in the Netherlands skyrocketed by more than 500 percent in early July, an unprecedented contagion rate for a European country. The reproduction rate (R0) remains at an all time high in the Netherlands at 2.91—indicating that each person infected goes on to infect nearly three people on average.

The surge in infections is the direct result of the scrapping of almost all remaining social distancing restrictions, driven by the bourgeoisie’s campaign to fully reopen the economy after June 26. Now, an average of more than 11,000 recorded daily cases are announced by the Dutch Public Health Institute (RIVM), compared to approximately 500 daily infections in mid-June.

Health care workers wait for the arrival of an ambulance at Bernhoven hospital in Uden, southern Netherlands, Monday, March 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

In line with an undeclared official policy of spreading the virus, the Dutch ruling class utilized the falling case numbers in June and the vaccination program in recent months as an excuse to dispense with social distancing measures. This included eliminating even the minimal mandated use of face masks in public spaces.

Only 43 percent of the Dutch population is vaccinated, though roughly two-thirds has had at least one of the two shots. However, around three-quarters of new cases in the Netherlands are occurring among young people, particularly among those who have not completed the two vaccination shots. More than half of infections involve the highly contagious Delta variant, which is now present in at least 104 countries.

As many as 1,000 COVID-19 infections were linked to the Verknipt outdoor festival in Utrecht alone, a two-day festival that was attended by 20,000 and which required a “test for entry.” This only underscores yet again that official plans to prevent super-spreader events at mass gatherings are ineffective.

Eighteen months into the pandemic, the ugly reality of Dutch society, with its colossal levels of social inequality, pervasive poverty and ruling class criminality, has been exposed. The Netherlands was classified as having the worst risk level for COVID-19 infections by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Faced with mounting social indignation, the Dutch caretaker government can no longer entirely conceal their complacency and indifference.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte felt compelled to officially “apologize” for the premature relaxation of social distancing, calling it “an error of judgment.”

Acting Health Minister Hugo de Jonge said at the same press conference that the late June loosening of restrictions combined with a lack of social distancing and the Delta variant “had had, of course, an accelerating effect. You can unfortunately see that with hindsight.”

Rutte followed up with a second “apology” for a “bad press conference” during which he and de Jonge had dismissed criticism that the government had eased restrictions too early. The ministers maintained the decision had been responsible, given the information they had at the time. In fact, it shows primarily that the government is in hock to the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the banks, and their most vocal henchmen, the neo-fascistic far-right and affiliated anti-vaccination outfits.

While Rutte offers his cynical and empty “apologies,” the financial aristocracy is rejoicing that profits are surging due to the reopening of the economy. The economic bureau of ABN AMRO, the third-largest Dutch bank, stated in a communiqué last October that “the explanation for the decline in economic activity must largely be sought in the effect of the fear of the virus.” As of July 1, as infections surge, the agency has tweeted: “Now that the fear of the virus has gone, the economic damage is also less.”

Despite months of warnings from epidemiologists of outbreaks across the continent, capitalist governments in Europe have lifted or are ending the last of their limited measures to tackle the virus. They are thus fueling a rapid rise of the more infectious Delta variant.

An open letter denouncing the British government’s murderous policy in The Lancet, now signed by over 1,200 scientists, warns of “a generation left with chronic health problems and disability.” Immunologists in the Netherlands are warning that inadequate vaccine coverage among youth, coupled with the lack of social distancing, is leading to the surge in cases. “It is not just because of the Delta variant. It’s also because most of these young people were not fully vaccinated,” Dr. Dimitri Diavatopoulos, an immunologist at the Radboud Centre for Infectious Diseases told Sky News.

The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment stated that from infections that could be traced to their source, 37 percent occurred in hospitality venues such as bars and clubs.

Dutch authorities are now scrambling to reintroduce minimal social distancing, bargaining with business owners on subjects like closing times of cafes and restaurants and fixed seating for diners or concert-goers. All dance venues and nightclubs will be closed. Also, festivals spread over several days would be canceled and large public gatherings restricted to smaller groups. The current ‘curbs’ went into effect on 17 July and, for now at least, are to remain in place until 14 August.

The concerted downplaying of risks, and the dead-silence about effects of Long-COVID among an officially infected record number of 1.7 million, approximately 10 percent of the entire Dutch population, accounting for nearly 18,000 official deaths in between, fits into the capitalist logic and calculation of herd immunity. In other words, anything that hinders business or potentially makes people reluctant to let money roll must be removed.

In the meantime, the Dutch ruling establishment, with the tacit support of the union bureaucracies and their political allies, are presenting the pandemic as largely a thing of the past and have ignored calls from scientists and medical personnel to take coordinated scientific public health measures. This is a politically-criminal action, complicit with social murder as governments play Russian roulette with the health of millions.

Suicide attempts among Canadian children have doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic

Dylan Lubao

A Canadian children’s charity has declared a state of emergency with respect to children’s mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Children First Canada launched the #codePINK campaign, which aims to raise awareness about pediatric emergencies.

The figures reported by the campaign are devastating:

● A 200 percent increase in hospital admissions for substance abuse among children over the past year

● A 100 percent increase in suicide attempts by children during the same period

● 70 percent of children between ages 6 and 18 say that the pandemic has harmed their mental health in some form

● 62 percent of parents admit that the pandemic has worsened the mental health of at least one of their children

● 61 percent of parents expect the residual effects of the pandemic to impact their child’s mental health even after the pandemic ends

While the pandemic has unquestionably dramatically worsened the mental health crisis facing children, the real cause of the dramatic rise in suicides and substance abuse, which had begun well before COVID-19 emerged, is the capitalist profit system.

The statistics cited by #codePINK are ultimately a by-product of the disastrous, decades-long gutting of social services by all the major political parties, from the social democratic New Democratic Party to the Liberals and Conservatives. Mental health services across Canada are in an atrocious state, with patients often waiting months to see specialists and receive support. Public education is also in a deplorable state following decades of austerity, which has pushed up class sizes, cut back on support staff, and placed increased demands on already overworked teachers.

Meanwhile, the same politicians and political parties who repeat ad nauseam the claim that there is “no money” for critical health care and mental health services have lavished hundreds of billions of dollars on the banks and major corporations, and increased military spending by tens of billions of dollars.

Even as Canada’s billionaires increased their wealth by $78 billion over the past year, no significant additional resources were made available to support children and their families. The millions of workers thrown out of their jobs were provided with a piddling $500 per week under the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, plunging tens of thousands of families into poverty.

Provincial governments across the country, under the direction of the federal Liberals, have pursued a savage policy of mass infection, including by keeping schools open to in-person learning. The underlying goal of this policy was to keep children in classrooms as much as possible, so that their parents could go to work and generate profits for the corporations. This policy was continued even when COVID-19 ran rampant during last winter’s second wave, which claimed the lives of more than 10,000 people across Canada.

When the authorities felt they had no other option but to resort to remote learning, they pursued a policy of deliberate sabotage. Children and their families, not to mention teachers, were left largely to fend for themselves. Virtually no equipment or support was provided to facilitate the transition to online learning, including much needed social support for students facing an unprecedented situation that placed incredible pressure on their mental health.

In partnership with some of the country’s top children’s hospitals and pediatric organizations, Children’s First Canada is using the #codePINK platform to lobby governments for greater investment in and support for improved mental health outcomes. They stress that for years, every government in Canada has grievously underfunded mental health supports. This has disproportionately impacted working class communities, where individuals are twice as likely to be hospitalized due to self-harm than their counterparts in affluent neighbourhoods.

According to Sara Austin, CEO of Children First Canada, “We simply haven’t seen that robust investments that are really needed in our health-care system, particularly when it comes to the mental health of our children, but even simple things like accessing rehabilitation services or life-saving surgeries for children, kids are being put on a waitlist sometimes for months, upwards of years now, and it’s getting worse by the day.”

A prominent, yet unsettling feature of their campaign is the demand for a return to in-classroom learning while the global pandemic rages out of control.

The campaign organizers have called for a summit between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the provincial premiers to address their concerns. Such a meeting, however, would only be used to provide unwarranted scientific legitimacy to the ruling class’ drive to end all restrictions on the spread of the virus.

A return to in-classroom learning would lead to thousands of infections among children, especially given their low vaccination rates—those under age 12 are still ineligible for vaccination. These children would then go on to infect their family members and the broader community, fuelling a resurgence of the pandemic. To date, there have been over 271,000 COVID-19 cases among youth 19 and under, representing 19.2 percent of all infections, the largest proportion of any age group.

Capitalist governments across the world have utilized a mixture of pseudo-science, cherry-picked medical research and outright lies to advance the claim that schools are not significant vectors of COVID-19 infection, and that children are not at risk of serious illness when contracting the virus.

This was most egregiously demonstrated in February, when US President Joe Biden flatly lied to a second grader, telling her that she and her family bore no risk of getting infected. A barrage of editorials in the major US papers followed, falsely claiming that schools were safe to reopen, even as classroom transmission helped drive the disastrous winter and spring waves of the pandemic in the US and Canada. This prepared the way for school reopenings across the continent.

The majority of school districts in Canada remained open for at least partial in-classroom education through the end of the current school year. However, millions of workers opted to keep their children learning remotely. A survey conducted in June revealed that a majority of respondents (59 percent) opposed the return of students to classrooms in the fall without being vaccinated.

In conjunction with the inadequate and haphazard execution of remote learning, the renewed push to scapegoat the latter for children’s declining mental health is squarely aimed at breaking all remaining opposition in the working class to full school reopenings.

The ruling class reopening campaign has produced its intended effect on a section of the middle class, represented by pediatricians and children’s health professionals. On June 4, an open letter was sent to Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford, demanding the immediate reopening of schools, and the provision of in-classroom instruction for summer and fall classes. Similar letters have been sent to provincial governments across Canada.

Signed by over 400 medical professionals, the letter’s arguments for reopening schools mirror the rhetoric articulated by the most unabashed proponents of the “herd immunity” policy, which has been thoroughly debunked by science. The nightmare unfolding in the UK shows what is in store for Canada if such a course is pursued. There, the number of daily new cases driven by the Delta variant has surpassed 50,000 and the death rate is quickly rising.

In a recent column on the current surge in the UK, the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) clearly laid out how school transmission helped drive the rapidly emerging fourth wave of the pandemic. Examining outbreaks of the more transmissible Delta variant up to the end of May, Public Health England identified 140 outbreaks in schools, the largest number of any setting. As the BMJ put it, “Spread of the delta variant is likely to have played an important role in the exponential rises we are seeing of cases in England, and hospitalisations in North West England.”

While the pediatric concern for children’s mental health is well-founded, capitalist governments across the country have absolutely no interest in devoting additional resources to the safe resumption of public education. On the contrary, the concerns as outlined in the doctors’ letters are being shamelessly touted by these governments as proof that all school doors must be reopened with virtually no public health restrictions in place.

A situation in which the ruling class feels unrestrained to promote its murderous herd immunity policy is primarily the responsibility of the trade unions and their pseudo-left adjuncts. From the start of the pandemic, they have supported this policy and ruled out any job action to oppose it. In April of this year, Harvey Bischof, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, urged the provincial government to “safely” resume in-classroom education, knowing full well that the hard-right Conservatives had no intention of keeping children and their families safe.

French President Macron among those targeted by international Pegasus smartphone spyware operation

Kevin Reed

The Pegasus Project media consortium published new revelations on Tuesday about the targeting of the smartphones of as many as 50,000 journalists, business and political figures and dissidents with spyware by governments around the world. According to the Washington Post, the list of identified targeted individuals contained fourteen prominent heads of state and governments.

Although none of those who were identified offered their phones up for forensic analysis so the infiltration of their devices with the spyware could not be confirmed, the Post report said the list of targeted leaders included “three presidents, 10 prime ministers and a king.”

Emmanuel Macron [Sebastien Nogier, Pool via AP]

The identities of the fourteen individuals were derived from the list of 50,000 phone numbers that was leaked to the French media non-profit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International and then reviewed by the 17 news organizations that comprise the Pegasus Project.

The Post reported that the three sitting presidents are France’s Emmanuel Macron, Iraq’s Barham Salih and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa. Three former prime ministers are Pakistan’s Imran Khan, Egypt’s Mostafa Madbouly and Morocco’s Saad-Eddine El Othmani. Seven former prime ministers are Yemen’s Ahmed Obeid bin Daghr, Lebanon’s Saad Hariri, Uganda’s Ruhakana Rugunda, France’s Édouard Philippe, Kazakhstan’s Bakitzhan Sagintayev, Algeria’s Noureddine Bedoui and Belgium’s Charles Michel. The one king is Morocco’s Mohammed VI.

The Post said the media groups within the Pegasus Project confirmed the ownership of the phone numbers “through public records, journalists’ contact books and queries to government officials or other close associates of the potential targets.”

The revelations about the scope of Pegasus spyware use internationally is resulting in a series of lawsuits and political crises around the world. On Tuesday, for example, the French government demanded an investigation into the report that President Macron was one of the individuals who had been targeted by the hacking operation.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex told the National Assembly that the government had ordered investigations. An official Élysée Palace statement said, “If the facts are confirmed, they are clearly very serious. All light will be shed on these press revelations. Certain French victims have already announced that they would take legal action, and therefore judicial inquiries will be launched.”

The Pegasus spyware—developed by the cybersecurity firm NSO Group—has been contracted by governments since 2016 to transform smartphones running the latest versions of either iOS or Android operating systems into 24-hour surveillance devices. The initial versions of the software used a technique called “spear-phishing” in which text or email messages are used to get the device owner to click on a malicious link that would then download the spyware onto the phone.

Since these methods have become less effective, NSO developed more advanced methods of getting Pegasus onto the smartphones such as “zero-click” attacks that do not require the device owner to do anything for the spyware to be actuated. The zero-click methods exploit flaws in the operating system security to gain entry into a targeted smartphone. The Guardian reported on Sunday, for example, that NSO had been exploiting vulnerabilities in WhatsApp by placing the malicious code directly into the program and infecting a user’s phone as soon as they download it. More recently NSO has been exploiting a weakness in Apple’s iMessage to gain “backdoor access to hundreds of millions of iPhones.”

The Guardian also said that, “Pegasus can also be installed over a wireless transceiver located near a target, or, according to an NSO brochure, simply manually installed if an agent can steal the target’s phone.”

Once a phone has been hacked by Pegasus, the operators of the spyware can harvest any data on the device included phone call records, text messages, address books, calendars, email messages, internet browsing histories, geolocation and map data and also activate the microphone and camera.

NSO Group—named after the first names of its founders Niv Carmi, Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie who are all ex-members of Unit 8200, the Israeli Intelligence Corps—was founded in 2010 in Tel Aviv. The use of NSO’s software for spying on journalists and political oppositionists was initially exposed in 2012 following the signing of a $20 million contract with the government of Mexico.

In 2014, NSO Group was purchased by the American private equity firm Francisco Partners for $130 million, and these investors then flipped the cybersecurity company for $1 billion three years later.

By 2018, Amnesty International accused NSO Group of helping the regime of Saudi Arabia to spy on a member of the organization’s staff. It was later alleged that NSO’s Pegasus software played a role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi regime by tracking his whereabouts in the months leading up to his death. In 2019, WhatsApp accused NSO Group of injecting spyware into its system by exploiting the call feature of the software.

NSO Group has denied all along that it is responsible for the ongoing malicious software attacks. When WhatsApp presented evidence of smartphone hacking with NSO’s tools, the company blamed the hacks on its customers. The company has recently stated publicly that it has sold licenses for Pegasus to 40 unnamed countries and continues to maintain that it does not maintain any of the data of its clients or operate the software once it is sold to a country.

NSO Group has also maintained that it is technologically impossible for its spyware to be installed on smartphones within the US. According to Slate, the company claims that the Pegasus software will “self-destruct if it finds itself within American borders.”

Responding to the absurd statements by NSO Group, Edward Snowden, the whistleblower and former intelligence analyst who exposed a global US government electronic surveillance program, tweeted on Tuesday afternoon, “NSO’s claim that it is ‘technologically impossible’ to spy on American phone numbers is a bald-faced lie: an exploit that works against Macron's iPhone will work the same on Biden’s iPhone. Any code written to prohibit targeting a country can also be unwritten. It’s a fig leaf.”

Earlier in the day, Snowden commented on the revelation that French President Macron was on the target list, “No one is safe from the out-of-control designer spyware industry. Export controls have failed as a means of regulating this easily abused technology. Without an immediate global moratorium on the trade, this will only get worse.”

Snowden also denounced the Washington Post for its editorial response to the Pegasus revelations. “WaPo’s editorial solution to the NSO scandal is so embarrassingly weak that it is itself a scandal. These companies (and their hosts) claim ‘transparency, accountability, and licensing requirements’ are already in place! You ask for less than nothing.”