Kabul drone strike was CIA-military murder

Patrick Martin

A New York Times analysis of the August 29 US drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, based on military-intelligence sources as well as interviews with survivors and co-workers of the victims, demonstrates that the incineration of ten members of an Afghan family, including seven children, was a wanton act of mass murder.

Despite claims by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the attack followed a rigorous protocol and was a “righteous strike,” the Times report, published September 11, indicates that every step, from the initial identification of the target to the final decision to launch, was carried out in a reckless fashion, entirely indifferent to the human consequences. Every stereotype of punch-button, remote-control warfare is confirmed.

Military-intelligence sources admitted to the Times that they did not know the identity of the driver of the white Toyota Corolla when they gave the orders to strike it with a Hellfire missile, nor did they know who lived in the home where the car had just stopped in the courtyard. The decision to attack was based entirely on the “pattern” of conduct by the driver, who allegedly visited an Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K) “safe house,” and was later seen loading heavy objects carefully into his car, in a way that supposedly suggested bomb materials (they were actually water canisters).

US MQ-9 Reaper Drone (Image credit: U.S. Air Force/Paul Ridgeway public domain)

The initial claims from the Pentagon were that four ISIS-K militants had been killed, along with three civilians, and that a secondary blast, much larger than the first, had taken place, indicating that the US missile had caused a large cache of explosives to detonate. The actual toll was three adults and seven children, six of them ten or younger, and there was no secondary explosion.

The prime target of the attack, Zemari Ahmadi, the driver of a vehicle that was supposedly being prepared to carry out a bomb attack on US forces at the Kabul airport, was actually a long-time employee of a California-based aid group, Nutrition and Education International. He and another victim, his cousin Naser, had applied to the US Embassy for refugee status in the United States, fearing they would be targeted by the Taliban because they worked for an American non-governmental organization. Instead, they were murdered by the US government.

Ahmadi had gone to his job at the group’s office in Kabul, a longtime location of a US-based organization which would certainly have been known to the US Embassy and US intelligence services, and in the course of the day loaded his car with canisters of water for his family and neighbors, because there was no water service there in the chaos following the collapse of the Afghan government.

When he returned home, which he and his three brothers and their families shared, in the fashion typical of Afghanistan, the children ran out to welcome him—and all were incinerated in the fireball caused by the detonation of a Hellfire missile launched by a circling drone.

The victims included Ahmadi, 43; his sons, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; three nephews, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; his cousin Naser, 30; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya, whose relationship to the family is unclear.

According to information supplied to the Times by military-intelligence sources, Ahmadi was initially identified as a potential target because on his way to work he stopped at a home that had been identified as a “safe house” for ISIS-K, the terrorist group that carried out a suicide bomb attack August 27 at the Kabul airport, killing 13 US soldiers and at least 170 Afghan civilians.

Ahmadi reportedly made three stops on his way to work, two to pick up co-workers, one to visit the home of his boss, the director of the Kabul branch of Nutrition and Education International. How any of these locations—all belonging to employees of a US-based charity—could be identified by US intelligence as havens for terrorism was not explained.

The actual decision to fire at this alleged ISIS-K target was equally unexplained. According to the Times, “Although the target was now inside a densely populated residential area, the drone operator quickly scanned and saw only a single adult male greeting the vehicle, and therefore assessed with ‘reasonable certainty’ that no women, children or noncombatants would be killed, U.S. officials said.”

Eyewitness accounts gave a diametrically opposed picture. The Times report continues:

But according to his relatives, as Mr. Ahmadi pulled into his courtyard, several of his children and his brothers’ children came out, excited to see him, and sat in the car as he backed it inside. Mr. Ahmadi’s brother Romal was sitting on the ground floor with his wife when he heard the sound of the gate opening, and Mr. Ahmadi’s car entering. His adult cousin Naser had gone to fetch water for his ablutions, and greeted him.

The car’s engine was still running when there was a sudden blast, and the room was sprayed with shattered glass from the window, Romal recalled. He staggered to his feet. “Where are the children?” he asked his wife. “They’re outside,” she replied.

The report on the Kabul drone strike does more than expose the monstrous carnage for which the US military-intelligence apparatus is responsible in this instance. There are countless such episodes over the past two decades, always justified in the same fashion: US intelligence identified a terrorist “operative” or “facilitator,” the “pattern of activities” indicated that an attack on a US target was “imminent,” the strike was carried out in a fashion calculated to “minimize civilian casualties,” and all of these actions were taken on the basis of “reasonable certainty.”

Most of these drone-missile strikes have been carried out in rural areas or remote towns inaccessible to media investigation, unlike the Kabul strike which was conducted, in a sense, with the whole world watching. But there is no doubt that if a serious investigation were conducted into any of thousands of such missile strikes, which have incinerated tens of thousands of people in an area stretching from Central Asia to North Africa, the results would be similar to those found by the Times in Kabul.

American imperialism is, in the full sense of the word, a gigantic criminal enterprise. Its leaders should be tried, convicted and punished to the fullest. And its apologists—like the Times itself, on 364 out of 365 days every year—should be branded as such. One day’s truth cannot outweigh the years of deliberate lying and cover-up that have served to conceal from the American people the reality of the imperialist “war on terror.”

Eviction filings in US spike in week following end of moratorium

Chase Lawrence

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling which ended the eviction moratorium, millions of renters stand the risk of losing their housing amid the new surge of the pandemic. Eviction filings have already skyrocketed for the week ending September 4, with four of six states monitored by the Princeton University’s Eviction Lab having already exceeded historic averages.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s weekly Household Pulse Survey for the week ending August 26 found that 3,511,056 respondents are facing the “likelihood” of eviction in the next two months. This is taking place as the Biden administration has allowed the expiration of federal unemployment benefits for 7.5 million jobless workers, who will be left with nothing, and the $300 supplement for another three million workers still receiving meager state unemployment benefits.

While data is only out for the first four days of the month, within these days dramatic increases in eviction filings have already been observed. Out of the 31 cities that the Eviction Lab tracks, 13, or roughly a third have seen an increase in evictions above and past their respective historic averages for the same period. The three largest increases seen as of September 4 were recorded in Charleston, South Carolina, at 232 percent the historical average; Wilmington, Delaware, at 238 percent; and Dallas, Texas, at 134 percent.

People from a coalition of housing justice groups hold signs protesting evictions during a news conference outside the Statehouse, Friday, July 30, 2021, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

Five saw filings increase relative to historic averages in previous months, with Delaware seeing a 130 percent rise. Before September, Delaware saw eviction filings consistently at half or less of its 2016-19 averages at virtually every point following March 2020, when the moratorium was implemented.

Indiana is now 22 percent above average. It had also stayed under historical averages since March 2020. New Mexico has seen a similar increase, with evictions averaging now at 140 percent the state’s 2017-2019 averages and reaching the highest point since the Eviction Lab started tracking the state. Other states like Minnesota and Connecticut did not increase past their respective averages but saw increases nonetheless relative to previous months preceding the end of the moratorium.

Rental assistance funds of $46.5 billion have been allocated, but the vast majority of the money has not been distributed. Treasury Department Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that she would begin to move funds from jurisdictions that have failed to distribute assistance by the end of September to ones that did. In other words, the Biden administration will allow poor renters in areas with unwilling local governments to be deprived of federal rental assistance.

In a hearing on Friday, California Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters said state and local governments have only distributed 11 percent of the emergency rental assistance funds available. “There is no question that the funds are not reaching landlords and renters quickly or widely enough,” she meekly complained.

One of the major reasons for the failure to distribute the funds is resistance from landlords themselves who have exploited the landlord-friendly character of the measure, which gives them veto power over whether to accept it or not.

The solution the Congressional Democrats advocate would be even more favorable to landlords. The Expediting Assistance to Renters and Landlords Act of 2021 bill, introduced by Waters, would allow landlords to directly apply for back-rent themselves, in what essentially amounts to a bailout of the landlords.

Slumlords who maintain illegal units will simply throw out residents late on payments and get new, desperate renters. The recent flooding in New York City caused by Hurricane Ida exposed that hundreds of thousands of low-income residents live in illegally converted basements. In Los Angeles County, with a population of 10 million, there are an estimated 200,000 such illegal units.

In addition, the New York Times noted, “Federal and local officials, housing experts, landlords and tenants cited an array of problems that slowed the flow of aid: bureaucratic missteps at all levels of government, onerous applications, resistance from landlords, the reluctance of local officials to ease eligibility requirements for the poor, difficulty raising awareness that rental aid even existed, and a steep rise in rents that increased the incentive for kicking out low-income tenants.”

Housing assistance has also been decimated by decades of bipartisan attacks on the remains of the social safety net in the country. The only comparable program to the Emergency Rental Assistance Funds program is the Section 8 voucher program, a federal program that provides funding to make up the difference between what tenants pay and what the going market rate is for housing by paying landlords and nonprofits.

As the Times notes, Section 8’s funding has been “stagnant for decades” and waiting lists “of up to 10 years are not uncommon in many cities.” Given the onerous nature of the certification requirements, Section 8 was unable to provide any sort of useful means for the new money to be directed. That is, no preexisting infrastructure was in place for the relatively small amount of funds to be distributed for rental assistance.

By contrast there is a vast governmental infrastructure for the various bailouts of the financial and corporate oligarchy, which has received trillions of dollars looted from the public treasury. This includes the bailouts following the 2008 global financial crash and many other “small” bailouts of individual industries, such as the airlines in 2001, as well as GM and Chrysler in 2009. The bipartisan CARES Act has funneled trillions more to the largest corporations, including purchases of their bad debts, and the Federal Reserve pumps $120 billion in virtual free credit into the financial markets every month .

In other word, a well-oiled infrastructure exists for distributing aid to the ruling class, which has enriched itself during the pandemic, while tens of millions of people are being threatened with destitution and homelessness.

Israel responds to jail break with dragnet across the occupied West Bank and Israel

Jean Shaoul

Following an unprecedented dragnet operation across Israel and the occupied West Bank, the Israeli authorities captured four of the six Palestinians on the run after their audacious jail break on Monday from the maximum security jail in Gilboa, Israel.

Four of the prisoners were serving life sentences for their involvement in attacks on Israelis during the second Palestinian Intifada (2000-2005), while two had been held for years, awaiting trial. As Palestinians living on land captured by Israel during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, they had been held in Israel by the Zionist state’s military regime that has for decades used collective punishment, house demolitions, expulsions, torture, forced confessions and systematic theft to strip the occupied population of almost all democratic rights and human dignity.

Their detention in an Israeli jail contravenes Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that outlaws the transfer of prisoners outside of the occupied territory. This is, however, a widespread Israeli practice that serves to prevent the prisoners’ families in the West Bank and Gaza from visiting them. According to Addameer, the prisoners’ rights group, Israel holds 4,750 Palestinians, including 42 females, 200 children and 550 administrative detainees, across dozens of prison facilities.

Protesters carry posters with pictures of Palestinian prisoners that read "Ahed Abu Ghalmeh a life sentence and five years, freedom for Mohammed al-Salaymeh, a 25 years sentence," during a rally supporting Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

Many of these prisoners are awaiting trial, while others are in so-called administrative detention, whereby they are held without trial or even charges. Their conditions in captivity are nothing short of brutal, and they face the constant threat of beatings and torture. The Israeli authorities even deny them food, with the result that the Palestinian Authority (PA) pays their families to support them in jail.

Two were caught on Saturday in the Arab town of Umm al-Ghanam in Israel. One was Zakaria Zubeidi, 46, from the northern West Bank city of Jenin. Zubeidi joined and later emerged as a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Fatah’s armed faction, after Israel launched a horrific attack on the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002, killing hundreds of Palestinians and carrying out a mass demolition of homes, including Zubeidi’s family home. The other was Mahmoud al-Arida, a member of the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

A further two, whose names were not released, were captured on Friday near Nazareth in northern Israel, while another two remain on the run. Five men, all members of Islamic Jihad, are Monadel Yacoub Nafe’at, 26, Yaqoub Qassem, Yaqoub Mahmoud Qadri, 49, Ayham Nayef Kamamji, 35, and Mahmoud Abdullah Ardah, 46.

While there were reports that local residents in Umm al-Ghanam and Nazareth had turned in the prisoners—claims denied within the two towns—sparking angry denunciations by Palestinians in the West Bank, others have suggested that such reports were part of a deliberate attempt by the Israeli authorities to drive a wedge between the Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank.

The men hail from Jenin, where there is mass opposition to President Mahmoud Abbas’s corrupt Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority for its role as Israel’s subcontractor in its efforts to permanently subjugate them in their own land. In recent months, there have been gun fights between Israeli forces and the Palestinians in the Jenin area and the refugee camp, with the PA’s own security units unwilling to enter the camp. Two weeks ago, Israeli security forces killed at least four Palestinian men with live fire when Israeli special forces raided the Jenin refugee camp to arrest a Palestinian man.

The prisoners’ audacious escape from the high security jail prompted jubilation and hilarity among the Palestinians and throughout the Middle East while profoundly embarrassing Israel’s military intelligence apparatus that described it as “a major security and intelligence failure.” It is one of just a handful of such escapes that include the escape of three Palestinians from the Kfar Yona facility in 1995 and an escape via tunnels from the Shata prison in 2014.

The Palestinians had tunneled their way out of Gilboa by digging a hole with a spoon from their cell toilet floor to open underground passages built during the prison’s construction, whose plans were apparently on the website of the architectural firm that had designed the prison. As the underground passages were open and apparently not monitored, the prisoners were able to dispose of the building waste without detection. The hole beyond the prison’s fence through which the prisoners escaped was situated directly below a watchtower whose guard was asleep.

The Israel Prison Service (IPS) immediately announced that it would relocate around 400 Islamic Jihad-affiliated inmates inside Gilboa, Megiddo, Rimon and Katziot prisons in Israel to other prisons to isolate them from each other, some of whom were later held in solitary confinement. Their use of special units and the military to transfer prisoners who refused to go voluntarily prompted days of tensions inside the jails. On Wednesday, after Palestinian prisoners in Katziot prison set fire to seven cells in protest against their transfer, the military moved in to reassert control, while the IPS banned all visits for Palestinian prisoners for the rest of this month and declared that no new visits could be booked.

As the news of the tensions within the prisons emerged, angry demonstrations broke out across the West Bank that were put down with brutal force. According to the Palestinian News Agency, Israeli forces fired stun grenades and tear gas at protesters, injuring nearly 100 Palestinians in the Nablus and Hebron governorates, while four were injured in clashes in East Jerusalem. On Friday, the Palestinians held a mass “Day of Rage” protest, called by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group that controls Gaza, in solidarity with the prisoners.

Israel deployed hundreds of troops to scour villages and the countryside for the escapees and arrested several of the prisoners’ relatives, a form of collective punishment outlawed under international law. The military extended the closure of the occupied West Bank beyond the planned closure from last Monday to Wednesday during the Jewish New Year celebrations and set up hundreds of checkpoints to prevent the escaped prisoners from crossing into the West Bank and Gaza, amid calls for the security forces to catch and kill them as a deterrence to others.

The Palestinian Authority warned that Israel’s “repressive” measures against the prisoners could ignite a new intifada. A PA official said, “Israel is playing with fire. The issue of the prisoners is extremely sensitive. The situation is very dangerous.” He warned Israel that the West Bank “is on the verge of explosion” because of the anger over the measures taken against the security prisoners, while the PA Foreign Ministry said that Israel’s latest measures “rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

The PA is acutely aware of mounting public anger over its cooperation with Israeli security forces, its rampant corruption and nepotism, mismanagement of public monies and refusal to tolerate dissent, especially if it targets Fatah, the ruling party that has enriched a handful of Palestinian families at the expense of the broad mass of the population.

Last week, the PA was forced to indict 14 members of the PA’s security services on charges of beating to death Nizar Banat, an outspoken activist well known for his fierce criticism of the PA on social media, last June. His death at the hands of the Palestinian security forces turned into a rallying cry against Abbas and the PA. Banat’s family, however, dismissed the indictments, saying that the 14 are merely “sacrificial lambs” and that the senior Palestinian officials that gave the instructions should also be charged.

Last month, Israel agreed to transfer $155 million to the Palestinian Authority—monies it described as a loan—to keep the cash-strapped government afloat.

In Gaza, following threats by Islamic Jihad and Hamas to launch rockets into Israel if the six escapees or other prisoners were hurt, militants fired a rocket into Israel on Friday and again on Saturday, causing no damage after the prisoners were captured. Israel launched air strikes on the Palestinian enclave in response.

A Hamas spokesman said that Hamas will demand that the escaped prisoners be included in any future prisoner exchange deal negotiated with Israel, which is seeking the release of two Israeli civilians and the bodies of two Israeli soldiers held in Gaza. There is still no agreement with Israel over Gaza’s reconstruction following Israel’s 11-day assault last May, after the PA backtracked on transferring Qatari monies through its banks in the West Bank to Gaza, citing concerns that its banks would be exposed to lawsuits alleging support for terrorism, as Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by Israel and other Western countries.

Phone call between US and Chinese presidents underscores dangerous tensions

Peter Symonds

US President Joseph Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held their first phone conversation since February last Thursday [US time], amid mounting tensions fueled by Washington’s aggressive stance toward Beijing across the board—diplomatic, economic and strategic.

Few details were issued. Both sides issued brief read-outs from the 90-minute discussion, but no decisions were announced and no joint statements were issued. In short, Biden initiated the call in a bid to enlist China’s assistance on matters of US concern, but offered nothing in return and the standoff between the world’s two largest economies continues.

The tensions were evident even in the limited official reports. A White House statement declared that the two leaders had “discussed the responsibility of both nations to ensure competition does not veer into conflict.” An administration official told reporters that Biden’s message had been to ensure “we don’t have any situation in the future where we veer into unintended conflict.”

Xi Jinping (Left), Joe Biden (right) (Image Credit: Alan Santos Wikimedia Commons (Left), AP Photo/Evan Vucci (Right))

The very fact that the prospect of “conflict” between two nuclear-armed powers is raised in formal statements indicates it is under discussion behind closed doors. Over the past decade, beginning with the “pivot to Asia” initiated by the Obama administration, in which Biden was vice-president, the US has sought to undermine China and prepare militarily for war.

According to a Chinese foreign ministry statement, Xi made clear that “the policies that the United States has adopted toward China for some period of time have pushed Chinese-US relations into serious difficulties.”

Xi warned: “Whether China and the United States can properly handle mutual relations is a question for the century that concerns the fate of the world, and both countries must answer it.”

A senior White House official told reporters on Friday that Biden had requested the call after becoming “exasperated” by the unwillingness of lower-level Chinese officials to hold substantive talks with his administration.

The “unwillingness” of Chinese officials is no surprise. The Biden administration has not only continued, but escalated, the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-China policies, including:

* Perpetuating the Wuhan Lab lie that the COVID-19 pandemic originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, despite expert evidence to the contrary and a World Health Organisation investigation which found it was “extremely unlikely” to be the case.

* Denouncing China for “genocide” of the Muslim Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region of the country—another unsubstantiated lie. Beijing undoubtedly uses police-state measures in Xinjiang, as it does elsewhere in China, but there is no evidence it is engaged in the physical elimination of the Uyghur population.

* Strengthening ties with Taiwan and thereby undermining the One China policy that has been the basis of diplomatic relations between China and the US for three decades. In 1979, the US ended diplomatic ties with Taipei, effectively acknowledging that Beijing was the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan.

* Maintaining Trump’s trade war measures that included tariffs on more than $360 billion worth of Chinese goods, leading to China to retaliate with tariffs on more than $110 billion of US products. The US has also provocatively imposed bans on Chinese hi-tech giants, such as Huawei, aimed at limiting their sales and access to components.

Driving the dangerous confrontation between Washington and Beijing is the determination of US imperialism in its historic decline to prevent any challenge to its global hegemony by all means, including war. While also targeting Russia and Iran, the US regards China as the chief threat to its position and has demanded that Beijing abide by the “international rules-based system” by which Washington has set the rules for global capitalism since World War II.

Shortly after taking office, Biden made abundantly clear that his administration would maintain Trump’s anti-China policies. At the first top-level meeting between US and Chinese officials in Alaska in March, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken provocatively opened up with a list of American denunciations and grievances against China, triggering an extraordinary slanging match before the press.

China’s top foreign policy official Yang Jiechi responded by pointing to Washington’s hypocrisy on “human rights” and indicating that US references to an international rules-based system were tantamount to insisting that Beijing bow to US interests. China upheld the UN-centred international system, he said, “not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called ‘rules-based’ international order.”

Yang also noted that, unlike the US, China did not believe “in invading through the use of force, or toppling other regimes through various means, or massacring the people of other countries.”

The only difference between the orientation of Trump and Biden toward China is a tactical one. Biden has sought to marshal support from US allies for its confrontation with Beijing, in particular by holding the first-ever leaders’ meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—a quasi-military alliance with India, Japan and Australia, directed against China.

Since March, meetings between Chinese and US officials have continued to stall amid mutual acrimony. In July, US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman flew to China and met with Foreign Minister Wang Yi but left complaining that she faced a list of demands and grievances. This month, Wang told Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry, who visited Tianjin for talks, that cooperation on climate could not be separated from other issues, and called on the US to take steps to improve the broader relationship.

According to the US statement on last week’s call between Biden and Xi, the “two leaders had a broad, strategic discussion in which they discussed areas where our interests converge, and areas where our interests, values, and perspectives diverge.” As well as climate change, the US was evidently seeking Chinese assistance over North Korea and its debacle in Afghanistan.

After reviewing US policy toward North Korea, the Biden administration is appealing for talks with Pyongyang. At this stage, the North Korean regime has rejected negotiations, which in the past two decades have led to nothing but broken US promises and crippling sanctions. Washington now wants Beijing to pressure Pyongyang to come to the negotiating table by threatening to cut off its economic lifeline.

The Biden administration is concerned that the ignominious collapse of the US puppet regime in Afghanistan will open the door for greater Chinese and Russian influence in the strategic Central Asian country. Chinese officials have held talks with senior Taliban officials, seeking guarantees that the new regime will not allow its territory to be used by Uyghur separatist groups.

Even as it seeks Chinese cooperation, however, the Biden administration continues to ramp up its confrontation with Beijing. Top US officials are reportedly discussing whether to launch an investigation into Chinese industrial subsidies, with a view to imposing greater trade penalties on Beijing.

Just hours before Biden spoke to Xi, the media reported that his administration was considering allowing Taipei to include “Taiwan” in the name of its representative office in Washington—a further undermining of the One China policy that would anger Beijing.

Biden’s call for Chinese cooperation has a hollow, hypocritical ring to it. He is steering a course not toward “peace and prosperity” but conflict and war.

UK parents threatened with fines, jail for refusing to send children into unsafe classrooms

Julie Hyland

Within days of schools reopening in England, cases of COVID-19 are rising exponentially, and deaths along with them. But still the Conservative government and local authorities—many Labour Party-run—continue to insist that schools are safe, and parents who reject the lie and refuse to send their children into COVID infected classrooms are faced with threats of fines and imprisonment.

In the week to September 8, 272,334 people tested positive and 6,748 were admitted to hospital—a daily average of 863. Over 130 people were killed by the virus each day on average, 932 in total. Case rates are highest among those aged 0-19, especially in the 10-19 age group, 43,166 of whom tested positive in the last week.

Primary school pupils return to a school in Bournemouth, England on Monday September 6, 2021 (WSWS Media)

In Scotland, where schools opened on August 11, cases doubled by the end of the month. Children account for almost 40 percent of the new cases, 2,729 out of the 6,836 recorded on Thursday. On Wednesday, Dingwall Academy, one of the largest secondary schools in the Scottish Highlands, was forced to shut due to a “significant number” of COVID cases and the “high number of staff having to self-isolate.”

The rest of the UK is following the same path as the ruling elite, and all the official parties, prioritise profits over lives.

In Wales, Dr David Hepburn, Intensive Care consultant at the Grange University Hospital in Cwmbran, tweeted that his Intensive Therapy Unit was “now over 50 percent of our capacity with COVID patients” and that patients “are also younger this time around”.

In Northern Ireland, the Ulster Teachers’ Union said schools are “on the verge of collapse under the strain of COVID-19”, as a further 3,500 children tested positive in the last week. General Secretary Jacquie White said rising “transmission rates, changes in guidance, as well as the lack of support and availability of tests is causing [schools] to be overwhelmed.”

But the union, like education unions across the UK, refuses to call any action to protect its members and those they teach. Instead, White appealed to the government and Education Department—which are enforcing herd immunity—to work “along with the teaching unions and… come up with solutions that will both make the situation manageable for teachers and keep children in schools.”

Deaths among children from COVID-19 are still, thankfully, proportionally low, although exact numbers are hard to quantify as the media parrot the official lie that children are at virtually no risk. This week another child reportedly died, bringing the estimated number of child deaths to 80. There have been 8,842 children admitted to hospital for COVID in the 299 days to September 9, and the numbers are rising daily.

As COVID-19 is allowed to run rampant, enabling new variants to develop, these numbers will tragically rise, as seen in the US. Democratic Party President Joe Biden has doubled down on school reopenings even as 250,000 child coronavirus cases were reported in a week, with 30,000 children hospitalised in just one month.

The supposed “resilience” of children to the virus also conceals the debilitating impact of Long COVID (which affects one in seven COVID infected children), and that high transmission rates among children present a life-threatening danger to teaching staff, family members and the community more generally.

With good cause, a poll by Ipsos MORI shows a large majority of parents—70 percent—are concerned by the risk of COVID-19 infection of their children at school, despite the disinformation campaign.

Nonetheless, most are forced to run the risk of sending their children to school or else lose their jobs, while local authorities, who are imposing government policy, seek to make examples of those who refuse.

One of those targeted is Lisa Diaz, a parent and leading member of the SafeEdForAll (Safe Education For All) campaign group. Within days of schools reopening this month in England, Diaz, who has a genetic blood disorder and has been forced to keep her two children—aged 11 and eight—out of school, received a letter from her daughter’s primary threatening sanctions.

She told the World Socialist Web Site, “On day two of the schools reopening [Tuesday September 7] a generic letter was sent from Woodfield school, saying that attendance is mandatory and send your child in or face fines and prosecution. The next day, I received another letter from Wigan LA [local authority] repeating that attendance is mandatory and the risk to children is ‘very low’. On Thursday, there was another letter stating that a positive COVID case had been confirmed in my daughter’s primary school. But I’m supposed to send her in!” Another case was confirmed on Friday.

Lisa posted a video on Twitter—viewed over 43,000 times—in which she responded to the threats, citing world-renowned scientists on the dangers of COVID to children. She stated that she was “fed up and bored being lied to”, told that COVID is benign, “absolutely fine” and everyone “can get it”. “It isn’t fine, and we should be doing everything we can to protect them so enough of the gaslighting. I’m absolutely sick of it.”

Lisa Diaz speaking on the video in which she responded to the threats from Labour Party-run Wigan local authority, citing world renowned scientists on the dangers of COVID to children. (Credit: Liza Diaz @Sandyboots2020)

Lisa said the video was “then retweeted and endorsed by Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, leading epidemiologist and Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC. He retweeted it because the claims are a lie. One in seven children get Long COVID and suffer symptoms 15 weeks later. The latest figures are that in Scotland, one in 50 children will be hospitalised through COVID. That cannot be described as a ‘very low risk’.

“Then, just three days into the school reopening, there was a COVID positive case in primary year two and the school is just advising pupils with symptoms to get a test. There’s no mandatory isolation, the ‘bubbles’ are not shut. It’s just laughable. COVID is in school, and they are saying you have to send your children in.”

She told the WSWS that, in contrast to her son’s school, Woodfield have “never provided any work for my daughter for the duration of the pandemic. Not one lesson.

“I don’t care what they put in the little book as the reason for absence so long as they don’t threaten me with fines and prosecution. I want my children in school, but it’s just got to be safe. Not at this moment in time.

Lisa Diaz with both of her children

“It looks like Wigan LA want to make an example of me but I’m completely resolute. If they’re that stupid to take me to court, I will go to every news outlet in the country and make a big show of it.

“Schools can authorise absences or choose to bully parents. I’m not having people telling me its fine for children to catch COVID. I’m not having people telling me that classrooms are safe because they’re lies. I know children already learning at home when schools reopened because they’ve got COVID and they have not even been reopened a week.

“Wigan is Labour-run. I’ve got in writing from Lisa Nandy [Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary and Wigan MP] and Kate Green [the party’s Shadow Education Secretary] that the Labour Party is ‘firmly’ against punitive measures in the pandemic against parents like myself. But their council is doing that. Official Labour policy is not to fine parents but they’re doing it anyway.”

Schools forced to close across Russia as COVID-19 spreads

Andrea Peters

About a week after the start of the school year on September 1, dozens of areas in Russia are reporting the closure of classrooms at all levels of the educational system—from daycare to colleges—due to outbreaks and exposures impacting thousands of children, young people, and educators. Russia’s families are now confronting a COVID-19 crisis, with a situation developing akin to that seen in the US over the last several weeks.

In Saratov, 21 schools, 20 kindergartens, three vocational high schools, and several institutes had to send hundreds of students and dozens of faculty into quarantine. In Vologodsky, 27 schools had to shutter 34 classes. In Volgograd, children in 28 classrooms moved to online learning this week. In Altai, where automatic closures are triggered when more than 20 percent of teachers are sick, 20 institutions shut 30 school rooms. Other regions forced to take similar measures include, but are not limited to, Adygea, Chelyabinsk, Kemerov, Yekaterinburg, Perm, Nizhegorodsky, Krasnodar, South Ossetia, Kuzbass, and the country’s second-largest metropolitan area, Saint Petersburg.

That city is also now recording 10-15 child hospitalizations a day, two to three times what was witnessed in January, as part of a rapid rise in severely ill patients over the last several days. This comes on top of an already worsening situation for the young. It took Saint Petersburg just three months this past summer to see the same number of hospitalizations in the under-18 population as it did from March to September of last year.

The federal government in Russia does not regularly publish official statistics on coronavirus infections among children, forcing analysts to turn to information released by local health agencies to get a portrait of the situation. The Russian national media barely reports on the unfolding catastrophe.

Just before schools reopened on September 1, the Russian Health Ministry revealed that half a million school children—out of a total number of almost 7 million official cases—had already been infected with the virus in the previous year and a half. Infections among newly born children have climbed 26 times in comparison to the winter, according to Moscow-based pediatrician Evgeny Timakov. He added that, “if adults fall ill in a family, in 80 to 90 percent of cases the children will fall ill too.”

As of early to mid-August—that is, even before schools opened their doors —the Sakha Republic reported seeing a 30 percent rise in cases among kids, the region of Saratov registered a 57 percent uptick in those under 6 with the virus, and local doctors in Altai, Kamchatka, and Bashkortostan said they were seeing more sick children.

Now, Russia is confronting a new surge bound up with the spread of the Delta variant and the reopening of schools.

In Kazan, in a single day this past week, the city reported 500 cases of children with respiratory infections. In Kuzbass, an increase in child coronavirus cases has tipped the region into the “red zone” and led to an extension of the hours of pediatric clinics and increase in emergency services. This comes on top of a population-wide surge in COVID-19 infections in Russia this summer, which, while declining somewhat, still remains well above previous lows with daily cases averaging around 18,000 over the last week.

While government officials seek to publicly downplay the danger of a “fourth wave,” it is clear that it has already begun, and they were well aware of what would happen as millions of school children streamed back into classrooms. The newspaper Nezavismaya Gazeta reported that the Ministries of Education and Science and Higher Education have been anticipating widespread transitions to online learning as COVID-19 makes its way through the schools.

Experts state that massive investments in air filtration systems are necessary to arrest the progress of the disease, but so far, all that schools have managed to introduce, if anything, are anti-germicidal UV systems, the purchase of which is financed out of local budgets and in some cases, parent committees. These efforts, along with other limited mitigation measures such as masking, social distancing, temperature checks, surface cleaning and, in some schools, vaccine mandates for staff, cannot transform Russia’s dilapidated schools into safe spaces.

As government officials and the media have done around the world, Russian leaders and major media outlets have long promoted the view that children tend to not get COVID-19 and, should they be infected, not become severely ill. This is untrue. Pediatricians in Tomsk recently reported that 40 percent of their COVID-19 patients have had to consult a cardiologist, 19 percent an allergy-immune specialist, and 10 percent a rheumatologist after infection. In Altai, the head physician at a children’s polyclinic, noted that doctors are having to treat infants who have recovered from COVID-19 for urinary tract complications that are long-term.

Child deaths from coronavirus, data about which the government does not release, will rise in the coming weeks and months, mirroring what is happening in countries like the United States and the UK.

There have been just two COVID-19-related deaths among the under-18 population reported recently in the country, including a two-month-old baby in Tula and a 12-year old in Novosibirsk, although in the latter case the local Ministry of Health insisted that the real cause was an underlying genetic disease.

Daily coronavirus deaths in Russia, which have between 750 and 800 since mid-July, show no signs of abating, despite a small drop in the number of cases. It is also widely known that these numbers are a gross underestimate, as officials routinely attribute COVID-19 deaths to other causes, should a patient have any other co-morbidity. Estimates indicate that the real death toll may be up to five times higher than the officially acknowledged 187,000 deaths. The mortality rate from COVID-19 has been climbing upward throughout this year, and July has been the deadliest month in the pandemic for Russia so far with over 50,000 deaths from the coronavirus.

Greek government appoints right-wing extremist Athanasios Plevris as health minister

Katerina Selin

After the devastating forest fires in July and August, Greece is now heading into the next wave of the pandemic with sharply rising COVID-19 infections and a low vaccination rate. On August 24, authorities registered a record 4,608 COVID cases. On September 2, 106 people died from the virus—the third highest figure since the pandemic began. In the small country of around 11 million inhabitants, more than 14,000 people have already died from COVID-19.

There is growing concern and anger in the population about the lack of resources in the health system and the dangerous “herd immunity” strategy of the government. The reopening of schools next week in particular will fuel the spread of the Delta variant and put thousands of children, young people and their families at risk. At the same time, only about 56 percent of the population is currently fully vaccinated.

The Greek government under the right-wing New Democracy (ND) party is reacting to the social tensions escalated by the pandemic with a further shift to the right and is bracing itself for a confrontation with the working class. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis therefore reshuffled his cabinet last week and gave positions to radical right-wing forces.

Newly appointed ministers are sworn in at the Athens presidential palace after Greece’s cabinet reshuffle, Aug. 31, 2021 (AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis)

The new health minister is Athanasios (Thanos) Plevris, a lawyer and the son of Greece’s most influential fascist and Nazi Konstantinos Plevris. Until his defection to ND in 2012, Thanos Plevris was an MP for the far-right party LAOS (People’s Orthodox Alarm). This means that three ministries are now in the hands of former LAOS politicians: Health under Plevris, Interior under Makis Voridis and Development under Adonis Georgiadis. All three are notorious right-wing extremists known for their xenophobic rants.

LAOS founder Giorgos Karatzaferis, himself a racist and anti-Semite, commented on the cabinet reshuffle over the weekend on his own television station, Art TV, with evident satisfaction. “Half of my faction is currently running the country,” said Karatzaferis, who sees this as a concession to right-wing opponents of vaccination. “Thanos Plevris was my protégé,” he stressed. When Plevris’s father’s Nazi propaganda was too much in the public spotlight, the son was promoted instead and first entered parliament in 2007.

Although Thanos Plevris has been trying to distance himself from his father in words for a long time, a closer look at his political background proves what kind of politics he has.

The father, Konstantinos Plevris, is considered the ideological pioneer of the neo-Nazi party Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn). During the military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974, Plevris worked closely with the junta and is also said to have been on the payroll of several secret services, including the CIA. Already in 1965, he founded the “Fourth of August Party”, whose name goes back to the dictatorship of General Ioannis Metaxas (1936–1941) who bloodily suppressed the workers’ movement in the interwar period. Plevris senior is not the only one in this tradition. His son, too, has reportedly referred positively to Metaxas on several occasions, calling him a “comrade” and a “leader”.

Konstantinos Plevris in October 2020 as the lawyer of right-wing extremist and MEP Ioannis Lagos, who was convicted as ex-member of Chrysi Avgi (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In 2006, Plevris senior published the anti-Semitic book “Jews, the Whole Truth”, in which he promoted the Holocaust and bluntly declared that he despises the Jews and regards them as “subhumans”, as the German online magazine Telepolis reported . This book was promoted on television by the current Development Minister Georgiadis. When K. Plevris was sentenced to 14 months in prison on probation for “incitement of the people and racial hatred” in December 2007, he appealed and was defended in court by his son Thanos in the following trial—and won. In 2009, the old Plevris was acquitted, which his son praised as proof of “freedom of expression in Greece”.

In a statement on September 1, the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece expressed concern about the appointment of Thanos Plevris, recalling how he explained to the court in 2009, as a defense lawyer, why it was perfectly legal for his father to want to exterminate other people. Commenting on K. Plevris’s reference to Auschwitz, he said: “I will examine the most extreme interpretation. That the defendant with this reference means: ‘Keep the camp of Auschwitz in good conditions because I want, at some point, the national socialist regime to come back, Hitler to come back, take the Jews and put them in Auschwitz.’ What kind of instigation is this? What incitement is this? Is it that one is not allowed to believe and want to believe that ‘I want to exterminate someone’?”

Plevris responded to the accusations of the Central Board by apologizing to the Jewish population and speaking out “against any form of anti-Semitism”. But such worthless phrases are only meant to cover up his extreme right-wing views.

As early as the 1990s, Plevris marched with the neo-Nazis. He is on friendly terms with the former spokesman of Chrysi Avgi, Ilias Kasidiaris, as this photo proves.

Thanos Plevris (left) with neo-Nazi Ilias Kasidiaris (Twitter / @AntilianKotzai)

In 2020, the trial began for the murder of an LGBT activist who was beaten to death in Athens two years ago. The defendant’s legal counsel is Thanos Plevris, according to a Deutsche Welle report.

In 2010, Plevris appeared with Georgiadis before the extreme right-wing “Patriotic Association of Thermopylae”, where they ranted about the “purity” of the Greek race and the importance of “blood ties”.

Moreover, the new health minister is a vaccine sceptic. When the H1N1 influenza pandemic spread in 2009–10, he encouraged right-wing opponents of vaccination and railed in parliament against doctors calling on citizens to get vaccinated, denouncing them for creating “panic”. This July, he spoke out against the government persuading people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Particularly shocking are his inhumane statements from 2011, when he called for the killing of refugees at an event hosted by the right-wing Patria magazine. “There is no border protection without deaths,” Thanos Plevris declared to the applause of his fascist followers.

He threatened immigrants, “When you’re here, there will be no social benefits, you won’t get anything to eat or drink, you won’t be able to go to the hospital, and you’ll be telling others in Pakistan, ‘We’re worse off here.’” Migration to Greece should be deterred, he stressed. “Hell must look like heaven to what they will live here!”

It is not just Plevris’s ilk in Europe like Hungarian prime minister Orban or German politicians of the AfD who have made similar diatribes. In recent years the entire ruling class in Greece and the EU has followed precisely this path, terrorizing refugees with gunfire at the border, ‘pushbacks’ in the Mediterranean and hellish living conditions in detention camps.

The strengthening of fascist elements in the Greek government must be understood as an open declaration of war on the working class. The new extreme right-wing health minister will relentlessly impose reopening policies and cuts in the health system under the conditions of the new Delta wave.

Mitsotakis has made other changes in his cabinet. Citizen Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis, discredited for his fatal inaction during the recent wildfires, has been replaced by Panagiotis Theodorikakos, who is also in charge of the police and fire brigade.

Theodorikakos has had a long march to the right—from the youth organization of the Communist Party of Greece to the social democratic PASOK to the ND. His history means he is seen as a suitable man for suppressing social protests. A few days after taking office, he applied for the first time the new law restricting demonstrations that was passed last year. A demonstration of around 200 students in the centre of Athens was pushed to one side of the street by the police last Friday so that car traffic could continue as normal.

The government also set up a new ministry for the climate crisis and civil protection to deflect popular anger over the consequences of this year’s forest fires. Mitsotakis first appointed Evangelos Apostolakis, a former navy general and defence minister in the Syriza government, to the post, with the aim of integrating the opposition party. He declined, and the job was given to Cypriot right-wing conservative politician Christos Stylianidis, previously EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Protection from 2014 to 2019.

The current right-wing shift in Greece is part of an international process. Everywhere, the ruling class is turning to dictatorial forms of rule and relying on far-right forces to suppress the growing opposition among workers and youth.

The year began with the storming of the US Congress by a fascist mob instigated by former President Donald Trump. In Germany, the bourgeois parties’ candidates for the Bundestag are vying to see who can most aggressively push a militarist agenda and implement school openings most ruthlessly. In all EU countries, the public health system is in danger of collapsing due to the spread of the Delta variant as governments let the virus run rampant, removing all protective measures except vaccinations. A year and a half into the pandemic and after more than a million deaths in Europe, the ruling elites continue to pursue the same agenda: “profits before lives”.

That is why there was no outcry in the international media about the fact that a politician in the mould of German fascist Bjorn Höcke now heads the Greek Ministry of Health. Major newspapers like Spiegel Online, the New York Times and the Guardian have remained silent, as have most EU politicians and international pseudo-leftist parties.

The largest opposition party, Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), feigned verbal criticism of the cabinet reshuffle. Party leader Alexis Tsipras spoke of an extreme right-wing “government of LAOS ministers” and Syriza MP Euclid Tsakalotos quoted Plevris’s anti-refugee rants in parliament. “A man who made this statement and thinks like this cannot be a health minister in any European country,” Tsakalotos said.

But he then immediately offered to accept Plevris if he distanced himself from the statements: “In our view, there are only two options: either he retracts his statements now, before the inauguration, or Mr Mitsotakis revises his decision.”

In fact, Syriza itself is part of the right-wing turn in Greek and international politics and directly responsible for the rise of far-right forces to the highest government offices. During its 2015–2019 term in government, it formed a coalition with the ultra-right Independent Greeks (Anel) to impose the austerity dictates of the Troika of the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Commission in the face of enormous popular opposition. In the process it also armed the police state apparatus and the military, and pursued a brutal refugee policy in the spirit of Plevris.