Canada’s Trudeau government reaffirms support for Israel’s Gaza genocide, as crackdown on protests intensifies

Roger Jordan & James Clayton

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with Israeli War Cabinet and former Defence Minister Benny Gantz Wednesday to reassert Ottawa’s “support for Israel and its right to defend itself, in accordance with international law.”

Trudeau called Gantz to underline Canadian imperialism’s backing for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, after he faced criticism from the far-right Israeli regime for stating at a press conference Tuesday that the killing of babies, children and other civilians “has to stop.”

Canada, alongside the United States, is among Israel’s closest international allies. In addition to supplying the country with weaponry and maintaining close links with its military, Canada has repeatedly voted at the United Nations together with Washington and a handful of tiny Pacific island states to oppose even the most timid criticisms of Israel. In a recent UN General Assembly vote on a resolution condemning the expansion of settlements and settler-violence in the West Bank, Canada was one of just seven nations to vote against it, along with the US, Israel, Hungary, the Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Nauru.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, shortly after his Liberal government came to power in Nov. 2015. [Photo: Twitter/Trudeau]

In his remarks Tuesday, Trudeau made statements that during past conflicts would have been taken for granted. “I urge the government of Israel to exercise maximum restraint. The world is watching, on TV, on social media—we're hearing the testimonies of doctors, family members, survivors, kids who have lost their parents. The world is witnessing this killing of women, of children, of babies. This has to stop,” he said.

Trudeau did not go so far as to call for a ceasefire, let alone condemn Israel for committing war crimes and violating international law. But the ruling elites in Canada, the US, and Israel are so fully committed to the Netanyahu government’s genocidal onslaught on the Palestinians that not even the most timid and transparently hypocritical criticisms can be tolerated. Netanyahu responded on Twitter/X, tagging Trudeau in a post that blamed Hamas for all civilian deaths and rejected any criticism of Israel’s savage slaughter. Within Canada, pro-Zionist forces from the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre and B’nai Brith Canada denounced Trudeau’s remarks, as did a cabal of neo-conservative and far-right newspaper columnists.

Trudeau responded by calling Gantz to make clear to the Israeli regime, Washington and the Canadian public that Canada “stands with Israel” as it commits genocide against the Palestinians. After declaring that Israel has the “right” to “defend itself,” Trudeau, according to a Prime Minister’s Office readout, condemned “Hamas’ terrorist attacks, including the atrocious use of Palestinian civilians as human shields.” The conversation concluded with Trudeau and Gantz denouncing all opposition to the Israeli onslaught on Gaza as antisemitic. “In the face of the rise of antisemitic events in Canada and around the world, Prime Minister Trudeau and Minister Gantz condemned antisemitism in all its forms and agreed on the need to address it head-on,” stated the readout.

Trudeau’s call was all the more significant in that it came just hours after Israel launched its bloody and criminal raid on the al-Shifa hospital, the largest medical centre in Gaza. Citing their own lurid, unsubstantiated claims that Hamas was using the hospital as a command centre, the Israel Defence Forces repeatedly bombarded and fired at the hospital, killing patients and medical workers.

The fact that not even the Prime Minister can make the most tepid criticisms of what everyone can see is the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians by a heavily-armed Israeli state backed by the imperialist powers underscores how all-embracing the regime of political censorship and repression against the opponents of the onslaught on Gaza has become.

Propped up by its trade union and New Democratic Party allies, the Trudeau government has retained its fulsome support for the Israeli war machine as it has bombarded hospitals, schools, and other places of refuge, while denying the 2.3 million residents of Gaza access to the most basic necessities of human life, including water, fuel, and food.

The New Democrats demonstrated their contempt for democratic rights early on in the Israeli bombardment by expelling the Ontario legislator Sarah Jama from its legislative caucus. Jama had previously issued a statement declaring her solidarity with the Palestinians and condemning Israel as an “apartheid state,” a description supported by the United Nations and Amnesty International. The NDP’s move opened the way for Doug Ford’s rabidly hard-right Ontario Tory government to censure Jama, thus preventing her from speaking on any issue in the legislature until she repudiates her statement supporting the Palestinians and apologizes.

Part of the Oct. 21 Toronto demonstration denouncing the Canadian-US backed Israeli onslaught on Gaza's Palestinians

The trade unions have focused on diverting the mass protests in defence of the Palestinian people that have developed across the country into impotent appeals to the Trudeau government to push for a “ceasefire.” Moreover, they have failed to mobilize workers to defend individuals who have been witch-hunted by the political right for declaring their support for the Palestinians, such as Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario President Fred Hahn.

The suppression by the NDP and unions of opposition in the working class and among young people to Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinians has emboldened right-wing and far-right forces to step up their smearing and witch-hunting of protesters.

City of Toronto Councillor James Pasternak has submitted a motion to ban Palestinian solidarity protests on City property, calling upon the Ontario Attorney General and the City of Toronto Police to “consult on what steps can be taken quickly to protect the public from such hate speech…”. Toronto has seen protests involving tens of thousands over each of the past three weeks.

Speaking to Joe Warmington of the right-wing Toronto Sun, and dripping with contempt for democracy, Pasternak fretted that “We’re verging on mob rule, where law and order is breaking down, and groups of people who have grievances are taking over public spaces, they’re interfering with traffic flow, with commerce, with the movement of emergency vehicles, and they’re sucking up an enormous amount of police resources.”

After demonstrators shut down the main offices of Scotiabank in Toronto on Thursday Nov 8, answering the call of the Palestinian Youth Movement to “Shut it down for Palestine,” Warmington opined, “Is taking over the lobby of one of Canada’s largest banks in downtown Toronto to protest Israel considered a hate crime?” Scotiabank has been targeted due to its $500 million stake in Israeli weapons maker Elbit Systems, whose Canadian offices were also shut down the same day.

After three activists briefly interrupted the “Scotiabank Giller Awards for Canadian Fiction” on November 13, holding up signs declaring that “Scotiabank funds genocide” Warmington reveled in the prospect of their imprisonment due to their use of “forged documents” to enter the gala event, and their act to “obstruct, interrupt, interfere with the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property.”

On November 15, Palestinian Canadian doctor and activist Tarek Loubani posted about his imminent arrest by police for the “crime” of smearing ketchup on the office door of his local MP, Peter Fragiskatos, in protest over the Liberal legislator’s refusal to demand a cease fire. Loubani was previously imprisoned by the Egyptian dictatorship for attending a demonstration in 2013, and was shot in Gaza by the IDF in 2018.

Those expressing public solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinians of Gaza have been targeted, sometimes successfully, for disciplinary action, up to including termination from their jobs.

• Arij Anwer, a Muslim chaplain at Western University was fired due to a comment on Twitter, replying to neo-conservative journalist and ex-Tory Senator Linda Frum: “Stop spreading lies of beheading babies or rape of little girls. It’s been debunked. No one is celebrating the murder of Israeli babies. Palestinians are mourning the death of their babies. It’s incredible how Israel sympathizers simultaneously are the oppressor and the victim.”

• Sabreina Dahab, a Trustee with Ontario’s Hamilton Wentworth District School board is under investigation for a “breech of the Trustee Code of Conduct” for tweeting “75 years of violent occupation and apartheid and the expectation is that Palestinians will be passive observers in their genocide?”

• Javier Dávila, a Student Equity Advisor at Toronto District School Board was suspended for sharing social media posts documenting the Palestinian solidarity activities of students at Marc Garneau High School.

US Department of Education announces probe into alleged antisemitism on college campuses

Emma Arceneaux

The US Department of Education announced Thursday that it has launched investigations into six universities and one public school district for alleged violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Five of the investigations are related to allegations of antisemitism and two are related to alleged incidences of Islamophobia.

The schools currently under investigation are Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, Wellesley College, Lafayette College, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and Maize Unified School District in Kansas.

Palestinian supporters protest at Columbia University, Thursday, October 12, 2023 in New York. [AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura]

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told CNN that he expects more investigations will be forthcoming. Cardona warned that schools which fail to comply with the department’s recommendations risk losing federal funding.

Details of the specific allegations under investigation have not been released. However, the investigations come amid an intensifying campaign led by the Biden administration to suppress growing opposition to Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza, which has the full backing of the Democratic White House and US imperialism. Central to this campaign is the smearing of opposition to Israel’s war crimes as “antisemitic.”

On college campuses, students have been doxxed, blacklisted and penalized by administrators for voicing political opposition to the escalating US-Israel genocide, which has already claimed the lives of more than 12,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children. The Israeli Ministry of the Interior has itself defined the aim of the war on Gaza to be the removal of the Palestinian population through a combination of mass killings and forced expulsion from the territory.

Palestinians inspect the damage of a destroyed house following an Israeli airstrike in Jabaliya refugee camp, on the outskirts of Gaza City, Sunday, November 5, 2023. [AP Photo/Mohammed Alaswad]

There is a particularly perverse and vile irony in the attempt to brand opponents of ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine, which include many thousands of Jews in the US and around the world, as “antisemites,” given the tragic fate of European Jewry in the Holocaust.

The investigations into the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and Wellesley College follow a federal civil rights complaint filed on November 9 against the schools by the Brandeis Center, a Zionist organization founded by Kenneth Marcus, former assistant secretary of education for civil rights under Donald Trump. The Brandeis Center has student chapters at law schools throughout the US, whose stated purpose includes fighting “anti-Israelism,” countering the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and promoting “Israel legal advocacy.”

The complaints against Penn and Wellesley state that “Zionism is an integral part of Jewish ethnic and ancestral identity for many Jewish students,” and, on that basis, argues that anti-Zionism constitutes “erasive anti-Semitism.”

Last week, Penn President Liz Magill issued two statements alleging incidences of antisemitism on campus. The first cited “vile, disturbing antisemitic emails threatening violence to members of our Jewish community.” It added that the FBI had been informed of a potential hate crime. However, a campus police investigation found “no credible threat” to campus safety. The details of these emails have not been released.

Magill issued a second statement last week in which she denounced “vile, antisemitic messages [that] were projected onto several campus buildings.” Multiple news reports that repeated the claim of “vile antisemitism” showed images with the projected messages blurred out. However, pictures of the projections shared on social media disprove this slanderous allegation.

The so-called “hateful” messages included the following: “Free Palestine,” “Let Gaza Live,” “Liz Magill: call for ceasefire now,” “From the Sea to the River, Palestine will live forever,” and “10,000 murdered by Israeli occupation since October 7.”

Wellesley College confirmed to local news that the Department of Education investigation is related to the complaint filed by the Brandeis Center. In this instance too, the allegation of antisemitism rests upon students’ opposition to Zionism. On October 19, student resident assistants sent an email to their dormitory’s residents stating that “there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism within the Wellesley College community.” The university forced the students to issue an apology.

As of Friday morning, both Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and the Maize Unified School District in Kansas said that while they had received notification of Department of Education investigations, neither had been given details of the allegations.

Cooper Union did not comment on the investigation, though it follows the attempts last month by the corporate media to portray a peaceful Palestine solidarity protest on campus as an antisemitic rampage. Reports of Jewish students being “barricaded” and locked in the library in the face of threats to their safety were soon debunked. City officials later acknowledged that some pro-Israel counter-protesters voluntarily waited in the library during the protest, and that school officials closed the library for approximately 20 minutes.

At Cornell University, the specific allegations under investigation are not known, but may be related to the arrest last month of Cornell student Patrick Dai. He was arrested and charged in federal court for multiple alleged internet posts that made violent threats, including threats to “shoot up” the predominantly Kosher dining hall on campus.

Columbia University did not comment on the investigation. The elite university has been one of the focal points of the government-led campaign to intimidate and ban student opposition to the genocide in Gaza. As at a number of other universities, the far-right media group Accuracy in Media drove its “doxing” truck around campus with the names and images of students alleged to be affiliated with pro-Palestinian groups.

Last week, Columbia suspended the student organizations Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), claiming that the groups’ peaceful protests and sit-ins “repeatedly violated University policies related to holding campus events, culminating in an unauthorized event Thursday afternoon that proceeded despite warnings and included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”

Building upon the month-long campaign to slander and intimidate students, the growing efforts to ban student groups and campus protests outright mark a significant escalation in the attempts to criminalize all opposition to the war crimes of the US and its Israeli ally. In Florida, far-right governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was the first to issue an order to deactivate SJP chapters in the state university system. Brandeis University has also banned the SJP.

This week, the administration of George Washington University in St. Louis announced the suspension of the campus SJP chapter for at least 90 days following a peaceful protest action in which students projected messages onto a university library building. As with the projected messages at Penn, the George Washington administration turned reality on its head. The messages, which university President Ellen Granberg declared to be “antisemitic,” included, “End the siege on Gaza,” and “GW is complicit in genocide in Gaza.”

The federal investigations by the Biden administration into US colleges occur against the backdrop of growing opposition to the genocidal war against Gaza, while the barrage of propaganda and lies used by the Biden administration to justify war crimes are rapidly breaking down.

The Department of Education’s announcement follows the pro-genocide “March for Israel” in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, at which leaders of both parties of US imperialism joined hands to declare their unconditional support for Israel and its war crimes. The event featured speeches from real antisemites, including evangelical pastor John Hagee, who has previously stated that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jewish people “back to the land of Israel.”

The investigation was also announced one day after US Capitol Police violently assaulted Jewish activists who held a peaceful vigil and protest demanding a ceasefire at the headquarters of the Democratic Party in Washington D.C.

Having failed in its desperate attempts to intimidate protesters by equating criticism of the US-backed genocide with “antisemitism,” including demands for a ceasefire by Jewish activists, the ruling class is directly resorting to anti-democratic and repressive measures, in violation of constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and political expression, to censor opposition. The threat to withhold funding from public universities and school districts, many of which already face massive budget deficits, is a directive to school administrators to crack down on political opposition.

At the same time, the lie that the interests of the Jewish people are represented by the policies of the state of Israel, a state founded on ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence, creates conditions for a dangerous equivalency between Zionism and Judaism.

Australian government rams through bill to impose unprecedented restrictions on released detainees

Mike Head

In just over 12 hours on Thursday, the Australian Labor government teamed up with the Liberal-National Coalition opposition to push through both houses of parliament a bill that inflicts a police-state regime—essentially a new totalitarian form of detention—on people being released, by order of the country’s highest court, after being previously imprisoned indefinitely.

Protesters stage a rally outside the Park Hotel calling for the release of refugees being detained inside, in Melbourne, Australia, Friday, Jan. 7, 2022. [AP Photo/Hamish Blair]

The bill was also supported by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, Tasmanian independent Jacqui Lambie, all the “teal” independent members of parliament and Australian Capital Territory independent David Pocock, before being rushed to the governor-general for royal assent.

Thursday’s events expose the true repressive face of parliamentary democracy. The ruling establishment, currently led by the Labor Party, is ripping aside fundamental democratic rights, flouting even the extremely limited protections of basic legal rights in Australia’s 1901 Constitution.

These events underscore a reactionary political atmosphere being drummed up by the ruling parties and media, full of inflammatory allegations against supposed “illegal immigrants,” under conditions in which all the politicians involved are also backing Israel’s murderous assault on the people of Gaza in blatant defiance of international law.

Under the unprecedented legislation, the previous detainees—mostly refugees who cannot be deported—will be forced to wear ankle bracelet monitoring devices “at all times” and are effectively confined to house arrest, potentially for life. They face the threat of imprisonment for up to five years, with a mandatory minimum of one year, for breaching any of the far-reaching restrictions placed on them.

These restrictions, more than a dozen, include confinement to set locations with 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfews, limits on travel, and exclusion from designated forms of employment. Those released must report constantly to the police or other authorities, including on their living arrangements, finances, memberships of organisations and associations with other people.

All these controls can be imposed or varied by executive fiat, by the immigration minister, without “natural justice.” That is, there is no right to a prior hearing, let alone a procedurally fair or unbiased hearing. The minister can simply decide that a person “poses a risk to the community.”

This is after people were detained indefinitely and unlawfully in immigration facilities for years, in one case almost 13 years.

As government ministers admitted in parliament, the bill’s provisions could very well violate the High Court’s November 8 ruling that indefinite detention of asylum seekers and other non-citizens—a regime first introduced by the Keating Labor government in 1992—constituted “punishment” without judicial process.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt told the Senate there was a “degree of constitutional risk” in the emergency changes.

After enforcing unlawful detentions for decades, the judges on November 8 said they breached the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine, but have yet to issue reasons for the court’s apparent partial about-face.

The High Court decision has so far resulted in the release of 84 people, with the legality of the detention of a further 340 people in detention for more than a year also in doubt.

Lawyers for some of the released detainees have mooted a legal challenge to the new law, saying it imposes new forms of punishment without trial. David Manne, the executive director of Refugee Legal, said the bill was tantamount to imposing “a further form of deprivation of liberty, a further form of indefinite detention, because there are also no time limits on these conditions.”

For now, the bill’s measures apply only to non-citizens—imposed via conditions on temporary visas. But they set chilling precedents for wider use against anyone accused of conduct or views deemed an unacceptable threat to “national security” or the underlying economic order of capitalism. This is occurring amid threats by governments to ban protests against the Gaza genocide, falsely accusing participants of antisemitism or “hate speech.”

Despite all being blackguarded by politicians and media headlines as “murderers” and “rapists,” only some of the released detainees had been convicted of crimes. These included several serious offences, while others were locked up for traffic offences. But all had served their sentences. Had they been citizens, they would have been released, either on parole or unconditionally.

A large proportion of the detainees—78 reportedly—are owed refugee protection and cannot be removed from the country without defying the International Refugee Convention. At least 30 of them were detained indefinitely on various accusations, ranging from endangering “national security” to belonging to bikie groups, giving incorrect information in visa applications, changes in circumstances, or posing risks to “the health, safety or good order” of Australia.

Media commentators and the Greens, who opposed the Migration Amendment (Bridging Visa Conditions) Bill 2023, described the parliamentary rush as a “capitulation” by the Labor government to the aggressive refugee-bashing demands of the Coalition, spearheaded by opposition leader Peter Dutton.

In parliament, however, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil boasted that the bill was harsher than anything introduced by Dutton when he was home affairs minister in the previous Morrison Coalition government.

“The Leader of the Opposition loves to present himself as a tough guy on borders,” O’Neil said. “He never wrote laws as tough as this… These laws allow us to do things that no government has ever been able to do before: to put ankle-monitoring bracelets on people we are concerned about… What’s really important about this bill is that for the first time we criminalise people who do not follow these visa conditions.”

O’Neil declared that she agreed with Dutton that “some of the people at the heart of this decision have committed deplorable crimes; disgusting crimes—crimes that no-one in this parliament, surely, would accept. That is why we kept them in detention.”

These kinds of allegations were quickly inflamed by the corporate media, notably on talkback radio, tabloid newspapers and breakfast television.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was equally determined to assert Labor’s “tough” credentials. He claimed personal credit for the bill, saying he was “fully involved” in the proceedings from San Francisco, where he flew on Wednesday to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit hosted by US President Joe Biden.

By demolishing what is left of the Labor government’s claims to defend civil liberties, the bill’s rapid passage has caused political shock and unrest. Laura Tingle, the chief political correspondent of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7.30” current affairs program, said it was a “dark day” for “the way we make laws in Australia.”

She wrote: “In the space of 12 hours on Thursday, the Australian Parliament passed legislation about what remains, to the public, a largely ill-defined and unknown group of people—but variously described by some of our MPs as ‘hardened criminals’ and ‘absolute animals’—in a legislative exercise alarming in its chaos and deeply concerning in its origins.”

In reality, the proceedings exposed the real character of parliament and the ruling class.

For their part, the Greens accused the government of endangering the “rule of law” by rushing through legislation that would end up back in the High Court. “The government has acted in haste, panicked at the fearmongering of Peter Dutton,” Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said.

That is a cover for the reactionary role and record of Labor, with whom the Greens are hoping to form a coalition government after the scheduled 2025 federal election because of collapsing popular support for the government.

In 2005, moreover, the Greens joined the Howard Coalition government and the Labor Party in the most notorious previous instance of ramming laws through parliament on an “emergency” basis. That legislation vastly expanded the already sweeping “counter-terrorism” laws by enabling people to be arrested, charged and convicted for allegedly planning unspecified “terrorist acts.”

The 2005 legislation, adopted under the banner of the “war on terror” that served as the pretext for the catastrophic US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, also introduced new forms of detention without trial, including for citizens, such as “control orders” and “preventative detention.”

The Coalition is calling for such types of detention to be imposed on the released detainees, and the Labor government has foreshadowed further legislation that may do so.

Sri Lankan President Wickremesinghe’s 2024 budget deepens attack on workers and the poor

K. Ratnayake

On Monday, President Wickremesinghe announced his government’s budget for 2024. In line with the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) austerity dictates, the budget will make further inroads the social conditions of workers and the poor.

Ranil Wickremesinghe [Photo: United National Party Facebook]

Addressing parliament, Wickremesinghe invoked the teachings of Buddha, telling the country’s suffering masses that Buddha “advised against leading a pompous and extravagant life, while receiving a low income… We should spend according to the income we receive.”

Wickremesinghe’s appeals to Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist sentiments will not fool anyone. At least 28 percent of the country’s 22 million-strong population lives in poverty and, according to a 2023 UNICEF report, one in two children goes hungry every day.

Currently an estimated 17 percent of the population is food insecure with nearly two-thirds forced to borrow money, spend hard-earned savings, if they have any, or adopt other coping methods, just to feed their families.

Blaming the masses for Sri Lanka’s ongoing economic crisis, Wickremesinghe declared, “We resorted to borrowing or printing money to provide jobs, increase salaries, distribute free rice, offer relief, and maintain state-owned enterprises.”

These are blatant lies. The official unemployment rate amongst youth was 15 percent in 2019, even before the economic crisis hit, with most young people employed in temporary jobs. At the same time the big corporations are raking in huge profits while the salaries of state employees, which remain stagnant, are eroded further by high inflation.

Colombo responded to the economic crisis precipitated by COVID-19 and the US-NATO war against Russia by unleashing brutal attacks on working people and destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs. At least 500,000 people lost their jobs in 2022.

Wickremesinghe pompously told parliament of Monday that measures taken by his government in first half of this year had seen a 50 percent increase in tax revenue and that inflation had dropped to 1.5 percent in October down from 70 percent in September 2022.

But at what cost? State revenue has gone up because of increases in income tax and higher value added tax (VAT) rates and, while the overall inflation rate has fallen, the prices of all essentials are higher. These measures have imposed unbearable burdens on workers and the poor.

In March, the IMF agreed to release a $US3 billion bailout loan, conditional on the imposition of harsh social attacks. These included slashing government expenditure to produce a surplus by 2025; increasing tax revenues via higher VAT and income tax rates; the privatisation of state-owned enterprises; huge job cuts in the state sector, and sharp reductions to welfare programs.

The IMF, however, withheld a second installment of its loan in September because the government failed to reach its revenue target. It only released the second tranche in October, after the government pledged to achieve all the IMF’s demands in the coming period. The government’s 2024 budget has been devised to fulfill those targets.

The budget envisages expenditure of 7 trillion rupees ($US21.47 billion) and revenue of 4 trillion rupees. The projected 2.85 trillion ($8.73 billion) budget deficit will be mainly bridged by even higher tax rates, the privatisation of more state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and further borrowings. Fifty percent of 2024 budget expenditure will go to principal debt repayments and on interest, with 3 trillion of this to repay foreign debt.

Wickremesinghe announced that the cost-of-living allowances of public sector workers, which have not been increased since 2015, will be increased by 10,000 rupees per month. This will not start until April next year with allowances payments accumulated from January to March 2024 to be paid in installments within a six-month period, starting in October 2024. This paltry increase will not compensate for massive wage erosion over previous years.

State pensioners will receive a meagre increase of 2,500 rupees, as a cost-of-living allowance, starting in April next year. The government, however, announced that state employees’ contribution to the pension fund will rise from 6 percent to 8 percent next year, in other words, a 2 percent cut in their salaries.

In 2024, nearly 50,000 poor families will be given ownership of their small homes, currently provided to them at a monthly rent of 3,000 rupees. This cosmetic measure will do little to overcome drastic housing shortages. According to the Urban Development Authority, more than 200,000 homes are needed in Colombo alone.

The government has allocated a total of 183 billion rupees for the approximately two million people receiving “Aswesuma” welfare payments, up from the 60 billion currently allocated. This means an estimated 400,000 severely poor families will receive 15,000 rupees per month, another 800,000 to receive 8,500 rupees per month for three years. Others will receive smaller benefits between December and March next year. These allowances are grossly inadequate amounts.

The annual allocation for the country’s crumbling public health service is 410 billion rupees, an increase of 88 billion while education is to receive an additional 5 billion rupees on top of the current 237 billion rupees. These allocations are below inflation and will not compensate for the desperate situation facing the public health and education sectors.

Substantial parts of these vital sectors have been handed over in recent decades to the profit-hungry private sectors by Sri Lankan governments. The Wickremesinghe government is stepping up the conversion of free public health and education into fee for service institutions.

Other budget measures include:

* VAT will be lifted from 15 to 18 percent, starting in January, which means further increases in the price of all goods and services.

* Local Government Authorities (LGA) will be “encouraged” to provide their services via a “self-financing model.” During the next five years the central government will gradually reduce, and then eliminate, its financing of all LGA salaries. This means the LGAs will have to increase service charges for residents in order to finance the jobs and wages of hundreds of thousands of local government workers.

Further moves towards the privatisation or commercialisation of SOEs include:

* The sale of 20 percent of shares in state banks to private investors.

* Restructuring of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) through the transfer of generation, transmission and distribution processes to 14 companies.

* The state-owned Telecom has already announced that will sell off a 50.23 percent majority stake to private investors.

Wickremesinghe declared that his government’s so-called reform program would “liberate the people from economic hardships.” This is a fantasy.

Last year Sri Lanka’s GDP growth rate was -7.8 percent. Although this year’s estimated growth rate is -1 percent, growth for the first half of the year was -7.9 percent. These are not just statistics. The escalating economic crisis in Sri Lanka, which is a sharp expression of a global process, will have an even more devastating effect on the jobs and social conditions of the masses.

The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, the country’s main big business lobby, praised Wickremesinghe’s budget declaring it a “framework for national development—pragmatic implementation and timely execution will be key.” In other words, it is a program that will open up additional avenues for extracting greater super profits.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake, leader of Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and its National People’s Power (NPP), declared that Sri Lanka’s economy for the past 75 years had been “built on loans, money printing and selling assets.” The 2024 budget, he said, “contained proposals to borrow and sell assets, essentially putting Sri Lanka’s economy back on the same old, failed path.”

Sajith Premadasa, leader of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), the main parliamentary opposition party, said the budget “promises heaven but will lead the people to hell…This budget pleases the rich and oppresses the poor. It is nothing but an attempt to make the IMF happy.”

While the SJB, JVP/NPP and other opposition parties criticise the budget, they are all committed to IMF austerity and have no alternative. Their denunciations are aimed at cynically exploiting the deep opposition of workers and the poor for electoral purposes. If elected to power, they would collaborate fully with the IMF and its demands.

While the working class has repeatedly shown its readiness to fight the government’s IMF-dictated measures, it is blocked time and time again by the trade unions which call isolated and limited actions.

Public sector union bureaucracies called protests in October and early November calling on Colombo to grant 20,000-rupee monthly allowance, peddling illusions that the government would be pressured to grant this demand in the budget. This proved to be another deliberate lie with Wickremesinghe completely ignoring these demands.

Many of the unions are controlled by the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, or by the JVP and SJB which are all committed to the IMF program, as are various so-called independent unions.

Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) Visiting Fellowship Program 2024

Application Deadline: 

16th January 2024

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility For Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) Visiting Fellowship Program:

Foreign researchers who fulfil the following conditions can apply:

• having a doctoral degree for less than 5 years  
• being exclusively of foreign nationality
• not have resided in France after September 1st 2023 (for more than 90 days)

A research stay convention with the host institution will be established between the institutions and the laureates and will detail specifically the means made available by the laboratory so that the researcher can carry out the research project.

Number of Awards: 40 fellowships will be awarded to the young researchers over a 12-month period from Sept 2023. 

Value of Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) Visiting Fellowship Program: The fellowship includes the following benefits:
– Monthly allowance of 2,500 euros  
– Moving allowance of 500 euros
– Support for social security coverage 
– Support for health insurance

A visiting fellowship agreement with the French host institution will be established between the institutions and the laureates. It will specify the means and resources made available by the host laboratory so that the researcher can carry out the research project.

Duration of Award: 12 Months

How to Apply: Applications should be submitted via the following link: here.

1. Your CV with the list of your publications in English (4 pages maximum)
2. Copy of your PhD diploma
3. CV of your research supervisor in the French host institution for the visiting fellowship (2 pages maximum)
4. Letter of support from the French host institution 
5. Letters of recommendation (maximum 3)
6. Copy of your Passport or National ID

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Leadership And Advocacy For Women In Africa (LAWA) Fellowship Program 2024/2025

Application Deadline: 

19th January, 2024 by 11:59pm Eastern Daylight Time.

Offered Annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Over 80 women’s human rights advocates from Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe have participated in the LAWA Program, and we hope to include Fellows from additional countries in the future.

To be Taken at (Country): Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., USA

About the Award: The Leadership and Advocacy for Women in Africa (LAWA) Fellowship Program was founded in 1993 at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., in order to train women’s human rights lawyers from Africa who are committed to returning home to their countries in order to advance the status of women and girls in their own countries throughout their careers.

Type: Fellowship, Masters

Eligibility: You are strongly encouraged to carefully read and comply with every requirement of the application, as incomplete or incorrect applications will not be considered. Please also note that AAUW requires you to submit a TOEFEL score.

1. You must be a women’s human rights lawyer from Africa in order to be considered. You must hold an LL.B. or other law degree. A preference is given to candidates who:

a. are currently living and working in Africa, and

b. do not already have a Masters’ Degree.

• The strongest applicants tend to be about five to ten years out of law school, but those with less or more experience will be considered.  Candidates with no work experience who are applying directly from an LL.B. degree or other law school will not be considered.

• Men and women who are committed to women’s rights are strongly encouraged to apply.

• As a requirement of participation in the LAWA Program, all applicants must commit to return home to their own countries upon completion of the Fellowship, and to use their best professional efforts to advance women’s human rights throughout their careers. 
• You must have strong English language skills, both written and oral. Language problems have been the primary barrier to success for LAWA Fellows.
• The LAWA Program requires candidates to become proficient in using computers for drafting papers and conducting research. Candidates are strongly encouraged to learn basic computer skills before arrival in order to make this transition easier. At the very minimum, candidates should work to improve their typing speed.
• Candidates must be prepared to enter a very demanding course of study. LAWA Fellows take four required courses and several more elective courses over the course of the two academic semesters. Each class requires advance preparation of reading hundreds of pages. Fellows are required to produce a Masters’ Thesis totaling no fewer than 40 pages, including several drafts with intense research, writing and editing. Successful completion of the program requires exceptional focus, and very hard work. Please do not apply if you are not prepared to make this serious academic commitment.

Value of Fellowship: The LAWA Program helps defray the costs for candidates who would not otherwise be able to afford an LL.M. degree and additional professional development training. The LAWA Fellowship provides the tuition for the mandatory Foundations of American Law and Legal Education course held from mid-July to mid-August (a U.S. $5,000 benefit) and for the Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree from the Georgetown University Law Center (a U.S. $66,872 benefit).

Candidates who are awarded a LAWA Fellowship must be prepared to cover the costs of all additional expenses (such as visas, travel, housing, utilities, food, clothing, and health insurance, etc.).  Candidates must be able to demonstrate to the U.S. Embassy for visa purposes that they have the full amount of funds available to cover these expenses at the time of their visa application. This totals U.S. $30,000. Please refer to this sample budget. These costs are significantly less for those that can reside with family in the Washington, DC area. Candidates still must show at least $8,000 for living expenses. For the summer internship portion, students need to show $2,232 per month, for the 2 to 3 month internship period.

Candidates are encouraged to apply for individual funding, or seek support from their employers. The LAWA Program does not have the capacity to assist with these efforts. There is a fellowship available from AAUW in the amount of $18,000. The application can be found here http://www.aauw.org/what-we-do/educational-funding-and-awards/international-fellowships/if-application/.

Duration of Fellowship: The entire LAWA Fellowship Program is approximately 14 months long (from July of the first year through August of the following year), after which the LAWA Fellows return home to continue advocating for women’s rights in their own countries. The LAWA Program starts in July, when the Fellows attend the Georgetown Law Center’s Foundations of American Law and Legal Education course. From August through May, the LAWA Fellows earn a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree at Georgetown with an emphasis on international women’s human rights and complete a major graduate paper on a significant women’s rights issue in their home countries. After graduation, the LAWA Fellows then have an opportunity to engage in challenging work assignments for several months at various public interest organizations to learn about different advocacy strategies to advance women’s human rights, before returning home to continue advancing women’s human rights in their own countries.

Upon completion of their Program, LAWA Alumnae have returned home to assume prominent leadership positions enabling them to focus on women’s rights issues in non-governmental organizations, government agencies, law schools, courts, legislatures, and private firms.

More Fellowship Guideline: LAWA Alumnae have formed their own non-governmental organizations, such as the Women’s Legal Assistance Center in Tanzania and Legal Advocacy for Women in Uganda (LAW-Uganda) to promote women’s human rights in their countries (e.g., by bringing impact litigation under their countries’ statutes, constitutions, and the human rights treaties that their countries have ratified).

How to Apply: The 2024-2025 application is available here, LAWA Application 2024-2025 updated, and due on Friday, January 19, 2024.

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Israel provokes diplomatic row with Brazil over Gaza, Hezbollah

Guilherme Ferreira

As Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza escalates amid mass global protests, an extraordinary series of events took place last week in Brazil, fueling diplomatic tensions between the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party – PT) and Israel.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva meeting Brazilians rescued from Israeli siege against Gaza [Photo: Ricardo Stuckert/@LulaOficial]

This occurred as the US and its allies in the G7 directly threatened Iran with war over its support for Hamas and Hezbollah and, more importantly, its growing economic and military relations with Russia and China. Brazil and many Latin American countries have strong economic ties with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia and Iran, the latter of which recently joined Argentina and four other countries in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) as part of the bloc’s bid to build a “multipolar” world in opposition to US hegemony.

US concerns about the presence of China, Russia and Iran, as well as “Hezbollah activities” in Latin America, were voiced in early October, shortly after the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, by Gen. Laura Richardson, head of the US Southern Command. 

In an interview with the right-wing think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, General Richardson denounced “Iranian warships that ... ended up making a port call in Rio de Janeiro” in February and the visits to several Latin American countries in the first half of the year by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Adding that the region is “insecure and unstable,” she said, “we can do better in this vulnerable time to keep out strategic competitors that have malign intentions.”

In this context, the Israeli government, with the full support of the US, launched a provocative diplomatic offensive aimed at destabilizing the Lula government and pressuring it to align itself with both its war against Gaza and the US war preparations against Iran. These moves came after Brazil tried to pass a resolution in October, when it chaired the UN Security Council, advocating a pause in Israel’s attacks in order to create a humanitarian corridor. The US vetoed the resolution, citing its failure to refer to Israel’s supposed “right to self-defense.”

Throughout November, Brasilia stepped up its criticism of Israel’s attacks on Gaza. However, unlike the pseudo-leftist presidents of Colombia (Gustavo Petro) and Chile (Gabriel Boric), who recalled their ambassadors, Lula limited himself to equating the actions of Israel and Hamas, saying on November 13: “Hamas has committed a terrorist act.... Israel is also committing various acts of terrorism by not taking into account that the children are not at war.” Lula has also defended the creation of a Palestinian state, but without referring to the need for Israel to leave the territories occupied in the 1967 war.

As part of the Israeli government’s effort to drum up international support for its war in Gaza, its ambassador to Brazil, Daniel Zonshine, met on November 8 with far-right parliamentarians and fascistic ex-president Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian Congress to show alleged footage of the Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. Members of parliament aligned with the Lula government were not invited to the meeting.

According to international journalist Jamil Chad, of the UOL website, Brazil’s Foreign Ministry considered the meeting “a serious breach of protocol, an intrusion into domestic politics and a complicated relationship with a public figure who is ineligible.” However, Bolsonaro is more than ineligible to run for office. In addition to being defeated in last year’s presidential election by Lula, he was recently indicted by a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry as the intellectual author of an attempted coup d’état on January 8, when his supporters stormed government buildings in Brasilia.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu considers Bolsonaro a close political partner. Over the four years of Bolsonaro’s administration (2019-2022), Brazil drew far closer to both Israel under Netanyahu and to the US under Donald Trump. Moving the Brazilian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the illegally occupied territories, the Bolsonaro government also supported the US assassination of Iranian General Qassem Suleimani.

The choice of the Brazilian Congress for the meeting between the Israeli ambassador and Bolsonaro served the purposes of the Brazilian far right, Israel and the US. Parliamentarians loyal to Bolsonaro presented bills in October classifying Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorists and equating support for them with the crime of promoting Nazism—an equation that Bolsonaro and the Brazilian extreme right has repeatedly made with socialism. One of the bills also states that Brazil should cut diplomatic and economic relations with their supporters, indirectly targeting Iran.

Another event that has increased diplomatic tension since the beginning of the war was the delay in allowing 34 Brazilians to leave Gaza, which came only at the beginning of this week. On the same day as the meeting with Bolsonaro, the Israeli ambassador gave the first justification for this delay, claiming that “the quota for leaving the Gaza Strip is determined by Egypt.” This, in turn, was denied by Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, pointing to the political reasons for Israel’s decision to prevent their escape.

As if November 8 hadn’t been turbulent enough, the Brazilian Federal Police announced on the same day the temporary arrest of two suspects allegedly linked to Hezbollah for planning terrorist attacks in Brazil against the Jewish community. According to the daily Estado de S. Paulo, “The action had the collaboration of American and Israeli authorities.”

On X/Twitter, the Netanyahu government celebrated the arrests, writing: “Brazilian security services, together with the Mossad and their partners in the Israeli security community, along with other international security agencies, thwarted a terrorist attack in Brazil, planned by the terrorist organization Hezbollah, directed and financed by Iran.”

In response, the Brazilian Minister of Justice, Flávio Dino, said that “No representative of a foreign government can claim to anticipate the outcome of an investigation conducted by the Federal Police, which is still ongoing.” In fact, in the detainees’ statements to the Federal Police, they denied any connection with Hezbollah. The lawyer of one of them stated that “He didn’t know what Hezbollah or Hamas were.”

In addition, a series of doubts vocalized even by Brazil’s own bourgeois media have emerged because of these arrests. Firstly, there are no perceivable motives for either Hezbollah or Iran to threaten a terrorist attack in Brazil.

Brazil has a Lebanese community larger than Lebanon’s own population of 6 million. Especially since the US “war on terror” in the early 2000s, there have been claims of Lebanese-Brazilians being involved in money laundering and links to drug trafficking—mainly in the triple border region between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay—to finance Hezbollah’s activities in Lebanon. No concrete evidence has been presented to support these allegations.

Secondly, it is not Hezbollah’s modus operandi to carry out actions outside Lebanon, let alone terrorist attacks. Recalled as a landmark of alleged terrorist activity in Latin America, the attacks on the Israeli embassy in 1992 and on the AMIA Jewish association in 1994, both in Argentina, were not claimed by Hezbollah. Actually, its only declared activity abroad was in Syria, when it fought the Islamic State and US-backed Al Qaeda-linked militias in support of Bashar al-Assad’s government.

Hezbollah is the direct product of the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982. Since 1992, in the first elections after the civil war (1975-1990) in Lebanon, it has been one of the main political forces of the Lebanese parliament and has wide support among the most oppressed sections of the country’s Shia population. In 2000, Israel left southern Lebanon, but in 2006 it launched a massive invasion against the region, supported by the US, which ended in a debacle for Israel and the US.

Both Washington and Israel view Hezbollah as an obstacle to their strategic interests. They want to eliminate it from Lebanon and facilitate a future US military offensive against Iran. The US considers Brazil and Latin America to be a strategic battleground in this process.

While Lula condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza as the most “brutal and inhuman violence against innocent people” he had ever seen, his government has failed to issue so much as a formal protest over the provocations staged by the Israeli ambassador, much less expel him from the country.

Behind this delicate diplomatic approach is the fear of upsetting relations not merely with Israel, but more importantly with its principal and indispensable patron, US imperialism.

Since coming to power, Lula has advanced the claim that the government of “Genocide Joe,” as the American president has been denounced in many protests, represents an important factor in democratic stability in Brazil and the world. More recently, he has praised Joe Biden as the most “pro-worker” president in history.

Significantly, the script for last week’s events in Brazil was unveiled in an article published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies at the end of October. Entitled “Hezbollah’s Terror Threat In Latin America,” Emanuele Ottolenghi wrote that “The U.S. and Israeli governments are rightly concerned that Hezbollaha—Iran’s oldest and best-armed proxy—... could create a second front in northern Israel, and it could add pressure on Israel and the US by launching terror attacks abroad.”

He recalled that “Latin America is a region of particular concern in this respect” because “Hezbollah is not considered a terrorist organization in most countries.” In addition to arguing that, “The Biden administration should encourage more governments to sanction Hezbollah as a terror group,” Ottolenghi stressed that “The US government needs to be proactive and take to the offensive against Iran and Hezbollah’s pervasive soft-power and hard-power operations in the region.”

But more importantly, Ottolenghi wrote that “There is radical mobilization in favor of the Palestinian cause across the region, much of which is fomented by Iran-backed disinformation.” Indeed, as part of a global mass movement against the genocide in Gaza, protests have been held weekly in Brazil and many Latin American countries.

Amid the diplomatic tensions with Israel and pressure from the US to align Brazil with its war plans against Iran and China, what the Lula government and the ruling elites in Latin America fear most is that this movement will intersect with an emerging working class movement against their austerity policies and criminally negligent approach to the ongoing pandemic.