Civil & Political Rights

Articles

Sex Is Complex

Transgender rights versus  women’s rights, and last week’s landmark British Supreme Court ruling on what the words “woman” and “sex” mean. The GPM speaks with Canadian human rights lawyer Robert Wintemute, author of a soon-to-be-released book entitled “Transgender Rights vs. Women’s Rights: From Conflicts to Coexistence.”


Stamping It Out

Gender-based Israeli violence, extermination and genocide in Gaza. A new report from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. A conversation about Israel’s war on Gaza with Middle East affairs commentator Mouin Rabbani. And, human rights abuse and corporate takeover in the United States. A conversation with one of the authors of another UN report.


Activist Arrested, Gets To Talk About It

Montreal-based author and guerilla-style political provocateur Yves Engler talks about his recent arrest and subsequent imprisonment in Montreal’s Bordeaux Prison (something police originally tried to block him from doing), and what he’d rather talk about than his five days and four nights of forcible confinement. And, another Canadian’s account of the funeral of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, brutally assassinated by apartheid Israel. Another conversation with Dimitri Lascaris


Ivory Tower Bans Free Speech

The Ivory Tower Bans Free Speech. Exiled Students Take Columbia University to Court. The GPM speaks with Catherine Curran-Groome about her court case — Catherine Curran-Groome, Brandon Murphy and Aidan Parisi vs. Columbia University, at the New York State Supreme Court.



Obscure Committee

On the margins of the 23rd session of State Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Court, in The Hague, a stairway conversation about international law, and its fate, with South African Ambassador to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Vusi Madonsela / The obscure UN committee charged with eliminating “all forms of racial discrimination” labours for five years on scrupulously detailed apartheid charges by Palestine against Israel, and comes up with … no comment — or “individuated” apartheid finding, as Irish legal scholar and CERD committee commentator David Keane tells the GPM.



Justice & the Taxman

Canadian rights groups call on the Canada Revenue Agency to suspend the charitable status of Canadian organizations funding Israel’s unlawful occupation and colonization of Palestinian territories, and to carry out audits and criminal investigations of their activities.


Jewish Anti-Zionism

Israel wants to eradicate the Palestinian people, and the UN agency that supports them. The GPM speaks with Chris Gunness about Israel’s persecution of UNRWA — the UN Relief & Works Agency. And, a Canadian Jewish group declares itself anti-Zionist. The GPM speaks with Sid Shniad, founding member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada.


Base Nation

Israel’s 57-year military occupation of Palestine is unlawful, the World Court rules, and must come to end. Will Israel abide by the ruling? Will countries like Canada enforce it? Washington certainly won’t. The GPM speaks about Canada’s response with Ottawa commentator Peter Larson. And, perpetual occupation of other people’s lands is an activity the US supports, defends and engages in, all around the world. The GPM speaks with United States of War author David Vine.


Mobile Petri Dishes

Mobile phones — smart, incredibly useful. Life support systems. They’re also mobile Petri dishes! The GPM speaks with a microbiologist who knows. And the roots of the US anti-abortion movement; misogyny, racism, hatred toward immigrants. A conversation with American academic Lauren MacIvor Thompson.


Killing the Future

Killing the future in Gaza. Reducing it to rubble. Forcibly transferring its people into filthy tent camps, or onto the street. Starving them. Hunger and disease go hand in hand. The GPM speaks with Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and authority on human-engineered food crises, and with Margaret Harris, global spokesperson for the World Health Organization.


Scholasticide

Scholasticide. Bombing schools, libraries and cultural centers. Killing students and teachers. Sound like genocide? It is. The GPM speaks about Israeli scholasticide in Gaza with the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education, and with a Palestinian academic doing top-drawer scientific research in the West Bank — against all odds. And, we play back voices at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, talking about Israel’s attempt to pulverize the foundation of Palestinian society — its learning institutions and its children.


Wheels of Justice

Some thought it would never happen. This past week it did: criminal charges against Israeli leaders at the International Criminal Court, in The Hague. Israeli leaders can kiss their overseas travel plans goodbye. Days earlier, the International Court of Justice ordered it to halt its assault on the southern Gaza city, Rafah — an order Israel is now defying, with US and British backing. Which does international law serve – power or justice? What difference does it make? The GPM speaks with three international law and human rights scholars — Toby Cadman, William Schabas and Michael Lynk.


Scoundrel Time Revisited

European governments try to stop a Palestinian surgeon from talking about Israeli ultra-violence – and fail. No one seeks to stamp out free speech more zealously than the Germans. How to explain the passionate attachment Western powers have for the State of Israel? It’s not what you’d think, says an Anglo-German Jewish activist.


Beautiful Resistance

For those who’ve never visited a Palestinian refugee camp, these are not dense tent or tin shacks encampments. They’re more like barrios; densely packed, tightly knit, fully functioning communities. On a very recent trip, the GPM visited one of Palestine’s largest refugee camps – Aida – in the southern West Bank town of Bethlehem.


Genocide by Home Demolition

In the seven months since Hamas’ daring incursion into southern Israel, the Israeli military has demolished over 300,000 Gazan homes — almost three-quarters of Gaza’s housing stock — killing an estimated 35,000, most of them women and children. Countless thousands of Gazans remain buried under the rubble of their humble homes. Armed with US bombs and missiles, Israel demolishes Palestinian homes in an instant. Palestinian suffering and trauma will endure for generations. What’s its aim? Ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the consolidation of the settler-colonial regime it established in 1948, says Israeli author and activist Jeff Halper. Halper is a founding member of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He’s also the author of a host of books, including An Israeli in Palestine (2010), War Against the People (2015), and Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State (2021).


Dear Mr. Trudeau

Starvation and famine in Gaza. A UN expert speaks out. And, a group of Canadian lawyers demand that the Trudeau government stop supporting Israeli genocide.


Intellectual Author

Consider all the injustice, death and destruction gone down in Palestine over the past 50, 75, hundred years. No one more responsible for all this misery than the British. The GPM speaks with British scholar Victor Kattan. Then, looming famine and genocide. Will the UK, US, Canada and other Western Powers act, or will they help Israel out? The GPM speaks with former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness.


Day of Two Suns

The Day of Two Suns: 70 years ago, the Pentagon conducted its biggest-ever atmospheric H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific. The 15-megaton Bravo shot spewed radioactive fallout on thousands of Marshallese, and long-lived radioisotopes all around the planet. Nearby Rongelap Atoll suffered the worst. Seventy years later, the people of Rongelap and Bikini have yet to go home.