The Free

News of Chomsky’s ill health prompts Outpouring of Gratitude for ‘Lion of the Left’

Noam is in Hospital in Sao Paolo with his wife Valeria after his massive stroke. He’s partly paralysed but following angrily the Gaza Genocide.

– from thefreeonline on Jun 14, 2024 Brett Wilkins at CommonDreams (NEW- on Telegram: – /t.me/thefreeonline)

News that renowned American linguist, anarchist, and author Noam Chomsky is hospitalized in Brazil following a massive stroke he suffered last year was met with an avalanche of accolades and well wishes from members of the international left on Wednesday.

“So many thousands of people have stories about how he has changed their lives,” said one admirer. “He certainly changed mine.”

Noam Chomsky is pictured during a press conference after visiting former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Curitiba in 2018.

Valeria Chomsky told The Associated Press that her 95-year-old husband—a laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—is currently in a São Paulo hospital.

She took him there on an ambulance jet with two nurses after he was able to travel from the United States following his stroke.

Chomsky told Folha de São Paulo that although her husband has difficulty speaking and the right side of his body is numb from the stroke, he follows the news and “when he sees images of the war in Gaza, he raises his left arm in a gesture of lament and anger.”

She said his condition has improved significantly, and he is seeing a neurologist, speech therapist, and pulmonologist daily.

However, people close to Chomsky say he is unlikely to return to public life.

“Noam is the most influential U.S. intellectual ever. Period,” Rutgers School of Communications Professor Andrew Kennis—whose book Digital Age Resistance contains a foreword co-authored by Chomsky—told Common Dreams.

“He has been the largest influence on my life in any way, personal or professional” Kennis added. “As for movements, no other thinker helped positively shape and mold anti-imperialsm analysis and criticism of the U.S. bullying the world on behalf of Wall Street and Silicon Valley better and more effectively than him.”

“His work has defined the terms of countless debates and he’s been a tireless advocate for—and guide on the path to—a better future.”

U.S. journalist and political analyst Anand Giridharadas hailed Chomsky—whom he interviewed in 2020—as a “lion of the left.”

“It would be difficult to overestimate the impact Chomsky’s work has had,” Giridharadas wrote for The.Ink Wednsday. “Beyond the total transformation of his academic field (he’s widely acknowledged as the father of modern linguistics and the main force behind the cognitive turn in the sciences), his political impact has been immeasurable.”

“As a writer, activist, analyst, and critic of power, and likely the most visible left public intellectual of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, his work has defined the terms of countless debates and he’s been a tireless advocate for—and guide on the path to—a better future,” he added.

Of the more than 100 books published by Chomsky—who was once voted the world’s top public intellectual in an international poll—four are specifically about Israel and Palestine.

Noam Chomsky: My Visit to Gaza, the World’s Largest Open Air Prison… – Truthout– November 9, 2012– “A defenseless civilian population, trapped, was subjected to relentless attack by one of the world’s most advanced military systems, reliant on U.S. arms and protected by U.S. diplomacy”.

He has been sadly absent from the outcry over Israel’s current genocide on Gaza, which is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.

Valeria Chomsky also told ‘Folha de S Paulo’ that she is thinking about moving to an apartment near the beach in Rio de Janeiro after reading that living by the sea is excellent for stroke patients…

This below is a letter Noam #Chomsky kindly wrote in 1995, when I asked "how do you keep your hope alive."

If you have examples of Chomsky's kindness, diligence and intelligence, please share them.https://t.co/b2AFxmserE pic.twitter.com/xSvAIVPed4
— Marc Hudson (@marcsrhudson) June 8, 2024

Current Affairs founder and editor Nathan Robinson—who is the co-author of Chomsky’s forthcoming book, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World—said earlier this week on social media that “Chomsky has been unbelievably kind over the years I’ve known him.”

“He treats everyone as an equal. Doesn’t care who you are,” he continued. “He would give as much of his time to a high school student as some celebrity or New York Times reporter. And devoted himself to attacking cruelty and injustice.”

“When I started a tiny lefty magazine with only a few subscribers, he bought a subscription, blurbed us, and would email if his copy didn’t show up,” Robinson recalled. “He provided countless generous blurbs to authors publishing with tiny presses, giving them a boost that could really help them.”

“So many thousands of people have stories about how he has changed their lives,” he added. “He certainly changed mine.”

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Massive Protests sweep France against far right threat

Alarm at fascist mobilisation for Macron’s snap elections after EU Parliament surge –

– from thefreeonline on Jun 13th 2024 by Alisa-Ece Tohumcu at Freedom News – ( The Free on Telegram: https://t.me/thefreeonline).

Protests against the far right have been sweeping across France from Paris to Montpellier, following the far right’s successes in the EU elections, and President Emmanuel Macron’s ill-fated reaction: a snap Parliamentary election. For two consecutive nights, hundreds of thousands took to the streets.

The protests reflect growing concern that Macron has provided the far right with a political opening, similar to centre-right enablers in the Netherlands and now the European Parliament.

The far right party Rassemblement National (RN)—a new name for the Front National—won the French European Parliament vote with 31.5%. Macron then dissolved the general assembly, stating he had confidence in “the capacity of the French people to make the best decisions for themselves and future generations”.

can’t watch on you tube

The first round of these elections is currently scheduled for the 30th of June, second being on the 7th of July.

Paris saw over ten thousand demonstrators burn barricades and holding the streets beyond midnight, facing tear gas and stun grenades.In Bordeaux, demonstrators gathered at the Place de la Victoire, protesting with graffiti and trash fires while police fired tear gas.

Here too, many continued to hold the streets.

The night also saw attacks on far-right bars, banks, and brand outlets. In Angers, the bar “Le Bazar” known as a neo-nazi headquarters was attacked.

Demonstrators in Bordeaux. Photo: *La Grappe*

Nantes saw around 4,000 demonstrators (according to official counts) who marched towards the police station, where they set barricades ablaze. Similar confrontation took place in Lyon, Toulouse, Rennes. Strasbourg, Caen, Montpellier, Nancy, and other cities.

10 juin : tour de France de la mobilisation antifasciste

In Dijon, high school students walked out at 10:30 am on June 11 and called on students across the country to join them.

Further anti-fascist assemblies planned during this week, with the organisers of a rally in Paris stating that “Macron the arsonist” had “rolled out the red carpet for the fascists” while warning that “our salvation will not come from the ballot box”.

~ Alisa-Ece Tohumcu

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UN finds more evidence of sexual violence committed by the IDF against men, women and children in Gaza

Iron bars, electric shocks, dogs and cigarette burns: How Palestinians are tortured in Israeli detention

Those who spread the Oct 7th mass rape claims are gonna condemn this, right? You will be unsurprised to hear the UN has found more evidence of systemic sexual abuse against Gazan men, women and children, and no evidence that Israeli authorities have taken any measure to prevent such acts, despite their legal obligation to do so. Journalist Muhammed […]
UN finds more evidence of sexual violence committed by the IDF against men, women and children in Gaza

Recently published reports have revealed the systematic sexual abuse and torture of Palestinian men, women and children by Israeli forces during the assault on Gaza.

On Wednesday, a report published by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that the frequency and severity of sexual and gender-based violations meant that they were likely “part of [Israeli security forces] operating procedures”.

The inquiry detailed multiple instances of Israeli forces publicly stripping Palestinian women of their clothes and veils, and subjecting them to sexual harassment in front of their families during ground operations in Gaza.

The commission noted that “Palestinian men and boys have been disproportionally affected and victimised on many grounds”, and heard several reports of male victims being subjected to sexual violence in Gaza and the West Bank by Israeli forces.

This included physical and mental abuse while being undressed, being forced to walk naked between checkpoints, and being coerced into undressing in front of family members..

The commission added that these acts were often filmed and photographed by the soldiers themselves.

Witnesses also reported mistreatment and forced public nudity during Israeli military raids in hospitals.

One account described how, during a raid of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital in November, Israeli forces took all the men and teenage boys outside and forced them to undress.

The commission said that the increasingly sexual nature of Israeli aggression was likely driven by a desire to humiliate Palestinians in retaliation for the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October, which killed more than 1,100 people.

The worst four days of my life

A three-month investigation by the New York Times published on 6 June also revealed systematic sexual abuse and torture perpetrated against Palestinians detained at Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel.

One detainee, Fadi Bakr, a law student from Gaza City, described his four-day long interrogation as “the worst four days of my life”.

Bakr reported that, prior to his interrogation, he was taken to a “disco-room” where music was blasted at such a volume that his ears began to bleed.

Another detainee testified that during interrogation he was forced to sit on a metal stick which penetrated his rectum. His account closely resembled another from an Unrwa report that cited a detainee testifying that interrogators “made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire”.

Evil beyond words

Evil beyond words

I got into the habit of writing these as soon as possible after I had seen the film in question, so that I would still be in touch with the impression that it had made on me and remember the salient details.

So it’s somewhat surprising for me to realise that I have taken several weeks to write about the film I am going to describe.

What has happened, I think, is that it made a very deep impression on me that I have needed time to fully process.

Les Survivantes (‘the female survivors’, literally, or perhaps better rendered as ‘the women who survived’) is a new French documentary from director Pierre Barnérias, known for his 2020 exposé of the Covid scam, Hold-Up.

⚠️ Piège : « Hold Up » n’est pas un docu, ce n’est pas du journalisme, c’est une propagande complotiste à budget blockbuster ⚠️ Honteusement cautionné par quelques politiques en errance.
Excellent thread à dérouler 👇🏽 https://t.co/Rs8UiZwUyK
— Coralie Dubost (@CoDubost) November 12, 2020

Given the vitriol and censorship aimed at that film, and given the even more controversial subject matter of Les Survivantes, I would have expected only to have been able to view it via some rebellious non-corporate website.

So it was a little surreal to find myself sitting down to watch it at a massive multiplex cinema in an out-of-town commercial zone in Nîmes.

The subject of the film is the abuse of children: not just sexual abuse, including violent rape, but also the torture of children, the dismembering and murdering of children and the forcing of children to watch and participate in the abuse, torture, dismembering and murdering of other children.

It has taken me a month to be able even to write that sentence, so it is hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for the survivors of such activity to talk in public about what they experienced.

Indeed, as one of them explained, part of the purpose of the activity – in particular the forced participation – was to traumatise and shame them into a lifelong silence that these women have now broken.

An important aspect of the film is that these crimes were not carried out by random individuals but by a network – when they met up, some of the eight women realised they had been abused by the same individuals in different locations across France, Belgium and Switzerland.

As the survivors told their stories, the nature of this network became increasingly apparent – there was talk of powerful people, politicians, heads of state and billionaires.

A former employee of Crédit Suisse (which cropped up in my recent article on the Rothschilds’ Chatham House operation) described how he had walked out of a party hosted by his banker boss when it started to involve a simulated satanic child sacrifice involving the banker’s daughter.

Just in case there was any lingering doubt, the caption at the end of the film refers to the network being run by “global financial power”.

We have, of course, all heard about Jeffrey Epstein or Jimmy Savile, with dark rumours about activities even less acceptable than sex with underage girls and boys.

But I for one never wanted to think about this too much, didn’t really want to emotionally embrace its reality, even though I accepted it intellectually.

Les Survivantes forced me to think about it, to feel it through the words of little girls who had suffered, survived and somehow found the courage, as women, to tell the world what had happened.

I know I was not the only person who walked out of the cinema desperately suppressing the desire to burst into angry tears.

In the subsequent weeks, the shock of what was described in the film has percolated into my thinking.

I thought I was being pretty hard-line in the language I use to describe the circles involved in all this, using labels like “criminocrats” or “mafia” and adjectives like “corrupt”, “odious” or “vile”.

However, I now realise I have been letting them off the hook. They’re worse than any of that.

It is already difficult to understand how anyone could deliberately cause the deaths of millions of people in wars, deliberately poison them with toxic drugs, deliberately destroy the natural world, polluting land, air and water, deliberately wreck communities and cultures, cynically enslave and exploit people across the world.

But how can we digest the fact that members of this same global financial power also enjoy raping, torturing, dismembering and murdering little children?

What words can we use to describe what they are? Even “Satanist”, which is presumably how they regard themselves, seems too weak.

I’ve always thought that mere human beings can no more be entirely evil than they can be entirely good.

Now I’m not so sure.