https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIwZquDMuaU
A Muslim NATO? Are Muslim Countries Finally Uniting? | Sami Hamdi
Friday, September 11, 2026
Message from CAIR
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Israeli film about killing of Gazan civilians gets 25-minute record ovation at Venice premiere
NAZA, a new documentary from Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor about the killing of civilians in Gaza, received a record 25-minute ovation at its premiere at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on Thursday, an AFP reporter witnessed.
As Abraham and Szor headed up the red carpet in a rain-soaked Venice, there were shouts of “Free Palestine” and “Free Israel” from onlookers.
The film is named after the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage.” It features interviews with 24 IDF soldiers, mostly intelligence officers, about what the filmmakers describe as the “premeditated, calculated and intentional” mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza since the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023, that sparked the war.
It is based on reporting that appeared in the Israeli left-wing activist outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, and the UK’s Guardian, at least some of which has been challenged by the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel says that it tried to avoid killing civilians during its operations in Gaza, which targeted Hamas after the terror group that rules the Strip led a devastating assault on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw 251 abducted to Gaza. Israel accuses Hamas of embedding its operatives and military infrastructure among the civilian population, including in hospitals, schools, refugee camps and mosques.
Israel also rejects all accusations of genocide in Gaza.
The film’s executive producer is British Jewish director Jonathan Glazer, who sparked controversy in March 2024 with an Oscar acceptance speech denouncing the war in Gaza when winning Best International Feature Film for his Holocaust-themed picture “Zone of Interest.”
He could be seen in footage from Venice clapping next to a stern-looking Abraham and Szor, two of the four directors who won Best Documentary at the 2025 Oscars for the Israeli-Palestinian film “No Other Land,” about the dispossession of Palestinians in the southern West Bank’s Masafer Yatta.
The applause for NAZA surpassed what was thought to be the festival’s previous record, when viewers last year clapped for 23 minutes for docu-drama “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” about the killing of a 6-year-old girl, her family and medics who came to save them in Gaza City in January 2024.
Ovations can be easily manipulated and are seen as an imperfect measure of a film, but they do give an indication of the impact on festivalgoers and critics.
The evident enthusiasm for “The Voice of Hind Rajab” last year made it a favorite for Venice’s Best Film award, but it went on to win the second prize, with reports of a split in the jury.
The post Israeli film about killing of Gazan civilians gets 25-minute record ovation at Venice premiere appeared first on The Times of Israel.
25 Years of War Was the Wrong Response to 9/11 by Medea Benjamin - Nicolas J. S. Davies
The lesson of 9/11 should be that war is not the answer to any of the problems facing the United States. After inflicting violence and chaos on country after country for twenty-five years in a “global war on terror” that has evolved into a Zionist genocide and a revived Cold War against Russia and China, the widespread public opposition to Trump’s war on Iran suggests that most Americans have finally learned that lesson.
Unfortunately, powerful sections of our corrupt business and political elites have not.
Most Americans old enough to remember September 11, 2001, can still recall the horrifying images played endlessly on our TV screens as the scale of the mass murder became clear. But we also remember something else: the sinking feeling that the hopes and dreams of billions of people, in the US and around the world, would be pushed to the back-burner for the foreseeable future, as our leaders and corporate media all too predictably embraced a new agenda of revenge, fear-mongering, jingoism and military violence.
We found out later that only hours after the attacks—less than six hours after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and barely five hours after the Pentagon was hit—the planning for America’s military response to the 9/11 massacre was already under way.
At 2:40 p.m., Defense Secretary Rumsfeld convened a meeting at the Pentagon. Notes taken by Undersecretary Stephen Cambone, later obtained by CBS News, recorded Rumsfeld demanding the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.” – meaning Saddam Hussein – “at the same time” as Osama bin Laden. Then came the chilling instruction: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
Twenty-five years later, we can look back and see how the US government used September 11 to unleash a crusade of violence, war crimes and chaos across the world. Experts like Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz and military historian Michael Howard warned from the beginning that declaring a “war on terror” made no sense and would make matters worse.
They were right, of course. But when the State Department’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report for 2004 showed an unprecedented increase in global terrorism following the US invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice simply cancelled and discontinued the report, replacing it with a new one with different criteria to prevent comparison with previous years.
But, as Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks, and for the remilitarization of the United States after the small reduction in its military spending after the end of the Cold War.
Total US military spending for the past 25 years has exceeded $21 trillion (in 2024 dollars), surpassing the combined spending of the other 18 largest military powers in the world. During that time, China has built a whole new civilization and infrastructure, and leapfrogged the US economy to become the world leader in clean energy, high-speed rail and technological sectors in which the US was once preeminent.
Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for these counter-productive choices, and the appalling human costs of these wars on the countries the United States has attacked, bombed or invaded make this an especially atrocious way to squander our nation’s wealth.
The history of the United States during this period calls to mind an old Greek myth. Croesus, the famously wealthy king of Lydia, asked the Oracle at Delphi what would happen if he invaded Persia. The Oracle told him, “If you cross the Halys river, a great empire will fall.” Encouraged, Croesus launched the invasion. But he lost the war, and the empire that fell was his own.
In pursuing their global imperial ambitions, our leaders and ruling classes have discounted and betrayed the real sources of America’s prosperity and security: the well-being of the American people and peaceful relations with our neighbors around the world.
They have led us into war, poverty and extreme inequality, and hollowed out a system of government that was slowly becoming more democratic. At home, decades of political struggle by labor, civil rights and other social movements produced enormous advances, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, major investments in public infrastructure and education, and a highly progressive tax system—with the top income tax rate at 91% until 1963—that helped finance those public goods and narrow the gap between rich and poor.
Contrary to the “End of History” theory embraced by many policymakers after the Cold War, and Margaret Thatcher’s famous insistence that “there is no alternative” to the extreme neoliberal capitalism that she and Ronald Reagan ushered in, societies always have political and economic alternatives. It is only a transparently self-serving choice by America’s corrupt ruling classes that saddles us with a system that keeps all decision-making power in their own hands in order to build their own wealth to the detriment of the country we all share.
We can see one alternative today in New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pursuing a different set of priorities: expanding free childcare, making major investments in affordable housing, improving public transportation, and freezing rents for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. Electoral politics can be part of the solution, but only if it reflects what ordinary people really want, instead of limited choices between oligarchic “lesser evils.”
Americans are demanding a renewal of social progress, with universal healthcare, quality public education, and all the things we need but can’t afford as long as this bloated, destructive war machine remains our government’s top priority. As Martin Luther King lamented in 1967, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”
Twenty-five years is a long time to keep moving in the wrong direction, especially when that direction involves endless war and the destruction of other countries. We are a long way from where most Americans would like our country to be. But we have a pretty good idea of what is wrong and what we need to do:
Stop throwing money at a broken, destructive war machine. Stop threatening and blockading our neighbors. Close overseas bases and bring our troops home. Tax the wealthy. Start rebuilding our country, and replace war and militarism with cooperation and problem solving. Take public ownership and responsibility for things we all need and use, like education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and utilities. Abolish ICE, and other militarized institutions that waste our national resources and do not serve the public good. Insist that the military be scaled back to its legitimate role of defending the United States against a possible, but very unlikely, foreign military attack.
If we have truly learned the lesson of the past twenty-five years, then we must translate it into policies that reflect that. The real test is not whether we can finally see what went wrong after 9/11. It is whether we are able to change course.
Italy’s Antisemitism Bill and the Equation that Seeks to Make Zionism Untouchable by Michael Leonardi
IHRA is the instrument, not the army. The army is a Zionist power structure that runs through governments, NATO headquarters, donor networks, and newsrooms. Its present work is simple: make Zionism identical with Jewishness, then treat every attack on the first as an attack on the second. Hasbara is the method — the daily weather of talking points, renamed maps, and moral blackmail. The Italian bill is one theater. New York is another. Occupied Palestine is the ground, and the ground is being renamed in real time.
On September 9, in front of the Italian Parliament at Montecitorio and in more than forty other Italian piazzas, the slogans were still the what the law is written to kill: criticizing Israel is not antisemitism, anti zionism is not anti semitism. Inside the Chamber, a text already passed by the Senate waited. The amendment vote slipped a week. The floor date is October 2. The bill’s official name is Disposizioni per il contrasto all’antisemitismo e per l’adozione della definizione operativa di antisemitismo (Provisions for Combating Antisemitism and for the Adoption of the Operational Definition of Antisemitism).
On March 5 the Senate approved it, 105 to 24, with 21 abstentions. At its core it takes the 2016 working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance — a non-binding paper whose principal drafter, Kenneth Stern, has warned should never be turned into law — and writes it into the Italian legal order “including the related indicators, necessary for the application of this law.”
Those indicators are the weapon. Of the eleven examples attached to IHRA, seven concern the State of Israel. Calling Israel a racist enterprise. Denying a so-called right of self-determination that in practice means the right of an ethnocracy to rule. Applying to Israel a standard not demanded of every other “democracy.” Comparing its conduct to Nazi Germany. Treating the state as a Jewish collectivity. The definition’s own caveat — that criticism of Israel similar to criticism of any other country is not antisemitic — is the clause governments never operationalize. What they operationalize is the list that makes anti-Zionism the new face of Jew-hatred. Zionism becomes Semitism. The ideology becomes the people. The occupation becomes a synagogue. After that, enforcement is administration: banned rallies under the 1931 public-safety law if they present a “serious potential risk” of slogans or symbols deemed antisemitic under IHRA; training in schools, universities, the armed forces, the police, the magistracy; monitoring of platforms; a national coordinator; a fund of ten million euros a year. Officials say there are no new prison terms. They do not need them. A denied hall, a frozen career, and a police file will do.
This is not Italy inventing a doctrine. It is Italy joining a doctrine already in use against the Palestine solidarity movement from London to Minneapolis to New York. Britain put Palestine Action on the terrorism list for targeting the machinery of the arms trade, then used the designation to raid, charge, and jail people for speech and protest that would once have been ordinary dissent. The U.S. State Department has followed the same script, stretching “terror” over solidarity networks and, in a separate act of discipline, sanctioning Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur, for naming the occupation and the genocide. Italy’s antisemitism bill is the legal cousin of those lists: declare the movement an enemy of civilization, then let the police, the campus, and the newsroom finish the job.
Zohran Mamdani took office as mayor of New York on January 1. On day one he revoked Eric Adams’s executive orders that had locked IHRA into city government and barred city agencies from boycotting Israel. Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the move “antisemitic gasoline on an open fire.” The consul general warned of violence. The ADL, the AJC, and UJA Federation issued a joint denunciation. A petition later asked the governor to remove him. City Hall said it would not replace IHRA with another codified definition of hate. The storm was not about a municipal form. It was to prove that a large American city cannot be allowed to refuse the equation. If the mayor of New York can treat anti-Zionism as politics rather than race hate, the whole apparatus looks optional. So the apparatus answers with the oldest hasbara move: the safety of Jews depends on the immunity of the state.
The same week the Italian piazzas filled, twelve countries — Britain, France, Canada, Spain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Poland, Portugal — announced they would restrict, or consider restricting, trade in goods from illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The step is minimal. It does not stop the weapons. It does not halt the siege. It does not name genocide. It is a customs gesture toward a two-state formula Israel’s own ministers are busy burying. Even that was enough to produce fury in Jerusalem and a press that treated trade from colonial settlements as a tragic misunderstanding rather than a war crime with a barcode. Germany and Italy still block anything that would actually bite at the European Union level. The twelve-country note is the outer edge of official courage. The Italian bill is what the inner core prefers: punish the naming, not the occupation.
Listen to the spokespeople. They are not only dropping “West Bank.” They are dropping the language of occupation itself. In official speech the stolen land is Judea and Samaria — the biblical map laid over the living country, as if Oslo, the Green Line, and the Fourth Geneva Convention were clerical errors. The Knesset has moved to strike “West Bank” from legislation and replace it everywhere with Judea and Samaria. American statehouses have been lobbied to do the same. Ministers speak of sovereignty, of “normalizing life,” of “encouraging migration” from Gaza and from Judea and Samaria. The cabinet deepens land registration and building control in the occupied territory and calls it housekeeping. Annexation is practiced first as vocabulary.
The more extreme line does not stop at the 1967 border. In that sermon the whole of historic Palestine is already the inheritance: not a state called Israel beside a people called Palestinian, but a single biblical estate in which Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the land taken in 1948 are chapters of the same title deed. When government voices use Judea and Samaria as if that name covered occupied Palestine as such — and when they refuse “occupation,” “settlement,” and even “West Bank” in the same breath — they are not describing geography. They are interpreting Greater Israel. A press on the take, or simply under the discipline of the State Department and of Israeli briefers, repeats the names as if they were neutral. Hasbara does not always invent. Often it only refuses the word that international law still uses.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has described the shops that keep this discipline in place: Mossad, the CIA, and MI6 as overlapping trades; Israeli intelligence inside the Pentagon’s policy office in the Iraq years; a lobby that owns large parts of the American Congress and the White House; covert work that runs whether or not the president is in the room. Washington, London, Berlin, Rome and Paris, he has said, participate in the same lies. Mark Rutte, secretary general of NATO, performed the part when the United States and Israel went to war on Iran: the president, he told American television, was doing it “to make the whole world safe.” That is the envelope. Ukraine and Israel inside “the West.” Gaza a complication. Solidarity a virus.
The newsroom is not outside the envelope. Israel’s post–October 7 influence spend, reconstructed by the Quincy Institute, passed a billion dollars in public diplomacy, with U.S. foreign-agent outlays on track to make Israel the largest FARA spender. Firms, pastors, influencers, chatbot seeding. A prime example in Italy is Maurizio Molinari: not a reporter who happened to cover Jerusalem, but a Zionist propagandist and Atlanticist mouthpiece. Hebrew University; years as correspondent from New York and Jerusalem; a shelf of books on Israel, America, and “radical Islam”; Bilderberg and Davos. He is married to Micol Braha, an Italo-Libyan Zionist lawyer; they wed in New York and raised four children there. He ran La Stampa and then la Repubblica on an unflinching pro-Israel, NATO-Italy line until his own newsroom voted no confidence, 164 to 55, after he pulped a hundred thousand copies of a supplement that dared to mention occupation and genocide. He left the chair in 2024. He did not leave the circuit. In 2026 he became editorial director of Gruppo SAE — Sapere Aude Editori — charged with the group’s expansion, including in the United States, after SAE bought La Stampa.
The revolving door does not stop with him. The same types of propagandists move from state media RAI to La7, from Corriere della Sera to La Repubblica: a handful of voices, a single brief, the occupation spoken as security and the resistance spoken as hate. When Naples students stopped Molinari’s campus appearance with “Zionists out,” the scandal, for the establishment, was the interruption. When students stormed the offices of La Stampa in Torino and threw some papers on the floor and spray painted some graffiti against the media escorts to Genocide, they were deemed as thugs and hoodlums, leading to persecution by the state and the eventual suicide of two highschool student activists.
From New York to Rome the sequence is the same. A movement names occupation, apartheid, genocide. The power structure answers that the naming is hatred and even terrorism. IHRA supplies the checklist. Hasbara supplies the talking points. The ambassador calls the protest terrorism. The minister calls the land by its biblical name and waits for the caption to follow. Twelve governments nibble at colonial goods and call it resolve. The Italian parliament prepares to make the equation law. What remains is the refusal: Zionism is a political project, not a people. Judea and Samaria is a sermon laid over a theft, not a map of a country that has stopped existing under another name. Occupied Palestine is still occupied Palestine. A press that cannot say so is not a press. A solidarity that accepts the gag is already finished.
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