In recent weeks I have moved on to other things and don't see myself using Lemmy as much in the future, at least not in the same capacity.

I'd like for this community to continue so I can leave things as is, but given my lack of involvement going forward, I think it would be better to appoint a new mod(s) and probably transfer ownership to one of them as well.

Thank you for allowing me to contribute. I got really into it! I'd be happy to share the resources and information I was accessing and using for posts.

All the best.

Part 1

Part 2

Commentary: The "practice curiosity" thingy seems very culty though.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/63707

By Talk World Radio, July 10, 2026

This is the July 22, 2026, show posted here ahead of time.

AUDIO:

Talk World Radio is recorded on Zoom.

Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

VIDEO:

This week on Talk World Radio we’re talking about a new documentary called An Ordinary Insanity (which you can see at https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com/ ) which focuses on Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s calls to action about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons. Our guest, the maker of this and a number of other wornderful films is Judith Ehrich, film director, writer, and producer. Her 2009 film The Most Dangerous Man in America, also about Daniel Ellsberg, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won a Peabody Award.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music: Brush Strokes by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: billraydrums

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The post Talk World Radio: An Ordinary Insanity appeared first on World BEYOND War.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1209342

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/61013

An undated photo from winter 2023 provided by Breaking The Silence, a whistleblower group of former Israeli soldiers, shows blindfolded Palestinian prisoners captured in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces and held at a detention facility on the Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel.  Photo: Breaking The Silence via AP

Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.

The months after the October 7, 2023, attacks saw a wave of questionable mainstream news stories about alleged sexual assault in Hamas’s attacks that day on Israel.

It would be years before the American press began to deal with sex crimes against Palestinians imprisoned by Israel as part of its brutal occupation.

It’s a reckoning that is long overdue.

Sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in detention is both a systematic and a decades-old practice — a well understood dynamic that is being put in the spotlight this week in a new report from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, a group of Palestinian and Arab feminist researchers and organizers.

The extensive 188-page report, parts of which were shared with The Intercept in advance of publication, situates recent, high-profile news stories detailing the rape and sexual assault of Palestinians in Israeli detention as part of “a wider system of sexualized and gendered violence spanning detention, warfare, surveillance, reproductive destruction, family separation, domicide, and the desecration of Palestinian bodies” over decades.

The report, “A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians,” brings together witness and survivor testimonies; news coverage; academic research; United Nations reports; and findings from human rights groups, like the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, and Israel-based B’Tselem; along with declassified Israeli archival material. (The Israeli government, military, and prison system did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

The United Nations added Israel in May to a blacklist of countries found to be committing sexual violence in war zones, citing 31 cases of sexual violence perpetrated in the last two years by Israeli forces against Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The new Palestinian Feminist Collective report underlines that the U.N.’s findings are merely the tip of the iceberg.

[

Related

The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé](https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/)

The compilation of harrowing details from a multiplicity of sources offers a chilling rebuke to those who have sought to discredit Palestinian victims’ claims or dismiss cases of sexual assault and rape perpetrated by Israeli forces as rare aberrations.

Crushed testicles, genital beatings, rapes of detainees including children and the elderly — the report, like a number of the previous human rights reports it draws from, shows that such abuse is, according to the authors, “institutional practice rather than individual misconduct.”

Rape by Trained Dogs

A section of the report shared with The Intercept includes the detailed testimonies of multiple released Palestinian prisoners. A 42-year-old woman arrested in Gaza while going through an Israeli military checkpoint in November 2024, for example, described being stripped, blindfolded, and handcuffed to a metal table and raped vaginally and anally by Israeli soldiers.

[

Related

YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations](https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-israel-palestine-human-rights-censorship/)

“I felt a penis penetrating my anus and a man raping me,” the woman said, in testimony originally collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “I started screaming, and they beat me on my back and head while I was blindfolded. I felt the man who was raping me ejaculate inside my anus.”

She then recounted subsequent vaginal rapes.

A 41-year-old Palestinian father arrested at Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2023 and held for 22 months in Israeli prison reported, “One of the soldiers raped me by violently inserting a wooden stick into my anus. After about a minute he removed it and then inserted it again more forcefully.”

Other accounts from boys and men detail anal rape by soldiers and prison guards using carrots, bottles, batons, and other sharp objects.

The report also includes multiple accounts claiming the use of trained dogs as sexual threats and tools of direct sexual violence.

When the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof last month reported on widespread and extreme sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli detention, including the use of trained dogs to rape detainees, the backlash from Israeli authorities and pro-Israel mouthpieces was as swift as it was predictable.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs slammed the article as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press” — a typical retort that deems any criticism of Israeli brutality to be antisemitic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to sue the Times for defamation. No such lawsuit has materialized, bound as it would be to fail and risk a court process revealing further horrors perpetrated by Israeli forces.

[

Related

The Media Calls Israeli Captives “Hostages” and Palestinians “Prisoners”](https://theintercept.com/2025/05/13/israel-palestine-hostages-prisoners-edan-alexander/)

Meanwhile, for Palestinians and advocates of Palestinian liberation, Kristof’s report was perhaps only surprising for its presence in the New York Times. Reports of rape, sexual violence, and sexual humiliation in Israeli custody have been widespread well established for years.

Pro-Israel media outlets like Bari Weiss’s The Free Press attempted to discredit and debunk the testimonies in Kristof’s article, particularly those from formerly detained Palestinians who alleged that trained dogs were used to rape prisoners. Such abuse was impossible, the critics claimed — despite the fact that, according to survivors, Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, as well as Nazi prison commander Klaus Barbie, reportedly used dogs to rape and sexually torture prisoners.

The “Predatory State” report lists 10 specific incidents of rape or severe sexual assault involving trained dogs, as reported to human rights groups by victims themselves or firsthand witnesses.

“The shock came when they forced me to lie down, and a dog climbed on top of me and tried to insert its penis into me,” one detainee testified, in a report first compiled by Euro-Med and cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. “At first, I did not understand what was happening, but then I realised that I was being raped.”

“They unleashed police dogs on us again, allowing them to tear into our flesh,” a 48-year-old man arrested at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza told the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in further testimony cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. He reported that one dog attacked a fellow detainee and “started mauling his genitals (penis). He bled to death in my arms.”

“Violence Across Decades”

The report authors note that “sexual torture has often preceded the deaths of detainees and prisoners and therefore must be considered part and parcel of the crime of genocide waged against the Palestinian people.”

This statement covers more than just Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza: The Palestinian Feminist Collective report is explicit in including accounts of sexual violence reportedly carried out by soldiers as well as settlers in the West Bank.

“They zip-tied my penis, tightened it and then dragged me all around the village,” a Palestinian man, Qusai Abu-al Kebash, told B’Tselem of a reported assault at the hands of settlers in his West Bank village earlier this year.

In response to credible claims of sexual assault, particularly in Israel’s Sde Teiman military prison, Israel’s defenders have attempted to downplay incidents as aberrations or outliers in the fog of war.

“This is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,” Jonathan Conricus, a former Israeli military spokesperson, now fellow at the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told The Free Press.

He was responding to an incident caught on video of Israeli soldiers appearing to beat and brutally sodomize a Palestinian prisoner with a knife. Conricus blamed “reservists without the right training” who “were called up to be prison guards” — but rejected any claims of systematic abuse.

“The Sde Teiman footage should have shattered the fiction that Palestinian testimony is unproven.”

All charges were dropped against the soldiers accused of sexually assaulting the detainee. Numerous Israeli lawmakers, including far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, condemned the military for even attempting to charge the soldiers.

Reports like the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s further give the lie to excuses like Conricus’s.

“The Sde Teiman footage should have shattered the fiction that Palestinian testimony is unproven until Israeli perpetrators record themselves,” legal scholar and human rights attorney Noura Erakat told The Intercept. “Still the debate focuses on whether individual soldiers received direct orders, rather than how a state has sanctioned, protected, and repeated this violence across decades.”

[

Related

Video of Sexual Abuse at Israeli Prison Is Just Latest Evidence Sde Teiman Is a Torture Site](https://theintercept.com/2024/08/09/israel-prison-sde-teiman-palestinian-abuse-torture/)

In a statement shared with The Intercept, Loubna Qutami, a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, said, “This report names what Palestinians have long known and what the world has too often refused to hear: Israel’s sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians is systemic, historical, and constitutive of Israeli colonial rule.”

According to Igal Dotan, an Israeli attorney cited in the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s report, “The situation before the war was very bad, but it is not comparable to what happened in Israeli prisons after October 7.”

Dotan’s clients include a “severely disabled” 14-year-old Palestinian boy, diagnosed with autism, who was, the report notes, “reportedly sexually, physically, and psychologically assaulted while in detention.”

Before October 7

The Palestinian Feminist Collective refuses to begin its history of sexual and gendered violence on October 7. The report includes testimonies of sexualized violence gathered from oral histories, declassified archives and historical documents, dating back to the Nakba in 1948, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what are today’s Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

The long history of systematic displacement and dehumanization of Palestinians is run through with sexualized violence — as is common in situations of oppressive, militarized violence and population control.

“Sexual torture is a technology of Israeli rule.”

“‘A Predatory State’ documents how sexual torture is a technology of Israeli rule: a means of terrorizing Palestinians and advancing a project of destruction,” Erakat told The Intercept. “Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.”

With the genocide in Gaza ongoing and Israeli expansionist violence continuing in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, such accountability seems beyond our current horizons of expectation.

More evidence of the sort compiled by the Palestinian Feminist Collective is unlikely to change that; it is not for lack of evidence that Israeli forces continue to carry out war crimes with impunity.

The urgency is to act on the ample evidence we have.

“The report is a call upon all responsible citizens to stay united,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, in a statement on the Palestinian Feminist Collective report, “not just to end genocide, but to fight once and for all this testosteronic model of power that roots and grows through subjugation and repression.”

The post How to Show That Israel’s Sexual Violence Against Palestinians Is Systemic — and Has Gone on for Decades appeared first on The Intercept.

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From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/privacy/p/842077/netherlands-the-government-s-privacy-officer-blocked-a-u-s-company-from-buying-the

Archived version

A month or so ago, the Netherlands reportedly blocked a US company from buying the cloud provider that runs Dutch digital identity (there is a post about it in this community here).

The more recent news is that the Chief Privacy Officer of the Dutch government, who was behind this initiative, is about to lose his job.

...

For more than four months, Pieter van Oordt warned internally about the risks of the takeover. When these warnings were ignored, he brought the issue to the media, the Dutch Parliament, and the Cabinet. He showed that Parliament had received incomplete and misleading information and revealed that vulnerabilities in digital infrastructure had been shared with a U.S. company. His actions forced the Ministry of Economic Affairs to block the takeover.

Instead of protection, Van Oordt faced retaliation. He was excluded from meetings, his salary increase was blocked, and his request for protection under the European Whistleblower Directive was rejected, despite an expert report confirming that he should have been protected. He has been suspended, and his dismissal is mentioned in a written notice from the Attorney General on 22 May 2026.

The dismissal has not yet been implemented.

...

Someone started a petition (not me), I post this here as you may want to sign it (and maybe spread the word).

The petition calls on the European Parliament and the European Commission to act:

• Protect Pieter van Oordt from an unlawful dismissal.

• Ensure he can continue his work safely within the public sector.

• Place digital sovereignty of vital infrastructure high on the European agenda.

• Hold the Dutch government and the responsible ministries accountable.

[To read the English version of the linked text, you need to scroll down. It's below the Dutch version.]

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/62833860

Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee published a 55-page report Thursday accusing the group of aiding President Trump in turning America's milestone into a "hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment" through tactics that potentially amount to criminal fraud.

It's titled "From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People out of their 250th Birthday."

Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the ranking Democrat on the committee, told NPR that the report was months in the making. It is based on interviews with unnamed whistleblowers, sworn Congressional testimony, internal Freedom 250 documents and other written responses.

"We put it all together to really tell the story … of how Donald Trump hijacked what should have been a unifying national celebration and repurposed it for his own interests," Huffman said in a Zoom interview. "This was a team of operatives using the Freedom 250 shell company, but it was also Donald Trump himself telling them what to do."

https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-releases/ranking-member-huffman-releases-report-on-how-trump-hijacked-americas-250th-birthday-to-enrich-himself-sell-access-and-harvest-americans-data