Category World News

As they returned to their homes, thousands of displaced Palestinians carried what they could along the main roads that lead to northern Gaza. Following a Hamas-Israeli agreement allowing the release of six more captives, Israel began the roadblocks along the Netzarim Corridor.

I turned over and slept through a few years ago when it was reported that The Office’s Ellie Kemper had been crowned at a debutante ball known as “the Klan’s ball.” I blew out my lamplight and fell back under the sheets a week ago when TikTok gushed over Donald Trump and made the best use of a digital soft-shoe to thank the soon-to-be president for saving its presence in the US. However, something about 90s hip-hop artists getting together to kiss the ring at Trump’s inaugural balls still keeps me awake at night.

For many of us Black millennials – especially those raised in working-class neighbourhoods – hip-hop was the oxygen of our childhood. No one else could or wanted to be aware of the sounds and feelings of our existence that nobody else could and did not know about. It recorded every aspect of our lives. Even though music was criticized or perceived as living on the fringes of real society, our everyday lives were mirrored in it.

It opened our minds to potential as well. It opened the door to a fate beyond the minimum-wage job or the “second childhoods” we were given. It gave us the opportunity to imagine conquering working-class and the straits of lumpen. To dress well, to be gangsta or appealing, and have respect.

More than that, it was a mind. It was a conference of thought and conflicting debates, not just one that reflected the neighborhood’s conditions. When Aaliyah told us we “don’t need no Coogi sweater,” we were encouraged and criticized for intra-class antagonism. We saw visions of escape in Rich Boy’s Throw Some D’s and forced into quiet introspection after watching Pac’s Brenda’s Got a Baby and Latifah’s U. N. I. T. Y. We spent an hour attempting to recall the adrenaline-rush sentiments of Bizzy Bone’s entire Heaven’z Movie album, and the following hour, Mobb Deep’s Shook Ones made us feel like we were meeting the high school or street bully.

We set off this artwork to convey what we knew they thought of our disposable lives. The most readily available proof to show us that the world was telling us the truth about the “inferiority of Black people” was this. We didn’t need that well-intentioned white lady teacher pitying us for being Black, holding a poster with George Washington Carver with a jar of peanut butter, saying we, too, “contributed”. As we laboriously attempted to understand the Wu-Tang hieroglyphics, she was on mute and the CD player was spinning.

So it was interesting to watch the intensity of our ghetto beauty being compelled to dance in the disjointed frat boys’ discombobulated dance. To see our griots stoop to collect money under racism, the lowest of all intellectual limits. To see it was our thinkers, too, who would play the white liberal game, squinting, pretending they could not tell if a Nazi salute is a Nazi salute. their coats without being asked. leaving the White House before the Anti-Defamation League has the benefit of the doubt for white supremacists.

Turncoat rappers have left the most stinging wound of all the daily assaults on racism that have shaped this renaissance of settler supremacy. Our biographers being reduced to stool pigeons on a burning cross is difficult to recover from.

Excuses were preemptively flowing. It was said “a check is a check”. It was said “this isn’t politics”. They were made to appear to be unaware of what MAGA stands for and what they are trying to achieve. As if we didn’t know hip-hop is more university than the university.

I can recall looking through the channels and getting Fox News at the hip-hop artists dancing. Now, Fox News is reporting that Snoop Dogg “wows the crowd” at a pre-inauguration event. Snoop Dogg once mentioned 187, but now I’m worried about when I’ll see him waving a Blue Line Flag.

In the 90s, white power campaigned to ban hip-hop. How complete is the victory that it has won by rubbing its own feet? Nelly said but “he is the president”. But this is the point. There are no sporadic examples of our dislike of presidents. Any track by Dead Prez can be heard as the starting point.

The Ku Klux Klan’s grand wizard entered the US presidential race in 1988. Were Eric B and Rakim expected to perform Microphone Fiend for “fans” wearing white hoods because “we support the troops” if he had won? How soon will police officers begin to lynch people while they are freestyle ciphers?

Although we may not have known it at the time, the music also incorporated working-class and Black American culture. It was played in the Black poor’s spaces in South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia. It was the music of the slums, the colonised’s counter-ideological weapon against the prison they kept us in.

Therefore, it is heartbreaking to see how our culture and lives are being used by the men who complain that we steal pets and call for “terrorism” in order to live. When our defenders are now tap-dancing for those who spray firehoses at the “woke” and stand back up the monuments to Confederate generals, it hurts the morale of the people.

Your pool house can only have a limited number of extensions. Only drive so many cars in your lifetime. But “what does it worth” to sell your soul at the price of a noogie? To consent to their actions knowing that your gifted mansion will never surpass Massa’s outhouse?

Of course, some rappers who perform photo ops with boys who no one would believe did not use blackface do so are not representative of all millennial hip-hop. But it’s not just them. As Elon Musk puts a dent in apartheid, Chuck D is battling off the people who are coming for him. Eve can’t get out of a still of Downton Abbey. Nor can Common from commercials. Nor can our beloved Black Thought, caged-bird singing from the “gilded cage” – the people’s oracle reduced to “the entertainment” for fascist-petting Jimmy Fallon.

I should count my blessings as the world continues to crumble. If Dead Prez or Lauryn Hill grabbed a fiddle, I’d probably never get out of bed again. But it shouldn’t have been any of them. It was art for us, by us. Our hidden inner lives are shattered by empire, alongside our bodies, and it is heartbreaking to watch.

They beat us with the wake they stole from Erykah Badu. And now they have our master teachers stepping down from their posts to cheer up young settler supremacists. Watching so many of our epic poets line up to kiss the warrior king of Jim Crow society is heartbreaking.

However, this approach might be more advantageous. When Nas said hip-hop is dead, it may have been a prophecy. Or at least these “uncs of rap” may have lost their relevance in the era of globalized apartheid. They are now rich and compromised. We may have to abandon them as millennials explore the new music and new generation of artists in the colonized sector, both here and abroad, where radical Palestinian rappers are currently nowhere near to be found posing as Benjamin Netanyahu’s court jesters.

Gen Z has been forced to leave the Black innocent daily as a result of the public’s forced lynching of the majority of their lives, staring directly into the eyes of open fascism. Every day I see them. Nobody is tap-dancing.

Their “mumble rap” – which we “old heads” have mocked – is not only more developed but more coherent than any rapper who says “f*** the police” from one side of their mouth and “let’s give the Confederacy a chance” from the other. In terms of drill, anticolonialism is more useful for Black liberation than a conscious rapper trying to find nuance in colonialism by using horizontal violence in drill lyrics.

Millennials ‘ hip-hop may abandon the slum, but the slum will have its day. It made hip-hop once, it can make another hip-hop. And when it does, it will stand over colonialism’s body, Buggin Out’s boombox on its shoulder, singing that old Black colonised sector’s spiritual, “It’s bigger than hip-hop”.

In the second day of deadly protests in southern Lebanon, Israeli forces shot and killed at least two people and injured 17 others, according to health officials as residents who had been displaced by Israel’s 14-month conflict attempted to reclaim their homes where Israeli soldiers are still living.

When Israeli troops opened fire on protesters who broke through border crossing roadblocks, 24 people were killed and more than 130 were hurt.

Under a United States-brokered ceasefire on November 27, Israeli forces were to withdraw from southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah was to move north of the Litani River, about 30km (20 miles) from the border, by January 26.

Israeli forces are still present in more than a dozen villages despite the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers having already arrived before the deadline.

The deadline for implementing the ceasefire terms was extended to February 18 as announced by the US and Lebanon on Sunday.

On Monday, protests resumed, particularly in eastern border villages, where residents once more made home-strike attempts.

According to the Health Ministry, Israeli troops opened fire in four southern villages, injuring one person and injuring seven others.

Hezbollah has been blamed by the Israeli military for escalating protests, and soldiers have claimed to have opened fire at demonstrators.

In the village of Aitaroun on Monday, scores of unarmed residents, some waving Hezbollah flags, marched hand in hand or rode motorcycles, escorted by ambulances, bulldozers and Lebanese army tanks. They sped away from Israeli positions as they approached the town’s edge, but they were unable to enter.

“We are coming with our heads held high and crowned with victory to our village, Aitaroun”, Saleem Mrad, head of the municipality, told the Associated Press news agency. We will restore our village to its former splendor, saying, “Our village is ours.” We are staying”.

Israel reportedly dropped a bomb at the village of Yaroun in southern Lebanon in order to deter residents from continuing their journey, according to the official state-run newspaper National News Agency (NNA).

In the town of Bint Jbeil, Hezbollah members handed out flyers featuring slain leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in September, with the words: “Victory has arrived”. Hezbollah flags were waved by some residents.

“They think they are scaring us with their bullets, but we lived under the bombing, and bullets don’t scare us”, Mona Bazzi told the AFP news agency in Bint Jbeil.

Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Lebanon’s capital Beirut, said the protests are a show of defiance by Hezbollah and its supporters.

She said that although the organization had been severely damaged by the conflict last year, it still has influence in this nation.

THe NNA reported on Monday that Lebanese “army reinforcements” had arrived near Meiss el-Jabal, a border town where residents had gathered to enter alongside the military.

No injuries were reported, despite the news agency’s claim that Israeli forces “opened fire in the direction of the Lebanese army” close to Meiss el-Jabal.

“We waited in a long line for hours but couldn’t enter”, Mohammed Choukeir, 33, told AFP from Meiss el-Jabal, noting that Israeli troops were intermittently firing at civilians gathered at the town’s entrance.

The Lebanese army deployed across several neighborhoods in Hula, where the Health Ministry confirmed two injuries, and the NNA reported that residents had managed to enter.

The implementation of the agreement has been accused by both parties of stalling it.

Israel claimed that Israel had delayed its withdrawal and that its deployment efforts had been hampered by the Lebanese military’s inability to move quickly.

On Sunday, the Lebanese army confirmed it had entered several border areas, including Dhayra, Maroun al-Ras, and Aita al-Shaab.

Some family members found their relatives’ bodies in border villages on Sunday. More than 4, 000 people were killed in Israeli-caused attacks.

Israel has engaged in near-daily operations in southern Lebanon since the ceasefire began, including shelling homes and airstrikes, while accusing Hezbollah of breaking the ceasefire terms by attempting to move weapons. Israel has been charged by Lebanon with hundreds of ceasefire violations.

Avichay Adraee, an spokesman for the Israeli military, called on southern Lebanon residents to “wait” before returning on Monday.

According to Hilal Khashan, a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, major violence is not expected to reappear again.

After US President Donald Trump threatened to impose immigration sanctions, the row was eased.