Archive June 17, 2025

Republican Senator Tom Cotton ought to be a happy MAGA-camper these days.

The rebar-right American lawmaker took a controversial turn as a writer in 2020, publishing a provocative opinion piece in The New York Times that caused quite the stir.

Cotton’s column came to mind because it seems that US President Donald Trump may not only have read the missive, but snipped it out of the newspaper for safekeeping and future inspiration.

At the time, America was roiled by demonstrations in the raw residue of the murder of 46-year-old George Floyd – and the killing of other Black men and women – by police officers.

Most of the rallies across a seething country were peaceful. But, in some places, the combustible mixture of grief, anger and frustration, coupled with columns of charging police wielding batons, stun guns, and tear gas, erupted into running battles. There were also reports of isolated looting.

It was in this already incendiary context that Cotton lobbed his slightly more than 800-word grenade into the flammable mix – courtesy of America’s so-called “paper of record”.

Cotton trotted out the usual hyperbolic cliches, claiming that several American cities were confronting “an orgy of violence,” had been “plunged … into anarchy,” or “descended into lawlessness” by “bands” of “nihilistic criminals [and] cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”.

Grim, apocalyptic-sounding stuff.

Cotton’s solution to the “orgy of violence” was, of course, to invite even more violence.

“One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers,” Cotton wrote.

Citing precedent, history and the commander-in-chief’s duty, Cotton argued that it was time for the president to send in the troops – the Marines, if necessary, as backup for the cops.

Cotton’s pernicious prescription to “restore order” in the face of a bourgeoning Black Lives Matter movement triggered a revolt at the Times and a sharp rebuke more broadly.

After first defending the decision to post Cotton’s commentary, the Times did a careening volte face, insisting, belatedly, that it had not met the paper’s editorial “standards”.

James Bennet, the Times’s opinion editor, resigned.

Trump watched the kerfuffle unfold, tweeting his support for the “great senator” from Arkansas and his “excellent Op-Ed”.

Five years later, it is clear that Trump has adopted Cotton’s “excellent Op-Ed” as his blunt blueprint to tame California and potentially other states where enlightened Americans are gathering to resist his brutish immigration raids and designs to use the military to suppress dissent.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has accused a “deranged” president of orchestrating a “military dragnet” across Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city.

Beyond his rhetorical broadsides, Newsom has asked a federal judge to stop the Trump administration from using the National Guard and Marines to bolster immigration raids – arguing it would only fuel tensions.

Legality aside, Trump sent in the troops knowing that generations of Americans have long agreed with Senator Cotton – the use of “overwhelming force” to “keep the peace” is a patriotic act to protect the republic from an ever-changing cast of “agitators” – citizen or not.

Newsom’s claim that Trump’s gambit amounts to “the deranged fantasy of a dictatorial president” misses the blatant point.

The stubborn construction that Trump’s edicts and conduct are the work of a “mad” president, realising his “dictatorial fantasies”, absolves millions of like-minded Americans who approve of what their industrious leader is doing in Los Angeles and throughout the United States.

It is politically convenient and expedient for an ambitious politician considering running for president in 2028 to point an accusatory finger at one culprit, instead of a complicit nation.

Recent polls show that a good majority of Americans – largely Republicans – are cheering on Trump’s draconian deportation orders since the alleged aim is, as Senator Cotton once wrote, “to maintain public order and safety”.

I suspect that, despite the predictable “outrage” given full and ample vent across a variety of cable news networks, which air their derivative pantomimes day and night, Trump’s popularity on immigration will perk up.

It appears that a lot of Americans have preferred a performative “tough guy” who enjoys putting on a good show of official power or exercising his First Amendment rights, despite the lethal consequences, over voices encouraging caution and restraint.

For evidence of this demonstrated fact, here is video of an appearance last April by Kyle Rittenhouse on the campus of Kent State University.

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire, unprovoked, on Kent State students, killing four and wounding nine others during an anti-Vietnam War protest. That same National Guard is patrolling the restive streets of Los Angeles.

Rittenhouse was invited to speak not despite the university’s grim history, but because of it.

His presence there was a deliberate provocation – an attempt to recast the memory of state-sanctioned violence not as a cautionary tale, but rather as a moment to be reinterpreted through the lens of righteous force and personal valour.

Rittenhouse is known – exclusively – for shooting three men, killing two of them, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020. A jury acquitted him of all charges, accepting his claim of self-defence.

The three men were part of a large crowd condemning police brutality – and all three were shot by a teenager who appointed himself, like Trump and Cotton, as guardian of the streets.

So, it is not surprising that Rittenhouse was embraced as a “hero” by an enthusiastic, overflowing audience in a lecture hall.

This is the country Trump and Cotton understand well: where “law and order” is preserved by theatrics and armed muscle, not fairness and temperance.

The applause for Rittenhouse and the polls girding Trump are not outliers – they are proof that the appetite for raw authority is deep and durable.

Trump has not hijacked America – he mirrors it.

Cotton’s column, Rittenhouse’s celebrity, the martial display – none of it is an aberration. It reflects an attitude that celebrates domination and obedience, endorsing aggression so long as it is draped in self-preservation or framed as “defence”.

And far too many Americans are just fine with that.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to launch strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities has sparked concerns among sections of the global community, atomic energy regulators and experts on the risks of nuclear contamination.

On Monday, Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, said there was a possibility of both radiological and chemical contamination from the damaged Natanz installation, Iran’s major nuclear hub.

Meanwhile, regional and global leaders warned that the Israeli strikes, which began on Friday, could further destabilise the region and increase the chances of a nuclear confrontation.

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, on Saturday expressed “deepest concern” at the escalation. The EU opposes Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons but believes “diplomacy, not military action” is the way to achieve that, she said.

Netanyahu, who has been calling for attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites for years, launched the unprecedented strikes as nuclear talks were being conducted between Washington and Tehran.

United States President Donald Trump has said his country was not involved in the attacks but has promised that he won’t allow Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran has insisted its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes.

So do Israel’s attacks point to a growing risk of nuclear radiation after two nuclear-armed neighbours – India and Pakistan – also came to blows in May and with Russia and Ukraine tussling for control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest?

What did the IAEA say?

Addressing an urgent session of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna on Monday, Grossi said radiation levels appear normal outside both the Natanz nuclear installation and another facility in Isfahan also targeted in Israeli strikes.

However, the IAEA director general warned that military escalation “increases the chance of a radiological release”. Grossi had on Friday told the UN Security Council that Israel’s strike on Natanz destroyed the above-ground part of the facility. While the main centrifuge facility underground was not hit, it lost power because of the attack.

That in turn, he warned, might have damaged the underground centrifuges that enrich uranium. Spinning centrifuges contain a gas called uranium hexafluoride, and it is this gas that poses the greatest risk of chemical contamination at Natanz at the moment, Grossi said. The gas is made by combining uranium and fluorine and is highly volatile and corrosive. It can burn skin and can be deadly if inhaled. It is unclear whether any of this gas has escaped from the centrifuges because of the power loss.

“Amid these challenging and complex circumstances, it is crucial that the IAEA receives timely and regular technical information about the facilities and their respective sites,” Grossi said. In the absence of that information, he said, the IAEA “cannot accurately assess the radiological conditions and potential impacts on the population and the environment and cannot provide the necessary assistance.”

Have nuclear facilities been hit before?

Al Jazeera cannot find a record of an operational nuclear ​installation coming under attack, but ​power plants have often been attacked while under construction – mostly in the Middle East.

A week into the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, Iran’s Operation Scorch Sword damaged Iraq’s unfinished Osirak ​nuclear reactor in the world’s first attack on a nuclear power plant.

Israel conducted another air attack the following year, destroying the French-built reactor in Operation Opera. A decade later, US Operation Desert Storm attacked the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Centre, of which Osirak was a part.

Iraq also attacked Iran’s incomplete nuclear reactor at Bushehr during the Iran-Iraq War, damaging it. The Soviet Union eventually completed the reactor in the early 2000s, and it went into operation in 2009.

Israel recently revealed that in 2007, it had bombed a Syrian reactor, apparently only just before it became operational, believing it to be part of a plan by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to acquire nuclear weapons. Operation Outside the Box bombed the North Korean-built plutonium reactor at Deir Az Zor, destroying it.

Other reactors have come under attack for political rather than security reasons.

Spain’s Basque separatist group ETA bombed a nuclear power station under construction in Lemoiz on Spain’s northern coast. ETA detonated bombs inside the facility in 1978 and 1979, killing three workers. Twice it assassinated the project’s chief engineer. Spain eventually abandoned the plant in 1983 after the Francisco Franco dictatorship’s nuclear programme was cancelled.

Antinuclear activists caused damage to unfinished power plants in 1982. In France, they fired five rocket-propelled grenades into the Creys-Malville plant near Lyon, creating a hole in its outer concrete wall.

In December of that year, the African National Congress set off a series of four staggered bombs at the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, which South Africa’s apartheid government was building near Cape Town. The first of two reactors at the plant was to have started operating that month. There were no injuries or radiation leakage.

Have there been other times the world’s been close to a nuclear incident?

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Dan Smith, the head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said the world has rarely been in much danger from accidental nuclear weapons use.

Previously, risks have primarily arisen from the threat of miscalculations.

“The last time that there was open information to show we were so close to disaster is the Petrov incident in September 1983 – a false alarm in the Soviet early warning system that he [an engineer] refused to report,” Smith said.

Stanislav Petrov, who worked at Moscow’s early warning command centre, received satellite information that a US ballistic missile had been launched against Russia, followed by four more.

It was a time of great tension between the superpowers as the US objected to the deployment of Russian SS20 missiles with multiple warheads and Moscow objected to forward-deployed Pershing II nuclear missiles being stationed in Western Europe.

Petrov may have averted a nuclear war by waiting for corroborating evidence before alerting his superiors. No missiles hit Russian soil, and the Soviet satellite information turned out to have been faulty.

More recently, during the four-day military conflict between India and Pakistan, India fired its homegrown BrahMos missiles at its neighbour. While the missiles carried conventional payloads in this case, some experts believe they could be modified to carry nuclear warheads too.

And as Khurram Dastgir Khan, former Pakistan defence minister, told Al Jazeera in May: “Once the missile is in the air, you cannot know what payload it carries until it hits the target.”

Such scenarios increase the risk of a nuclear war in instances in which both sides – such as in the case of Russia and NATO in Europe – are nuclear armed, Smith said.

He said that more than any planned nuclear attack, he worries about “somebody somewhere, in a chain of command under extreme pressure of time, with hostility in the atmosphere, with violent rhetoric in the background,” reacting mistakenly.

“Somebody sees something and they say, ‘That’s it. This is the big one. This is the attack coming. It’s 75 missiles and their warheads, just like we predicted in our exercise six months ago, and we have to destroy the remainder of their force so that they cannot escalate.’”

Has the Russia-Ukraine war added to the risks too?

A more recent nuclear contamination scare came early in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when it seized the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) on March 4, 2022. The ZNPP has six reactors, and it stands on the left bank of the Dnipro River, which forms part of the front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces.

Ukraine said Russia had placed 500 soldiers with military equipment, tanks and ammunition in the engine room of the first reactor unit, impeding access for firefighting equipment.

This Russian garrison also fired into Nikopol, across the Dnipro, apparently to provoke retaliatory fire.

On August 1, 2022, then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the UN General Assembly: “Russia is now using the plant as a military base to fire at Ukrainians, knowing that they can’t and won’t shoot back because they might accidentally strike a nuclear – a reactor or highly radioactive waste in storage. That brings the notion of having a human shield to an entirely different and horrific level.”

Two days later, Ukraine’s state nuclear power agency, Energoatom, said Russian forces fired rockets and artillery into the power plant, damaging its nitrogen-oxygen station. “There are risks of hydrogen leakage and sputtering of radioactive substances. Fire danger is high,” Energoatom said.

Over the past 20 months, I have often asked myself: how long does it take to recognise crimes against humanity?

In Gaza, one would think the genocidal intent of the Israeli military campaign and the scale of the tragedy are self-evident. And yet, the genocide continues. Why?

It turns out the world has a dismal record when it comes to recognising – and acting against – crimes against humanity while they are being committed.

Take, for instance, the case of colonial-era genocides.

Between 1904 and 1908, German colonists massacred 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama people in Namibia in what is often considered the first genocide of the 20th century. This campaign of extermination was Germany’s response to a tribal uprising against the colonial seizure of Indigenous lands.

The atrocities of this period were described as “one long nightmare of suffering, bloodshed, tears, humiliation and death”. Oral testimonies from survivors were recorded and published in a British government document known as the Blue Book in 1918. At the time, it was “a rare documentation of African voices describing the encounter of African communities with a colonial power”.

But in 1926, all copies of the Blue Book were destroyed in an effort to ensure that the African perspective on the genocide would “no longer be found and preserved in a written form”.

Germany formally recognised the massacre as a genocide and issued an apology only in 2021.

A similar pattern unfolded during the Maji Maji uprising in present-day Tanzania in 1905, which was triggered by German attempts to force the Indigenous population to grow cotton. Germany’s scorched earth response killed an estimated 300,000 people. Rebels were publicly hanged, and some of their skulls and bones were sent to Germany for use in pseudoscientific experiments intended to “prove” European racial superiority.

An apology for these atrocities came only in 2023 when German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke at the Maji Maji memorial in Songea, southern Tanzania.

Even in the years leading up to the Holocaust, little was done to protect Jewish people fleeing persecution.

Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Jews in Germany were subjected to a growing number of laws stripping them of their rights, along with organised pogroms. Well before the outbreak of the second world war, many German Jews had already begun to flee. Yet while many host countries were well aware of the rise of antisemitism under Adolf Hitler’s regime, they maintained highly restrictive immigration policies.

In the United Kingdom, a rising tide of anti-Semitism shaped government policies. Authorities enforced strict immigration controls and declined to dedicate significant resources to provide shelter or humanitarian aid for Jewish refugees. The United States similarly maintained restrictive quotas and systematically denied visa applications from German Jews, citing what contemporaneous officials described as an “anti-alien climate” in Congress and “popular opposition to the prospect of a flood of Jewish newcomers”.

Today, apartheid in South Africa evokes near-universal condemnation. But this was not always the case.

The UK’s relationship with apartheid South Africa is revealing. Historians have shown that successive Labour and Conservative governments between 1960 and 1994 – prioritising colonial ties in Southern Africa and economic interests – repeatedly refused to impose economic sanctions on the apartheid regime.

History casts an equally harsh light on President Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger.

Reagan’s policies of “constructive engagement” and opposition to sanctions were driven by the desire to undermine the African National Congress (ANC), which his administration viewed as aligned with communism. After receiving the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, Archbishop Desmond Tutu described Reagan’s approach as “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian”.

Kissinger, as US secretary of state under President Gerald Ford, gave prestige and legitimacy to the apartheid regime with a visit to South Africa in 1976 – just three months after the Soweto massacre, when security forces gunned down unarmed students protesting against the forced use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Reportedly, neither apartheid nor the massacre were discussed during his visit.

In 1994, more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in Rwanda over 100 days. Sexual violence was systematically used as a weapon of war, with an estimated 250,000 women raped. Hutu militias reportedly released AIDS patients from hospitals to form “rape squads” to infect Tutsi women.

Despite warnings from human rights groups, United Nations staff, and diplomats that genocide was imminent, the world did nothing. UN peacekeepers withdrew. France and Belgium sent troops – not to protect Rwandans, but to evacuate their own nationals. US officials even avoided using the word “genocide”.

It was only in 1998 that US President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology during a visit to Kigali: “We did not act quickly enough after the killing began … We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.”

Given this history, it is hard to feel hopeful about the situation in Gaza. But as with other crimes against humanity, a day of reckoning may come.

What Israel has carried out in Gaza is a genocide in real time – one that is being livestreamed, documented, and archived in unprecedented detail.

Sniper fire killing Palestinian children. The assassination of poets. The bombing of hospitals and schools. The destruction of universities. The targeted killing of journalists. Each act has been captured and catalogued.

Israeli politicians have made public statements indicating that the campaign’s goal is ethnic cleansing. Videos show Israeli soldiers looting Palestinian homes and boasting of the destruction.

Human rights groups have meticulously documented these crimes. And a growing number of governments are taking action, from diplomatic rebukes to the imposition of sanctions.

There is a saying in Hindi and Urdu: Der aaye, durust aaye. It is often translated as, “Better late than never.” But as a colleague explained, the phrase originates from Persian, and a more accurate translation would be: “That which comes late is just and righteous.”

Justice for Palestine may come late. But when it does, let it be correct. And let it be righteous.

Waves of Russian missile and drone strikes have killed at least 15 people and injured 116 others in Ukraine.

Most of the casualties from the overnight attack on Tuesday were reported in Kyiv, with the capital suffering “one of the most horrific attacks,” it has seen since the start of the war, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy put it.

“An entire section of a block of flats” was destroyed and rescuers were searching under the rubble for possible survivors, the president said.

Approximately 27 locations in Kyiv were hit, according to Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko.

Elsewhere, one person was killed and 10 wounded in a strike on Odesa.

Zelenskyy said that a total of 440 drones and 32 missiles were used in the attacks nationwide.

“Right now in Kyiv, efforts are under way to rescue people from beneath the rubble of an ordinary residential building – it’s still unclear how many remain trapped,” he said.

Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported the death of a United States citizen in the capital.

More than three years into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has continued its attacks despite efforts by the US to broker a ceasefire.