Ben Rosenzweig

I just did that thing where you accidentally get a tense wrong when talking about someone who was just murdered.

Yanar Mohammed and the OWFI advocate for and run shelters for women in Iraq.

Two excerpts from Lisa Davis, 'Countering Iraq’s Anti-Shelter Policy in the Islamic State Era', in the Summer 2017 issue of the Journal of International Affairs.

Available here:

jia.sipa.columbia.edu/news/counter...

Yanar Mohammed was one of the people trying to deal with the dark scenario created in Iraq in the wake of invasion and then in the wake of the occupation.

It's worth remembering that this nightmare is still ongoing in Iraq, not least as the US and Israel seem determined to similarly destroy Iran.

(Full disclosure: I only had a small amount of contact with Yanar Mohammed and the OWFI, but the opening paragraphs introducing this interview created a whole different feeling of horror as there's some chance that the money falling through being referred to is a failure in which I was involved.)

And this is a short excerpt from a much earlier interview, ‘"Our Lives Are Worse Now": Yanar Mohammed Talks About The Impact Of The U.S. Occupation On The Lives of Iraqi Women’, with Mohammed interviewed by Lucinda Marshall, in the July-August 2004 issue of Off Our Backs.

This is an excerpt from Zahra Ali’s ‘Iraqi Women's Activism - 20 Years After the US Invasion’, in the Spring 2023 issue of Middle East Report (MERIP). Noting the not infrequent death threats.

www.merip.org/2023/04/iraq...

Iraq: Ensure accountability for killing of women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed Responding to the killing of prominent Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed, who was shot by unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle outside her home

I only just found out that Yanar Mohammed was murdered very recently.

She was best known as a leader of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI).

www.amnesty.org.au/iraq-account...

You can't make me read that.

Also this article, on the number of people who had been killed working in the US coal industry, appeared in the same, 6 June 1949 edition of the National Guardian.

Article about yet another effort of the US government to deport Harry Bridges, who had emigrated from Australia to the United States and become an almost legendary trade union leader.

From the 6 June 1949 edition of the National Guardian newspaper.

Are you really the New York Times?

Because if so that's some really pathetic stuff...

On the top of the front page of that paper: "GIs are not strikebreakers or riot cops!"

Excerpt from not very good reproduction of the February 1974 issue of Rage, a GI-produced paper.

Historically, soldiers have often tried to find ways to resist.

Attacking the infrastructure of healthcare, and overtly targetting civilian areas, like they're trying to take out civil society as a whole, not just the military and not even just the state, but all of the social organisation of people in Iran, I assume hoping to leave only ruins.

The "new Middle East" they talk about wanting isn't one of democracy and human rights; it's just one where no-one is willing and able to refuse or contest Israeli and US power in the region.

I think Israel is hoping there will be a dynamic of escalation drawing the US into ongoing war to fulfil the desire of Netanyahu and his allies that Iran be crippled enough that they can't be a counterweight to Israeli and US power in the region. Which is why Hezbollah had to be attacked.

This would also explain why they're just essentially willing to kill anyone and everyone - there's a higher proportion of people in the cities who aren't fans of the regime, but it doesn't matter if they die or decide the regime is preferable because the goal is destroying the state and society.

I think that's Israel's goal. The kind of military victory and ongoing occupation that would be necessary to install reliably pro-Israel and pro-US people is implausible and unbelievably costly, but they think just destroying the place until it's bombed into chaos still serves Israeli interests.

A couple of years later, this article on students opposing the repressive regime of the Shah in Iran appeared in the 4 April 1975 edition of the Los Angeles Free Press.

Just incidentally, I came across this article about Iranian students in the US, including what they could expect from the Shah's SAVAK secret police if they were deported, from the 13 April 1973 edition of the Berkeley Barb newspaper.

Just eternally reminding states means there's an absence of public discussion of why these states are doing these things in violation of international law, and what might actually be adequate to make them stop.

Of course, UNICEF has done a lot of reminding about international law over the last couple of years in particular; eventually it starts to feel like UNICEF is pretending not to notice that Israel and the United States actually do know the law and don't care even a little.

Two excerpts from the 6 March 2026 media statement by UNICEF, 'The brutality of war measured in children’s lives as hostilities escalate in Iran'.

www.unicef.org/press-releas...

Deadly bombing of Iran primary school ‘a grave violation of humanitarian law’: UNESCO The UN education agency, UNESCO, says that the bombing of a primary school during the US and Israeli military attacks on Iran on Saturday constitutes a grave violation of humanitarian law.

Do you think it might be getting slightly different coverage, and more of it, in more prominent places, if Iran had just massacred a hundred-odd little girls in Tel Aviv?

news.un.org/en/story/202...

I just don't think that rhetoric has the same force these days, outside of the most nazified parts of Zionist culture.

That Israel is right now a state pursuing genocide and ethnic cleansing right now, and massive violence as part of that project in the region, has ALWAYS been my point. From my very first comment here. Doesn't feel like a shift to me.

AIPAC pretends to believe she's not a real progressive.

Because if they said they don't want her to win because she might oppose genocide and ethnic cleansing, it might not have the desired effect.

We can talk about which force is a Jewish supremacist Apartheid state pursuing a genocidal project and settler-colonial expansion, and that seems more significant?

I think you missed the point.

I've always found Israel's willingness to deliberately slaughter enormous numbers of people in Lebanon, to use Lebanese fascists as death squads to massacre entire refugee camps, to create torture prisons on a large scale, and legalise taking hostages fairly reprehensible, fwiw.