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US imposes new sanctions on Iran amid looming threat of Israeli attack
Andre Damon, WSWS, Apr 17 2024

The US and its imperialist allies will imminently announce new sanctions targeting Iran as the US-led war drive against Tehran continues to accelerate. In a statement Tuesday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the US and its G7 allies would announce the sanctions “in the coming days.” He said:

We will not hesitate to continue to take action, in coordination with allies and partners around the world, and with Congress, to hold the Iranian government accountable for its malicious and destabilizing actions, We shall continue a steady drumbeat of pressure to contain and degrade Iran’s military capacity and effectiveness and confront the full range of its problematic behaviors.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the US would impose “additional sanctions action against Iran in the coming days.” The announcement came ahead of a scheduled meeting of the Israeli war cabinet at which Israel is expected to decide whether to carry out strikes against Iran. Increasingly, the US press is treating a military response by Israel against Iran as inevitable. In an article titled “Restraint or retribution? Israel faces dilemma in its response to Iran’s attack,” CNN wrote:

The US expects Israel’s military response will be limited in scope, a senior administration official and a source familiar with the intelligence told CNN. There is US intelligence to suggest Israel is weighing a narrow and limited strike inside Iran, the second source said.

These developments come as the imperialist powers continue to ever more directly align themselves with Israel, using Iran’s strikes over the weekend as a pretext to abandon their previous nominal criticism of the Gaza genocide. Sunak, in a phone call with Netanyahu Tuesday, “reiterated the UK’s steadfast support for Israel’s security,” according to a UK government spokesperson. While stating on background that the United States will not directly take part in a strike, US officials have given Israel a green light to attack Iran, reaffirming Washington’s unconditional support for Israel. On Monday, White House spokesman John Kirby declared:

This is an Israeli decision to make, whether and how they’ll respond to what Iran did on Saturday, and we’re going to leave it squarely with them.

The escalating US-Israeli offensive against Iran comes as Israel continues its genocide against the population of Gaza. On Tuesday, an Israeli airstrike reportedly targeted a playground in Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp, killing 11 people, most of whom were children. Al Jazeera reported that “dozens” of people were transported to hospitals following the attack. Separately, seven police officers charged with protecting food distribution were killed in an airstrike on their vehicle. In a statement, Gaza’s interior ministry condemned the Israeli army’s “repeated, targeted attacks on security forces” throughout Gaza. It added:

We call on all parties within the international community to pressure the occupation to halt its attacks against members of the police force, who are carrying out their duties to serve and protect our people.

Al Jazeera reported that, in yet another airstrike Tuesday, several people were killed when an Israeli jet attacked a residential building in central Rafah. There are more than 1.5 million displaced Palestinians sheltering in the city, amid a looming Israeli offensive that is expected to displace hundreds of thousands of people and kill countless thousands. In a harrowing report published Tuesday, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor asserted that Israeli forces are broadcasting the recorded sounds of women screaming and children crying in order to lure civilians out from under cover in order to shoot them. The Monitor reported:

Testimonies from camp residents, which were provided to the Euro-Med Monitor team, confirm that the sound of women screaming and babies crying was heard late at night on both Sunday and Monday. When some of the residents went out to investigate and tried to help, they were shot at by Israeli quadcopter drones. The sounds they had heard were, in fact, recordings played by the Israeli drones with the intent of forcing the camp’s residents out into the streets, where they could be easily targeted by snipers and other weaponry.

Another witness described the incident to Al Jazeera, saying:

Yesterday, the area was subjected to Israeli shelling. Three hours after the raids, we heard the voices of children crying out and the voice of a woman. When we went out, we were subjected to heavy fire from the Israeli army and the sound was coming out of an Israeli quadcopter with four propellers.

In a statement Tuesday, the International Rescue Committee warned of a “public health catastrophe underway in Gaza,” declaring that “millions of Palestinians in Gaza facing famine, malnutrition and disease outbreaks.” The committee warned that without an immediate ceasefire, 12k people were expected to lose their lives as a result of disease. The statement quoted Dr Sima Jilani, senior health technical advisor for emergencies at the organization, who said:

No hospitals in Gaza are fully functioning any longer. IRC staff and partners in Gaza continue to witness devastation in the health facilities that are left. Palestinians are often forced to weigh whether it is worth the risk of death or encountering violence to get to a hospital, given unprecedented attacks, total absence of medical supplies, and the burden on existing health services. Patients as young as 4 months old are dying from preventable or easily treatable diseases like pneumonia and gastroenteritis.

“Something will have to give.” IMF warns of build-up of US debt
Nick Beams, WSWS, Apr 17 2024

The opening chapter of the World Economic Outlook report of the IMF, released at its spring meeting in Washington yesterday, presented a generally upbeat report on the state of the global economy, at least on the surface. But not far below it there are gathering storms. In his foreword to the report, IMF economic counsellor Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas wrote:

The global economy remains remarkably resilient, with growth holding steady as inflation returns to target.

Despite “gloomy predictions,” the world had avoided a recession and the banking system proved “largely resilient.” He was also gratified that despite the surge of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis there had been no “wage-price spirals.” In other words, because of the actions of the trade unions in all the major economies in suppressing wage demands and imposing sub-inflationary agreements, workers had been made to bear the cost of the inflationary spiral set off by the COVID pandemic and the boost to energy prices flowing from the Ukraine war.

In contrast to the generally upbeat outlook on the immediate situation, examination of the IMF’s own data and projections for the medium-term told a different story with growth over the next five years unlikely to return to anywhere near previous historical norms. And even the immediate projections for the major economies show a significant slowing of economic output. Within the G7, the US economy leads the way with growth for this year expected to be 2.7%, an upgrade of 0.6% on the previous estimate. But it is all downhill from there. The next best performer is Canada with expected growth of 1.2%. The German economy, by some measures now the third largest economy in the world after the US and China, is expected to grow by only 0.2%, the lowest in the G7. Japan, now relegated to the world’s fourth largest economy, will grow by 0.9% with the UK coming in at 0.5%, after experiencing no growth in 2023.

On the growth of the US economy, which was described as “exceptional,” Gourinchas sounded a warning about the increase in government spending. It had led to a “fiscal stance that is out of line with long-term fiscal sustainability.” This is a reference to the rise of US public debt, now equivalent in size to US GDP which is expected to accelerate in coming years and is characterised by the Treasury department itself as “unsustainable.” Gourinchas wrote:

This raises short-term risks to the disinflation process, as well as longer-term fiscal and financial stability risks for the global economy since it risks pushing up global funding costs. Something will have to give.

While he did not specify it, the key driving force of this expansion is the escalation of military spending as well as large handouts to major corporations under the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and other measures. The IMF also expressed concern about the Chinese economy which has been a mainstay of global growth since the global financial crisis of 2008. It continues to be heavily impacted by the property crisis and the IMF has called for strong measures to provide an increase in domestic demand to lift growth. But there is little sign of that. The Chinese government is seeking to boost manufacturing, especially in high tech areas such as green energy and electric vehicles, which it can turnout at lower cost than in the West, leading to a risk this will “further exacerbate trade tension in an already fraught geopolitical environment.”

These conflicts were on display during the IMF gathering. US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has been organising meetings with her counterparts with the aim, among other things, of developing a unified response against the outflow of high-tech exports from China that cut into the US and other markets. This was a central topic of her discussions with Chinese officials and government representatives during her visit earlier this month in which virtually no agreement was reached. In comments at the weekend on the eve of the IMF meeting, she made clear what was at stake. She said:

This is a complicated issue that involves their entire macroeconomic and industrial strategy. It’s not going to be solved in an afternoon or a month.

These remarks underscore the existential nature of the conflict. The US is demanding the total subordination of China to its demands that it completely scrap its focus on what president Xi Jinping calls the development of “new productive forces” because this is seen as one of the chief threats to its continued domination of the global economy. From the Chinese side this strategy is seen as the only way to sustain economic growth, even at the much lower target of 5%, to maintain “social stability” that is, to try to prevent the eruption of struggles by the Chinese working class which would threaten the regime of the ruling capitalist oligarchy represented by the Communist party. This conflict can only intensify under conditions where, as the IMF made clear in Chapter 3 of its report published last week, global growth is markedly slowing. In a blog on the chapter, two of its authors warned that in the coming period growth is “set to fall far below its historical average.” They wrote:

The world economy faces a sobering reality. The global growth rate, stripped of its cyclical ups and downs, has slowed steadily since the 2008–09 global financial crisis.

It said economic growth was expected to reach just 2.8% by 2030, well below the historical average of 3.8%. The prospect of weaker growth was “exacerbated by strong headwinds from geoeconomic fragmentation, and harmful unilateral trade and industrial policies.” They noted that half of the growth decline was the result of a fall in total factor productivity, which measures the input of capital and labour and how these resources are used. In recent years increasingly “insufficient distribution of resources across firms has dragged down TFP and, with it, global growth.” It was not referred to, but one of the key factors in this process is that corporations have used their profits and even run up debts not for productive investments but to finance share buy backs to meet the demands of hedge funds and other parasitic financial institutions for a boost in “shareholder value.”

Overall, the IMF gathering was not so a meeting to deal with growing global economic problems but was more akin to a war council in which the immediate target is China on the one hand, and the working class on other. There was an insistence on the need to continue the fight against inflation, the code phrase for driving down real wages, the need to increase productivity, the intensification of exploitation, and the maintenance of financial buffers, that is, cuts in social spending, to deal with mounting debts. Insofar as the resolution of economic problems was addressed, the IMF said “multilateral cooperation” would be needed. But that has gone by the board. Its passing was highlighted in remarks this week by the Australian Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese in which he announced government support for war-related industries. Starting with the US, he listed a series of nationalist measures introduced by a range of countries to boost their economic and national security. This “strategic competition,” which is directed towards war, he said, was now a “fact of life.”

Ban on the Palestine Congress: Another step towards a German police state
Tamino Dreisam, Peter Schwarz, WSWS, Apr 17 2024

Since hundreds of police officers broke up a Palestine Congress in Berlin last Friday, new details have come to light every day about the arbitrariness and ruthlessness with which the police disregarded the law and trampled on democratic rights. The German government employs the same police brutality against opponents of the genocide it supports in Gaza that it usually accuses enemies such as Putin of using. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) backed the brutal police action on Friday. She wrote on Twitter that it was “right and necessary” for the Berlin police to “crack down on the so-called Palestine Congress.” A collective of lawyers advising the organisers of the congress published a statement Apr 13 detailing the preparations for the congress and the course of events. It reveals that there had already been several security talks between the organisers and the police in the run-up to the congress. On the morning of the congress, the programme and the planned speakers were discussed with the police and confirmed by them. However, although the organisers agreed to all of the police’s conditions, even if they were more than questionable, the police banned the four-day meeting after two hours and broke it up.

A video message, announced in the programme, by 86-year-old Dr Salman Abu Sitta, who has been campaigning for the Palestinian cause for decades, served as a pretext. Although Abu Sitta did not say anything illegal, even according to the representative of the public prosecutor’s office present, the police stopped the video after a few minutes. The reason given was that the speaker had been banned from undertaking any activity in Berlin. However, neither the organisers nor the public, and apparently not even the police until shortly beforehand, had been aware of this. Furthermore, it had already been clarified by the courts in previous cases that a ban on activities does not apply to the playing of videos. Even when the organisers offered to refrain from playing the video, the police were not satisfied. They now claimed that the livestream of the event could potentially be used to broadcast criminal statements around the world. The organisers even agreed to do without the livestream. But that did not help them either.

The decision to close down the event had obviously been made long ago, even though there was no legal basis for it and not even a plausible excuse. The overall head of police operations justified the ban with the Kafkaesque argumentation that showing the video message of a person against whom a ban on undertaking any activity had been issued gave him sufficient reason to suspect that criminal statements would be made if the congress continued. This is ideological justice based on a person’s views, just as it was under the Nazis. It is not a criminal offence or a punishable statement that is being punished here; the mere suspicion that those affected might say things that do not agree with the government’s line is sufficient. Numerous other repressive measures were taken against the congress. For example, bans were imposed on other announced speakers. In at least two cases, contact bans were imposed, prohibiting all contact with and harbouring of congress participants. The Ministry of the Interior has imposed a ban on the former Greek finance minister and chairman of the pan-European party DiEM25, Yanis Varoufakis, which also includes a ban on entry to Germany and online access. This means practically that Varoufakis is no longer allowed to speak publicly in Germany.

Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a medical doctor and rector of Glasgow University, was also banned from entering the country on short notice by the Federal Police. He was detained on arrival at Berlin airport, interrogated for three hours and then put on a plane back to London. He was also banned from delivering his speech online. Ghassan Abu Sittah had worked with MSF in Gaza hospitals for several weeks during the war and testified about this at the International Court of Justice, where Germany stands accused of aiding and abetting genocide. He wanted to report on his harrowing experiences in Gaza at the congress. In the run-up to the congress, the authorities had already used various methods of intimidation in an attempt to prevent him from attending. For example, the bank account of the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace association, which was collecting donations for the congress, was blocked. There were “security warnings” against the Cafe MadaMe, where a fundraising evening for the Palestine Congress was to take place. This was eventually cancelled under pressure. And the landlord of the event hall was also put under pressure by various authorities to find alleged deficiencies in fire safety and usage conditions. It is hard to say whether such methods are more likely to come from the repertoire of the mafia or that of an authoritarian dictatorship. When all intimidation measures failed to bear fruit, the congress was banned without any legal basis. The lawyers’ collective concludes its explanation of the developments with the following statement:

Any constitutional attempts to protect the meeting and those taking part in it and to ensure that it ran smoothly and lawfully were torpedoed by the police. The impression was created that legal protection was to be curtailed here, beyond all tried and tested assembly law experience, case law and constitutional provisions.

Visibly emboldened by the ban, the Berlin police took action against further pro-Palestinian protests in the days that followed. On Saturday, around 1,900 people gathered for a demonstration to protest against the ban on the congress. The demonstration was accompanied by a large contingent of armed police. In intense heat, the police stopped the demonstration for just under half an hour before storming in without warning and pulling out a group of participants. A total of six people were arrested during the demonstration. The following day, the police took even more brutal action against the “Occupy against Occupation” protest camp in front of the Reichstag. The protest camp had been registered on Monday of the previous week to protest for several days against Germany’s active role in the ongoing genocide.

On Sunday, the police brutally attacked the peaceful protest. Several people, including Jews, were beaten, choked and pepper-sprayed, thrown to the ground and injured. Several had to be taken to hospital. Four people were arrested, including a member of the Jewish Voice. There were other incidents during the congress in which democratic rights were trampled on. For example, the TAZ told how a congress participant was reported to the police because he was wearing a T-shirt with the words “Free Palestine” and a stylised fist in the Palestinian colours. He had to take off the T-shirt and hand it over to the police as evidence. Several participants and journalists reported that they were followed, observed, had their IDs checked and were searched by the police on their way home. These are methods familiar from those of dictatorial regimes. They are directed against anyone who opposes Germany’s pro-war policy. This also shows the enormous fear the ruling class has of opposition to its war policy. The working class must be mobilised to stop the genocide, the war policy and the attacks on democratic rights.

Tories denounce BBC’s Nick Robinson for referring to “murders of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians”
Thomas Scripps, WSWS, Apr 17 2024

The truth about Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza was inadvertently spoken of by BBC journalist Nick Robinson on Monday. It met a torrent of denunciations from Britain’s Conservative government and a prompted a swift apology from Robinson on behalf of the state broadcaster. Robinson, with the BBC since 1986, its political editor for 10 years and now a presenter on its flagship radio programme Today, was speaking with Foreign Secretary David Cameron on the Iranian attack against Israel. At the close of an otherwise ordinary fifteen-minute interview, Robinson asked:

You will know, I think you’ve talked about, the fact that the West has been perceived to lose the argument, with even many of its own people, ever since the war of terror began. Isn’t the real risk of where we are now, that Western governments appear to back Israel the moment that Israel is under attack, but when Israel attacks and murders tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, we say the words, but we do almost nothing?

The response to the use of the words “murder” and “innocent civilians” was outraged. Conservative former cabinet minister Theresa Villiers told the Sun:

Even by the BBC’s standards this is shocking bias. I can’t believe that this kind of question is asked on one of the nation’s most influential and highly regarded news programmes. Israel does not target civilians. The country is defending itself from a brutal terror attack and making strenuous efforts not to harm civilians. The BBC should launch an immediate investigation into this latest example of an anti-Israel statement by one of its presenters.

Fellow Tory MP Greg Smith denounced:

Outrageous bias from the BBC. Israel is the nation being attacked – the actual victims – seeking to defend themselves from further attacks by terrorists who have the stated aim of destroying Israel and killing Jews.

Jewish Chronicle columnist Nicole Lampert stated baldly:

Israel has not deliberately ‘murdered tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.’ Dangerous inflammatory language.

A little later, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson insisted:

Impartiality, in reference to the BBC, is absolutely paramount. Israel is an ally of the UK, is the victim of a brutal terror attack and clearly has a right to defend itself. We should all be careful with our words at this time, particularly given heightened community tensions in the UK.

The scandal over Robinson’s comments is confined exclusively to ruling circles. He was, after all, only trying to pose Cameron a question reflecting the fact that tens of millions of people in the UK, the vast majority, are appalled by Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and disgusted by the British government’s complicity. But official discourse on the war in Gaza, especially in the media, is a thoroughly state-managed affair, down to the last word. It is designed to create a fantasy world in which a supposedly democratic Israeli state is conducting a war of self-defence with the best possible intentions and due regard for all aspects of international law. As Cameron answered Robinson in the interview, the “truly malign action in this region” is not Israel, or its allies the US, Britain and all the world’s imperialist powers, but Iran.

In this world, it is the Palestinians’ fault for accepting the leadership of Hamas, that nearly 34k of them, including nearly 14k children and more journalists and humanitarian aid workers than in any comparable war, have been killed, and millions thrown into famine. It is Iran’s fault that Israel has repeatedly assassinated its senior government personnel, violating the sovereignty of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq to do so, and is threatening a regional war. An equally important lie is that the British population agrees with these views and that those protesting Israel’s war represent a small minority of “hate marchers” and “extremists.” By even briefly referencing opposition to government policy, Robinson allowed reality to intrude on this fraud. He quickly apologised for this unpardonable slip, writing:

I should have been clearer that I was not expressing my own view, let alone that of the BBC, when I used the word ‘murders.’

A former president of the Oxford University Conservative Association and paid more than £270k/yr just by the BBC, he had only been concerned with the “‘risk’ of how the Government’s position ‘appears.’” The incident will nonetheless be used to tighten the ideological screws, feeding into an ongoing campaign against the BBC, accusing it of anti-Israeli bias for merely reporting on the crimes perpetrated by Israel. Its aim is to shift the broadcaster even further to the right and justify an even broader crackdown on popular anti-Zionist protest. Already last autumn, within a few months of the Israeli invasion, the Daily Telegraph was publishing:

BBC’s credibility with Jewish community has reached breaking point.

The Jewish Chronicle:

How the BBC’s week of Israel bias alienated the Jewish community.

The Daily Mail:

Ex-BBC television chief brands the corporation ‘institutionally antisemitic.’

The Times of Israel:

The BBC is under fire for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war — rightly so.

The Telegraph piece, written by former BBC Director of Television and now columnist for the paper Danny Cohen, accused BBC diplomatic correspondent Caroline Hawley of publishing tweets which read “like a series of press releases from Hamas central command.” Cohen upped the stakes in March, publishing:

The BBC’s anti-Israel bias is becoming dangerous.

Government ministers have said the same, with then Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick comparing the BBC’s reporting last year to a “21st-century blood libel.” This February, several Tory MPs spent an hour and a half discussing in parliament:

What makes the BBC institutionally antisemitic is not that there is bias or antisemitism within — sadly, there is a lot of that everywhere — but the fact that the management have not done what they should be doing about it. They have fuelled the rise in antisemitism and harmed diplomatic efforts to end the violence.

This is said of a broadcaster that millions of workers have either stopped watching entirely, or watch only while holding their noses because of its key role in promoting the lies of the British and Israeli governments. But the Tories will not be satisfied until they have the equivalent of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. The row between the government, Robinson and the BBC notwithstanding, mass alienation from the ruling class and its media, centred on disgust over the relentless pro-genocide propaganda, will only deepen. It is an essential aspect of a political shift to the left by the working class that finds its sharpest expression in the anti-imperialist and anti-war sentiment of the younger generation, which presages a broader eruption of the very political and social conflict the ruling class is seeking to repress.