TV News LIES

Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School of Public Health sent out a brief message announcing that one of the country’s most experienced and accomplished public health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would “step down” as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. The email struck a polite, bureaucratic tone, thanking her for her service and offering an upbeat rationale for a new “focus on children’s health”.

It omitted the fact that, according to a Harvard Crimson source, Bassett had been asked to resign just two hours earlier and instructed to vacate her office by the end of the year. The decision was not a routine administrative transition. It was the culmination of a year of escalating pressure on the Center for Health and Human Rights for its work on the health and human rights of Palestinians.

Powerful figures inside and outside Harvard, including the former Harvard president and now thoroughly disgraced economist Larry Summers, condemned this work and claimed it “foments antisemitism”. A leading public health scholar whose career has been defined by work on racial justice, poverty, HIV, and global inequality appears to have been removed not because her commitments shifted, but because the political costs of applying those commitments to Palestinians became too great for Harvard to tolerate.

Bassett’s ouster from the center, since denounced by hundreds of Harvard faculty and students, is not an isolated institutional failure. It exposes a deeper crisis in three intertwined domains often treated as guardians of modern moral universalism: human rights institutions, global public health organizations, and American universities.

All have long claimed to speak for everyone. All have repeatedly insisted that their missions transcend partisanship, borders, racial and gender differences, class, and interest groups. And all – when confronted with the political pressures surrounding Palestine – have shown how conditional their commitments have always been.

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A leading Muslim civil rights group in the US has sued Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, over his order designating it and another organization as a “foreign terrorist organization”, saying the directive was unconstitutional.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as Cair, has more than 20 chapters across the United States and its work involves legal actions, advocacy and education outreach.

The lawsuit was filed late Monday by the Cair-Foundation and Cair-Florida, its affiliate in the state. The suit asked a federal judge in Tallahassee to declare DeSantis’s order unlawful and unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced.

“He has usurped the exclusive authority of the federal government to identify and designate terrorist organizations by baselessly declaring Cair a terrorist organization,” the lawsuit says.

Cair said in the lawsuit that it was targeted by DeSantis for defending the free speech rights of people in cases in which state officials and officials elsewhere had tried to punish or silence those who had expressed support for Palestinian human rights.

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At dawn on Tuesday, Israeli occupation forces escalated their invasions across multiple areas of the occupied West Bank, deploying reinforcements toward Nablus in the northern West Bank while continuing widespread military operations in refugee camps, towns, and villages.

Troops broke into and ransacked dozens of homes, abducted many Palestinians, and set up military roadblocks, further tightening restrictions on Palestinian movement and daily life.

The soldiers invaded several neighborhoods including al-Makhfiyya and Rafidia, breaking into homes and abducting young men, including Mohyeldin Abdul-Haq, Ali Shami, and Bassem al-Qutub, in addition to three siblings.

In Balata refugee camp east of Nablus, soldiers stormed homes and abducted Semih Thiab as a means of pressuring his brother to surrender.

Troops also invaded residential buildings in Rafidia and advanced into the city from the military roadblocks of Beit Furik and Deir Sharaf.

In Asira al-Shamaliya northwest of Nablus, the soldiers broke into homes and abducted a young woman, Du’a’ Jarar’a.

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At least 12 Palestinians have been killed or have gone missing in Gaza over the past 24 hours as torrential rains, high winds, and flooding batter the enclave, according to the Government Media Office.

At least 13 homes have collapsed, and more than 27,000 tents sheltering the displaced have been swept away by flash floods, either submerged by water or torn apart by strong winds. Civil Defense teams are struggling to respond to hundreds of distress calls. The office said more than 1.5 million displaced Palestinians in Gaza are at risk.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a statement that basic tool kits, sandbags, and water pumps have not been allowed into Gaza due to “long-standing access restrictions” by Israel.

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Over 100 members of the US Congress signed a letter addressed to Prime Minister Netanyahu, urging him to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, according to a report published by Peace Now.

“As longstanding supporters of the US-Israel relationship and of human rights and democracy around the world, we write to express our urgent opposition to your government’s orders to demolish buildings, including private homes and the community center, in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair," the letter, issued in November, stated.

Nearly a quarter of the members of the House of Representatives signed the letter, including many from the Jewish caucus.

Congress members called the demolition orders to the village cruel, saying it would make vulnerable families homeless, including elderly people and children, just as winter arrives.

“This action, in service of making room for more settlers, settlements, and land only for Israelis, would be cruel, unjustified, and in naked violation of international law,” the letter continued.

The letter further emphasized that the demolition orders not only threatened the residents of Umm al-Kheir but also contributed to the erosion of support for Israel across the US political spectrum, particularly at a time of growing concern about settler extremism in Israel.

TVNL Comment:  How about ending the billions of US dollars that make these attacks possible?

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Israel’s security cabinet has signed off on plans to formalise 19 illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank, in a move Palestinian officials say deepens a decades-long project of land theft and demographic engineering.

Israeli media reported on Friday that the decision also revives two northern West Bank outposts dismantled during the 2005 “disengagement”.

The Israeli press outlet Ynet claimed the plan “was coordinated with the US in advance”, while Channel 14 said the push came from far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – a settler himself and one of the most hardline figures in Israel’s governing coalition.

Settlement expansion, though illegal under international law, is widely accepted across Israel’s political spectrum.

Palestinian officials condemned the decision, warning that it accelerates Israel’s annexation drive.

Mu’ayyad Sha’ban of the Palestinian Authority’s Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission described it as another step towards erasing Palestinian geography, saying it underscored growing fears about the future of the territory.

Hamas condemned the plan as a dramatic escalation. In a statement, the group said the move “constitutes a dangerous escalation in the annexation and Judaisation project” and reflects a government that “treats Palestinian land as colonial spoils and desperately seeks to entrench a settlement reality, ultimately aiming for complete control over the West Bank”.

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