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Geopolitics

Big Palestinian News Doesn't Even Make Front Page Nowadays

At a rally in Gaza City
At a rally in Gaza City
Jillian Deutsch

The most charismatic living Palestinian leader launches a massive hunger strike from his prison cell and the pages of The New York Times: In another time, it would have been front-page news around the world.

Deutsche Welle reports that between 1,100 and 1,500 Palestinian prisoners began Sunday to forgo food to demand access to phones, improved medical services and extended visiting rights for families. Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti called for the movement in an op-ed in the New York Times, in which he called Israel's prisons — which hold about 6,500 Palestinians — "the cradle of a lasting movement for Palestinian self-determination."

"This new hunger strike will demonstrate once more that the prisoners' movement is the compass that guides our struggle, the struggle for Freedom and Dignity, the name we have chosen for this new step in our long walk to freedom," writes Barghouti, who is serving a life sentence in for his role in the Second Intifada. Considered a hardened terrorist by the Israelis, many Palestinians consider him their people's Nelson Mandela.

marwan barghouti wall palestine

Portrait of Barghouti on the West Bank wall — Photo: Eman

Though the story looks bound to mushroom in the region, four months into 2017, this latest chapter in the eternal Israeli-Palestinian struggle is merely background noise to other huge — once unthinkable — news stories. Take, for example, the U.S. dropping the "mother of all bombs' in Afghanistan last week.

And then there's the daily updates of Israel's neighbor Syria being decimated by the nation's civil war, bringing us "scenes of a world devoid of rules: children killed by poisonous gas, the bodies of prisoners who were tortured or burned alive and a multitude of national armies and rebel groups that hack each other to pieces," as one one Süddeutsche Zeitung writer put it.

In Europe, meanwhile, nationalism is sweeping the ballot boxes, as it apparently did in Turkey's referendum Sunday as well. Oh, and thanks to the rising tensions between the U.S. and both Russia and North Korea, there's suddenly the return of worrying about a real threat of nuclear war.

"I don't wish to alarm you," Paul Mason from the Guardian writes, "but right now the majority of the world's nuclear warheads are in the hands of men for whom the idea of using them is becoming thinkable."

Yes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict merits our attention. But don't blame us for being distracted.

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LGBTQ Plus

Why Is Homophobia In Africa So Widespread?

Uganda's new law that calls for life imprisonment for gay sex is part of a wider crackdown against LGBTQ+ rights that is particularly harsh on the African continent.

Photo of LGBTQ Ugandan group

LGBTQ group in Uganda

Pierre Haski

-Analysis-

Uganda has just passed a law that allows for life imprisonment for same-sex sexual relations, punishing even the "promotion" of homosexuality. Under the authoritarian regime of Yoweri Museveni for the past 37 years, Uganda has certainly gone above and beyond existing anti-gay legislation inherited from British colonization.

But the country of 46 million is not alone, as a wider crackdown against LGBTQ+ rights continues to spread as part of a wider homophobic climate across Africa.

There is exactly one country on the continent, South Africa, legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, and another southern African state, Botswana, lifted the ban on homosexuality in 2019. But in total, more than half of the 54 African states have more or less repressive laws providing for prison sentences.

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