DL Open Thread: Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Israel Does It Again. The Carnage Quotient had apparently fallen below acceptable genocidal standards:
Israeli forces launched large aerial attacks across the Gaza Strip early Tuesday morning, in the first major strikes on the territory since Israel’s cease-fire with Hamas began roughly two months ago. Gaza’s health ministry said more than 400 people had been killed in the attacks, which raised the prospect of a return to all-out war.
Before the Israeli assault, which took place during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Israel and Hamas had been negotiating the next steps in the truce. The next phase is supposed to end the war and free more hostages taken during the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack that set off the Israeli military offensive in Gaza. But Israeli leaders said they were unwilling to end the war until the end of Hamas’s rule in the territory.
The office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he had ordered the military operation following the “repeated refusal” by Hamas to release the hostages, and warned: “From now on, Israel will act against Hamas with increasing military strength.”
Only White Men Are Heroes In Amerika:
But the page, along with many others about Native American and other minority service members, has now been erased amid the Trump administration’s wide-ranging crackdown on what it says are “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts in the federal government, a review by The Washington Post found.
The purge, which also targeted multiple webpages about women and LGBTQ+ service members, highlights how aggressively military leaders are pursuing President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI mandate. Their actions mean that some of the most authoritative sources of public information about the achievements of minority service members decades before government DEI programs existed have disappeared. Some of the articles, including the piece about Hayes, remain online on websites or social media accounts for the individual branches of the military.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has vigorously supported an executive order that Trump issued on his first day in office banning DEI from federal government programs and contracts, which he claimed were “immoral” and wasteful. In a memo last month, a senior Hegseth aide announced a “digital content refresh,” requiring officials to take “all practicable steps” to remove articles and other media that “promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” from the department’s website and social media accounts.
Don’t see what everybody’s worked up about. Hitler would have done the same thing had The Internets been around before World War II.
Oh, anybody spotted a Democrat taking a visible and principled stand lately?
Reliving The ‘Alien Enemies Act’. An absolute must-read:
The Gurcke family was among the first group of German nationals and Latin Americans of German origin deported from Costa Rica to arrive in Texas in February 1943. They had been rounded up and shipped away as part of a secretive transnational State Department program known as Special War Problems. The hope was to trade “enemy aliens”’ in exchange for American hostages. Through the initiative, the US government orchestrated the uprooting of more than 6,000 Germans, Italians, and Japanese—connected through citizenship or ancestry to the Axis countries—residing in Latin America and sent them to domestic internment camps across the United States.
As Donald would later document in her memoir, We Were Not the Enemy: Remembering the United States’ Latin-American Civilian Internment Program of World War II, the Gurckes became “one of many caught in the far-flung net cast by US authorities seeking the enemy.” After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt’s proclamations authorized broad detentions premised on promoting hemispheric security. “They swept up all of us,” Donald said in an oral history interview conducted by the Texas Historical Commission in 2009 “with none of us being serious threats of any sort.”
Now, Donald, and descendants of those interned during World War II, are watching as the same law that authorized the imprisonments then is used again by President Donald Trump—this time without the United States at war and with the goal of speeding up mass deportation.
In a lawsuit filed on March 15 challenging the executive order as unlawful, the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward argue the Alien Enemies Act—which has only been used three times before, always in times of war—can’t be deployed against citizens of a country, in this instance Venezuela, that isn’t engaging in “warlike actions” against the United States. As a result of the proclamation, the class action complaint states, “countless Venezuelans are at imminent risk of deportation without any hearing or meaningful review, regardless of their ties to the United States or the availability of claims for relief from and defenses to removal.”
Don’t consider a donation to the ACLU–just make one.
How Delaware Will Reform Opioid Grants Process:
At a meeting this month, members of the commission responsible for selecting grant recipients for Delaware’s opioid settlement fund voted to restructure its grant-awarding process, including by adding new staff to evaluate applications for the money.
Now, the Prescription Opioid Settlement Distribution Commission intends to distance itself from any possible conflicts of interest, even going so far as to prevent the state’s top substance abuse agency from collecting opioid settlement grants.
In addition to serving as co-chair of the opioid commission, Champney also is director of the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health. She said this month that her division will no longer receive grants from the opioid commission in order to avoid any perception of conflicts.
Another change increases oversight over grantees and their progress reports to the state.
Spotlight Delaware previously reported that the commission did not hold itself to its own reporting standards, allowing organizations to go months or even a year at a time without submitting progress reports to the state.
The commission will maintain its previously established rules to require monthly monitoring reports, as well as required site visits by commission staff to check on progress. It will also require more substantial reports that quantify the impact of their grants and include detailed financial reports showing how funds were spent.
I call that progress.
What do you want to talk about?
“The Carnage Quotient had apparently fallen below acceptable genocidal standards”
This is not carnage for carnage’s sake. Does anyone seriously believe Israel would continue bombing Gaza if their hostages were released and Hamas relinquished control of government?
This kind of commentary is why “pro-Palestinian” critics seem more concerned about preserving Hamas than Gaza civilians.
Let this be the last time Western liberals rally behind hostage-taking as a negotiating tactic. Hostage-taking is beyond the pale and is itself a war crime.
Israel holds about 4,500 Palestinian prisoners, of which about 310 are being held in administrative detention, without the right to a trial.
‘Western liberals’. If Israel had really been concerned about securing the release of hostages, it wouldn’t have killed so many of them with their raids.
‘Gaza civilians’ and ‘Hamas’ are not interchangeable.
Gaza is an open-air prison and Hamas are the jailers.
Israel has its own right-winger problem which it won’t be able to start dealing with until Hamas and Hezbollah are either gone or transformed.
Riddle me this: How many Israelis have been killed during this war, and how many Gazans and Palestinians been killed?
“how many Gazans and Palestinians been killed?”
Enough that you’d think the hostages would have been released long ago.
Yes, unconditional surrender always works out very well for those who surrender.
That’s such a foolish statement I can’t believe you’d make it if you weren’t emotionally involved.
I would hope surrender would work out very poorly indeed for Hamas leadership, while Gaza was freed to find more rational representation.
You mean the way we’re free to find more rational representation?
The POSDC is doing a solid cleanup of procedures. Now we will wait to see the next round of grants. My guess is that we will see less (hopefully zero) “pop up” nonprofits and nonprofits that do random things that now are suddenly are in the substance use disorder business. Great news for all but the shady operators. Kudos to both Chairs and the administration!
If you think “Hamas are the jailers” you’re ahistorical and a lunatic.
Long live the Palestinian resistance.