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by Elizabeth Bodenman – Please note: within the context of this blog, the terms 'women' and 'girl' are inclusive to...
Der Beitrag The Dehumanization of Roma Mothers in Bulgarian Hospitals erschien zuerst auf Menschenrechte - der Blog..

Director of Zone of Interest Jonathan Glazer denounced the dehumanization of Palestinian victims in Gaza alongside those of the October 7 attacks.

This analysis explores how systemic dehumanization of Palestinian children by Israeli forces mirrors racial injustices against Black children in the US, highlighting the role of Western media biases in normalizing such injustices.

The way the escalation of violence in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and adjacent areas in the region is discussed in Germany is, in many respects, not surprising. It follows the structural dynamics of war discourses: the polarization into a friend–enemy schema; the negation of moral ambivalence; patterns of legitimation which suggest that the actions of one side are more than justified by the previous actions of the other side; the compulsion of the threat situation, discrediting reflection and distancing as inappropriate; the construction of unparalleled amorality; the circumvention of humane standards through dehumanization of the enemy; the simplification of an inherently complex situation.
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Hanna Pfeifer



Prof. Dr. Hanna Pfeifer ist Professorin für Politikwissenschaft mit dem Schwerpunkt Radikalisierungs- und Gewaltforschung in Kooperation mit der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt und Leiterin der Forschungsgruppe "Terrorismus" am PRIF. Sie forscht u.a. zu staatlichen und nicht-staatlichen Gewaltformen und –akteuren in der MENA-Region. // Prof. Dr Hanna Pfeifer is Professor of Political Science with a Focus on Radicalisation and Violence Research at PRIF and Goethe University Frankfurt, as well as head of PRIF's research group "Terrorism". Her research interests include, inter alia, state and non-state violence and actors in the MENA region. | Twitter: @hanna_pfeifer

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Der Beitrag Israel–Gaza: A German War Discourse erschien zuerst auf PRIF BLOG.

Before Marines deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, they first went through a base in California called 29 Palms, where Iraqi refugees would roleplay as townsfolk in order to prepare the soldiers for what they would face abroad."The folks who were hired to play that, they all had terrible stories about [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein, about family members being killed or going missing," remembered Capt. Tommy Furlong. "It pumped you up. It made you believe just that much more in the fight that you were going towards."That feeling of joy and confidence quickly unraveled when Furlong reached Afghanistan. "When you deploy, people aren't happy to see you," he said. "What you're trained to and what you're told is not what you're seeing on the ground." Thus begins "What I Want You To Know," a new documentary from director Catie Foertsch that gives an unflinching look at a pair of wars that many Americans might want to forget. The film focuses on the experiences of 13 Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, most of whom joined the military in order to fight back after the September 11, 2001, attacks and help build democracy in the war-torn countries.Foertsch explained in a Tuesday panel that she views the film as a "testimony project" — a deep dive into the views of the majority of veterans who believe neither war was worth fighting in the first place.The Quincy Institute, which publishes Responsible Statecraft, sponsored the discussion. Other panelists included Sgt. Travis Weiner and Furlong, both of whom are executive producers on the film, as well as Col. Gregory Daddis, a professor at San Diego State University and a Quincy Institute board member.Furlong told listeners that he felt no previous documentary about the wars had truly captured the "raw, on-the-ground perception" of the conflicts through the eyes of the soldiers that fought them. He praised interviewees for their candor. "The part that isn't talked about a lot is that war is very private," Furlong said. "It's difficult to talk about your experiences."While the stories are diverse, a few themes stand out. One is a shared feeling of betrayal — a sense that their political and military leaders had misled them with false promises of a noble war."Anyone who joins the Marine Corps or the military is demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice their life for their country," said Capt. Sarah Feinberg. "I think our politicians and our military leaders have a responsibility to at a minimum tell the truth on what we're doing."For Feinberg, this divide between hope and reality made it impossible for her to return to combat. "If I can't explain to someone why they're putting their life on the line, then I can't lead that mission," she said.Some put it in starker terms. "I was betrayed by my government, and I was lied to," said Spc. Garett Reppenhagen. "Here I am with blood on my hands, for what?"Another theme is dehumanization, both of the soldiers and the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. The veterans remember the difficulties of simply staying alive in a war zone and the incentive to view all locals as a threat. "There was very little respect for the Iraqi people throughout the units in the military that I served with," said Feinberg, who deployed to Iraq in 2009. A few of the veterans interviewed admit that they participated in the accidental killing of civilians, and many recount haunting images of dead children and friends. "It's not the firefights that really haunt me. It's what I've seen humans be able to do to other humans," said Sgt. Alan Pitts. "Those are the things that probably bothered me the most to this day — to see what humans are capable of and how horrible they can be when they're told that this other person is less than them."While the documentary never uses the word PTSD, a deep sense of trauma lurks behind every shot. Veterans relate the mental struggles of joining up to fight for a supposedly venerable cause that had little to do with their actual mission. Some found that this cognitive dissonance, combined with the hellish fighting that they participated in, was too much to bear. "Most of the suicides, at least of the combat veterans, are so intimately and inextricably linked to their experience in war that I use the term 'killed by combat,'" Maj. Danny Sjursen said.It's a harsh reminder of an often ignored fact about the War on Terror: While roughly 7,000 American soldiers died at war, an additional 30,000 took their own lives after returning home, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University.Despite all the pain caused by these wars, the film shows that many veterans still care deeply about the military and its mission of defending America. They simply hope that policymakers will think more deeply about the suffering that results from our country's wars of choice. "We have to talk about the consequences or it will happen again," Foertsch said.

Hamas's surprise bloody attack on Israel on October 7, 50 years plus one day since the October 1973 war, and the massive Israeli military response in Gaza has dominated media coverage regionally and globally for the past two plus months.American mainstream media for the most part has avoided a serious discussion of the Hamas context, the "root causes" of the conflict, the long-term implications of Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, the morality, ethics, legality, and proportionality of the Israeli massive military operations in Gaza, and the diminishing stature and credibility of the United States among Arab and Muslim publics. The Hamas ContextHamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya—Islamic Resistance Movement; the acronym means Zeal) emerged in 1987 in the West Bank and Gaza under the Israeli occupation after the first Palestinian Intifada as an alternative to the secular PLO. Israel, Jordan, and a few other Arab states were concerend about the growing strength of the PLO's secular nationalist ideology and thus initially supported Hamas's creation. Like other local Sunni Islamic political parties and movements — for example, PAS in Malaysia, Refah and AKP in Turkey, the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, and the Islamic Movement in Israel — Hamas was grounded in the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.Hamas's political program and charter focused primarily on resisting the occupation and the state of Israel. Hamas never followed the Wahhabi Salafi radical Tawhidi doctrine of Islam emanating from Saudi Arabia. In most of its history, Hamas, unlike al-Qaida and ISIS, never subscribed to or practiced global jihad against the perceived enemies of Islam. Its operational context has always been Palestine and its leaders have always been Palestinians. Many of them spent years in Israeli jails where they learned Hebrew. Most of Hamas's political leaders are currently in exile in different Middle Eastern countries, especially in Qatar with whose leadership they maintained close relations.Hamas also comprises a political wing, which over the years participated in governing institutions in the West Bank and Gaza, and a military wing (Qassam Brigades) that has built a fighting force and planned and executed military operations against Israel. Hamas is not a monolithic group, which reflects the reality of Palestinian society in Gaza and the West Bank.Hamas's charter rejects the existence of the State of Israel in Palestine, but its political wing has engaged with Israel, especially since 2007, on pragmatic matters that affect the Palestinians' daily lives in Gaza and has shown a willingness to accept a two-state solution. Beginning in 2017, Hamas began to move slowly toward accepting a possible two-state solution to the conflict, implying recognition of Israel. Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzouk affirmed this position in a recent interview with the Washington based Al- Monitor but soon after tried to walk it back, claiming it was taken out of context.Israel, the U.S., and most other Western countries for years viewed Hamas as a local militant nationalist religious movement. And in order to further the cause of the two-state solution and undermine Israel's claim that there was no unified Palestinian interlocutor to negotiate with, some Palestinian leaders and Arab countries, particularly Qatar, suggested that the U.S. designate Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization, which it did in the late 1990s. After the Hamas election victory in Gaza in 2006, which incidentally was another intelligence failure, some important factions within Hamas sought a pragmatic engagement with Israel on such issues as labor, the power grid, water, fishing, and commerce. Some analysts within the U.S. government at the time judged that reaching out to the pro-engagement faction within Hamas would serve Israeli and U.S. national interests. Unfortunately, Israeli and U.S. policymakers rejected that judgement.Hamas's jihadism moves globalIsrael's goal of eliminating Hamas as a movement is unattainable. Liquidating the current military leaders of Hamas will bring a new cadre of leaders to the top. Hamas, like other resistance organizations, has developed leadership succession plans that go down to second, third, and fourth tiers. American and Israeli intelligence agencies for the most part have focused on the first tier with scant knowledge of the leadership tiers below that.Israeli and American policymakers have also yet to focus on the transformation of some of Hamas's military leaders shifting from a local, nationalist, religious ideology resisting the Israeli occupation and calling for a Palestinian state into a global jihadist ideology. If such a transformation takes root, Hamas would essentially move away from the Muslim Brotherhood ideology to a radical, Wahhabi Salafi jihadist paradigm. Extremists within the Wahhabi paradigm do not accept the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine.Much of the jihadist radicalization of many Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, occurred in Israeli jails. Although some were recruited by Israeli intelligence services, especially the Shin Beit, as assets and collaborators; others became more radicalized and secretive. Palestinian economic, social, and political dehumanization in Gaza and the West bank, together with Israeli hubris about its military power and presumed penetration of Palestinian society, have led many Palestinian activists, including within Hamas, to adopt a narrative of jihadism grounded in Wahhabism, al-Qaida, and ISIS. It's highly unlikely that Hamas's political leaders would be allowed to participate in any discussions about postwar Gaza unless the whole Hamas movement, including the military wing, jettisons the global anti-Jewish jihadist paradigm and returns to its local, anti-occupation resistance posture.The way forwardThe most recent public opinion poll in the West Bank and Gaza shows a significant rise in Hamas's popularity in both areas with nearly 90% calling on Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president in Ramallah, to resign. The poll, which was conducted between November 22 and December 2, finds that Palestinians view Hamas as the most legitimate group in the West Bank and Gaza.The path forward encompasses two crucial steps that are essential for a resolution of the conflict. First, the wider conflict must be viewed in the context of the political, security, economic, and human rights aspirations of both peoples between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.Second, Washington must engage government and community representatives from Israel, the Palestinians, Arab states, the EU, and the U.N. in a serious, initially private, conversation about the long-term political status of Palestine that goes beyond Hamas and the current PA regime in Ramallah.This might sound like a pipedream, but we see the alternative in Gaza — and it is ugly.

It's official — the Pentagon is becoming a bank. Well, sort of. At a March 8th event on dual-use technology at SXSW in Austin, Texas, director of the Office of Strategic Capital Jason Rathje announced that his team has officially received the internal authority to grant executive loans and loan guarantees, a first within the Pentagon.
The Office of Strategic Capital, or OSC, was created in response to growing concern over China's investment in next-generation technology. According to its investment strategy, released Friday, March 8th, the OSC will invest in firms researching and developing 14 "critical technologies," including hypersonics, quantum computing, microelectronics, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence.
After surviving a rocky first year — punctuated by allegations of conflicts of interest from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and hard questions over its funding — the OSC is now close to licensing its first funds as part of a joint lending program with the Small Business Administration. OSC loans require private funding to match their loans, giving a pathway for smaller defense tech companies with aggressive investment strategies to enter the mix.
Venture capitalists have poured money into many of the items now on the "critical technologies" list, making them well-poised to benefit from OSC loans. By one New York Times estimate, venture capital firms went from spending around $6.7 billion on military tech in 2016 to $34 billion in 2022.
However, they have generated relatively few government contracts so far, leading some tech entrepreneurs to accuse the Pentagon of paying lip service to innovation without actually funding innovative ventures. According to Palantir, a "unicorn" of the defense tech world founded by Peter Thiel, the top 100 venture-funded military start-ups have only generated somewhere between $2-5 billion in government contracts. Part of this is because of Silicon Valley's"move fast and break things" approach, which sees the Pentagon's bureaucracy as little more than a straightjacket.
Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and an investor in many defense tech firms through his American Dynamism initiative, embodies this psyche, defined by an infatuation with new technology and a repudiation of the precautionary principle, which urges prudence in the face of uncertainty. In an essay Andreessen authored entitled "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," he writes, "We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human – in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us."
This is where the message of defense tech venture capitalists differs from that of the prime contractors like RTX (previously known as Raytheon) and Lockheed Martin; instead of waxing lyrical about security, tech stalwarts evangelize about wielding artificial intelligence to overcome the frailties of human nature itself. Buoyed by their "yes, and…" theater-kid ethos, their beguiling promise is to usher in a near-utopia at the hands of the "Techno-Capital Machine."
That is, if the government steps aside. "Silicon valley is a builder culture, and Washington is never going to be a builder culture," argued Katherine Boyle, the co-founder of Andreessen's American Dynamism initiative. "I think people just have to come to terms with that."
So what does this "material philosophy" look like in practice? Shield AI, a company Andreessen has invested in through American Dynamism, offers AI-powered autonomous swarms that claim to own "the kill chain from start to end" like a "scene from Top Gun 2." Palantir has demonstrated a language model that analyzes battlefields and generates courses of action for a human operator. As defense analyst Van Jackson puts it, the OSC has "created various regulatory exemptions and federally guaranteed loans to incentivize VCs to go big on death-tech."
Even if their promises are more grandiose, the business model of capitalizing on instability remains familiar. On a panel about public/private partnerships at SXSW, former Olympian turned venture capitalist Larsen Jensen said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a "tremendous catalyst" for changing the national security investing environment.
"There have been many other catalysts that have occurred, if you think back prior to that, 9/11 was a catalyst," Jensen said. "Many companies that otherwise would not exist in the defense industry, such as General Atomics, probably owe a big portion of their success due to a geopolitical catalyst that was, you know, unfortunate for the United States obviously, but the Predator probably wouldn't be as prolific as it is now, and the early innings of autonomy wouldn't be as important as it is now, were it not for that tragedy."
It doesn't take a Luddite to realize that the Pentagon should exercise caution when partnering with VC firms on exploring technologies such as AI-powered language models and autonomous weapons. As Craig Martell, the head of the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office at the Pentagon, warns, AI chatbots "speak authoritatively, so we just believe them," despite the fact that these devices often spit out misleading or outright false answers. In a new report from Public Citizen, Robert Weissman and Savannah Wooten argue that autonomous weapons can lead to dehumanization or even loss of human control. "AI-driven swarms involve autonomous agents that would interact with and coordinate with each other, likely in ways not foreseen by humans and also likely indecipherable to humans in real-time," Weissman and Wooten write.
The Pentagon has some guardrails in place that urge caution with technology like artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons. A Pentagon directive, issued just a month after the creation of the OSC in January 2023, requires autonomous weapons to be designed to allow human operators to exercise "appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force," establishes testing and evaluation standards for autonomous weapons, and mandates a chain of review for approval, among other requirements.
But a number of critics outside of the department question whether this approach goes far enough. A Human Rights Watch/Harvard Law School International Human Rights clinic review of the policy noted that the directive allows for significant loopholes, among them allowing the senior review of autonomous weapons to be waived "in cases of urgent military need." Weissman and Wooten argue that the "biggest shortcoming of the directive, however, is that it permits the development and deployment of lethal autonomous weapons at all."
Venture capital firms are looking for more buy-in on the back end, an issue the OSC can't quite solve. As adjunct professor at Stanford University Steve Blank explains, "There's a demand problem, not a funding problem." For the venture capitalists, this requires convincing the U.S. government to sideline concerns they may have about emerging technologies and buy into the techno-utopian vision they are selling.
In order to persuade the government to be more in line with the brash futurism of Silicon Valley, venture capital-backed defense tech firms are ramping up their lobbying operations. In 2023, Palantir spent over $5 million on their formal lobbying operations, lobbying Congress against "the regulation of AI." Shield AI, which spent over $1 million on lobbying in 2023, lobbied the Department of Defense directly on "issues around autonomy and artificial intelligence." Anduril, another defense technology company backed by Andreessen, spent over $1.5 million lobbying Congress on issues related to "unmanned and autonomous systems," including autonomous sentry towers on the U.S.-Mexico border.
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has also signaled it may want in on Pentagon dollars. As the Intercept reported, earlier this year OpenAI quietly removed language that prohibits the military from using its technology. This week, former Sen. Norm Coleman registered as a lobbyist for OpenAI.The OSC is Silicon Valley's biggest step toward molding the Pentagon in its own image, a sign they are making inroads with top brass leaders. But should the venture capitalists continue to rush the development and deployment of untested, risky technologies, even as they cash in massively in the process, someone needs to commit the cardinal sin of prudence by stepping in and setting some rules.