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    Senators say US is complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza

    Two Democratic senators claim they have reached the “inescapable conclusion” that Israel is acting on a systematic plan to destroy and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza to force locals to leave, and they say the US is complicit.Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both members of the Senate foreign relations committee, released their findings in a report on Thursday after returning from a congressional delegation to the Middle East where, they note, the destruction goes beyond bombs and bullets. They say they also found a systematic campaign to strangle humanitarian aid, which they call “using food as a weapon of war”.“The Netanyahu government has gone far beyond targeting Hamas to imposing collective punishment on all the people of Gaza,” Van Hollen said at a Thursday press conference. “What they’re doing, and what we witnessed, is putting those goals into action.”At least one hundred people have died from famine in Gaza, the United Nations said this week, citing the Gaza health ministry.View image in fullscreenThe senators, who visited Egypt, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a deliberate strategy to ethnically cleanse the local population rather than collateral damage from the war against Hamas. Their report is titled The Netanyahu Government Is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. America is Complicit. The World Must Stop It.During their visit to the Egyptian-Gaza border, they observed Rafah, the southern Gaza city – once home to 270,000 Palestinians – reduced to rubble. Van Hollen described how both lawmakers climbed an outside fire escape from the Egyptian side of the border to get a clear view of the destruction.The lawmakers also met with former Israel Defense Forces soldiers who described participating in “systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure”. Their report noted first-hand accounts of “how this was a part of an intentional pattern of using explosives to blow up whole city blocks, houses, schools and other civilian sites”.The senators documented arbitrary restrictions that have left aid groups unable to predict what will be denied entry. Jordanian officials told them that peanut butter, honey and dates had been suddenly banned from convoys, with entire trucks turned away for carrying a single restricted item. Each truck, the report says, is subject to a new $400 customs processing fee, and when the truck is not able to make it through the screening process, the $400 has to be paid again to join a later convoy. Because of those and other restrictions by the Israeli government, humanitarian aid coming in from Jordan was currently operating under 10% of its capacity, according to the report.In Egypt, the senators report, the UN’s fleet of trucks have “sustained severe damage”, with United Nations organizations showing the senators video of their convoys coming under fire from the IDF, “a regular occurrence”. The senators also toured a warehouse run by the Egyptian Red Crescent and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) with goods that had been banned by Israel, including solar-powered water pumps, tents, wheelchairs and even spare parts for trucks under “dual-use” restrictions, according to the report.At the Israeli port of Ashdod, WFP officials told the senators that 2,200 shipping containers of food – enough to feed everyone in Gaza for three weeks – sit delayed by screening procedures requiring each pallet to be checked individually.Merkley described the strategy’s two components: “One is to destroy homes so that they cannot be returned to … That second strategy is to deprive Palestinians of essentials to live, food, water, medicine.”Israel replaced the UN’s hundreds of distribution sites with just four aid points for 2 million people, three located only in southern Gaza. The senators heard accounts of malnourished mothers unable to walk miles to distribution sites while carrying children and then lift 40lb food boxes for the return journey. From 22 May to 31 July, 1,373 people were killed in the vicinity of these sites, according to the UN.That Israel and the United States are calling plans for the mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza a “voluntary exodus” is one of the “most fraudulent, sinister, and twisted cover stories ever told”, the report reads.“There is nothing voluntary about wanting to depart when your home is gone, when your agricultural fields are no longer accessible,” Van Hollen said at the press conference.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBoth senators accused the US government of enabling the described ethnic cleansing. “We, the United States, are complicit in all of this,” Van Hollen said. “Because we’re providing taxpayer dollar support to the Netanyahu government to use weapons in Gaza.”Sentiment in Congress with regards to longstanding US support for Israel has been slow moving, but it has been shifting. A recent Senate vote on arms sales to Israel saw 27 Democratic senators – more than half the caucus – oppose weapons transfers.“The same values that made me a champion for Israel compel me to say what they are doing to the Palestinians, both in West Bank and in Gaza, is absolutely wrong,” said Merkley.Both lawmakers called for immediate action to secure a ceasefire, noting that Israeli hostage families had told them Netanyahu “has prioritized his political survival over the survival of our loved ones”.“The world has a moral and legal obligation to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing,” their report concludes. “Strong words alone will not be sufficient. The world must impose penalties and costs on those carrying out this plan.” More

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    Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

    Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.If it was current and controversial in US politics, chances are that Kirk was talking about it. On his podcasts, and on the podcasts of friends and adversaries, and especially on college campuses, where he would go to debate students, Kirk spent much of his adult life defending and articulating a worldview aligned with Trump and the Maga movement. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping.Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media.On race
    If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

    If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

    Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

    If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
    On debate
    We record all of it so that we put [it] on the internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.
    – Kirk discussing his work in an undated clip that circulated on X after his killing.

    Prove me wrong.
    – Kirk’s challenge to students to publicly debate him during the tour of colleges he was on when he was assassinated.
    On gender, feminism and reproductive rights
    Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
    – Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

    The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
    – Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

    We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024
    On gun violence
    I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.
    – Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023
    On immigration
    America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

    The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

    The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024
    On Islam
    America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

    We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025
    On religion
    There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022 More

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    The Guardian view on the killing of Charlie Kirk: a perilous moment that may lead to more | Editorial

    “Democracy is the way that we have diverse societies that don’t kill each other, largely,” Lilliana Mason, a leading scholar of partisanship, observed recently. She added: “As soon as we stop believing in it, it disappears.” Dr Mason’s own research suggests that there is sharply rising tolerance of political violence. On Wednesday, it claimed one more victim.The shocking killing of the co-founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk, a hugely influential activist who rallied young people to Donald Trump’s cause and far-right ideology more broadly, has been widely and rightly condemned across the political spectrum. Leading Democrats and progressive activists made clear that such violence must not be tolerated.Before a perpetrator had even been identified, the president, like several other Republicans, blamed “radical left political violence”, claiming that liberal rhetoric against conservatives was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country”. Mr Trump himself faced two attempts on his life last year. He cited other victims, but not the many Democrats who have been targeted, including Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota state representative shot dead at her home alongside her husband, Mark, in June. Meanwhile, some far-right commentators spoke of vengeance.Political violence is hardly a new phenomenon in a country that has seen a civil war, four presidential assassinations, and lynchings. But it is rising again. Ordinary Americans are being radicalised. In such an environment, one thing unites the political poles; any prominent figure is vulnerable, though women and people of colour are particularly targeted. Threats to members of Congress rocketed last year.“Demonising those with whom you disagree” is indeed dangerous, but Mr Trump himself has normalised vicious attacks on opponents. The tolerance of violent action – as with Mr Trump’s blanket pardons for the January 6 rioters – sends a message too. The roots of violent acts are complex, but an environment conducive to political attacks may channel the propensities of potential perpetrators. Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, has warned that US politics may be on the brink “of an extremely violent era … The more public support there is for political violence, the more common it is.” The US addiction to guns drastically increases the impact.Acts of political violence exact an appalling human toll in lives lost and families shattered; Mr Kirk’s death leaves two small children fatherless. But they also – by design – deter other people from political or other civic activity at all levels. The most extreme voices may persist and prevail. Blaming political adversaries before a perpetrator has even been identified risks fuelling anger and attacks, to everyone’s cost. Research by Dr Mason, of Johns Hopkins University, and Nathan Kalmoe, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that a fifth of respondents said political violence could sometimes be justified, but three-fifths thought it could sometimes be justified if the other side committed violence first.Yet other research notes that people appear less willing to condone violence if misperceptions of the other side’s extremism or propensity for force are corrected. In this perilous moment, the response to such hateful crimes should be to coalesce to stress non-violence and civic tolerance. To instead promote division will only increase the threat to politicians and activists of all stripes, and strike another blow to democracy itself.

    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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    Where does the US go after the Charlie Kirk shooting? – podcast

    Archive: ABC News, ABC7, CBC National, CBS News, PBS Newshour, Charlie Kirk, NBC News, Fox News, Turning Point USA, King 5 Seattle
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    From ‘hellhole’ UK to anti-Muslim rhetoric in Japan, Charlie Kirk took his message abroad

    Charlie Kirk directed most of his rhetoric at the US political scene, but he also strayed into foreign affairs, drawing both favourable and critical comparisons between life in the US and in other countries on his shows and doing the occasional speaking tour.In May, Kirk visited the UK, debating against students at Oxford and Cambridge universities and appearing on the conservative GB News channel. Days before he was fatally shot in Utah he took his message to relatively new audiences on a tour to South Korea and Japan.Last weekend he addressed like-minded politicians and activists at a symposium in Tokyo organised by Sanseito, a rightwing populist party that shook up the political establishment in upper house elections this summer.In Tokyo, Kirk described Sanseito, which ran in July’s elections on a “Japanese first” platform, as “all about kicking foreigners out of Japan”, where the foreign population has risen to about 3.8 million out of a total of 124 million.Foreign residents and supporters of mass migration were, he claimed, “very quietly and secretly funnelling themselves into Japanese life. They want to erase, replace and eradicate Japan by bringing in Indonesians, by bringing in Arabs, by bringing in Muslims”.He spoke at length about his trip in a podcast released the day before his death, returning to a familiar theme – criticising women who choose not to have children – that echoed the views of his host in Japan, the Sanseito leader, Sohei Kamiya.In Seoul, he addressed more than 2,000 supporters at the Build Up Korea 2025 event, which drew predominantly young Christians and students from evangelical schools, representing a self-styled Korean Maga movement that has rallied in support of the impeached former president Yoon Suk Yeol.The event invited a host of far-right American personalities, who openly promoted conspiracy theories including claims that China orchestrated “stolen elections” in both America and South Korea, and that Lee Jae Myung’s recent presidential victory was fraudulent.Kirk criticised special prosecutor investigations into Yoon and his martial law, describing “several disturbing things happening right now in South Korea” where “pastors are being arrested” and “homes are being raided”, adding: “If South Korea keeps on acting like this, it is the American way to step up and fight for what is right.”Kirk said he had “learned a lot” from his time in South Korea and Japan, recalling how safe he had felt on the clean and orderly streets of Seoul, where there were “no bums, no one asking you for money”.In his three-day visit to the UK in May, he clashed with students at the Cambridge Union debating society, arguing that “lockdowns were unnecessary”, “life begins at conception”, and the US Civil Rights Act was a “mistake”.Kirk made the same points in Oxford, also alleging immigrants were “importing insidious values into the west” and that police violence against Black people was a result of a “disproportionate crime problem” in the Black community.He told the rightwing GB News that the UK was a “husk” of its former self and needed to “get its mojo back”. The perception among US conservatives, he said, was that “this is increasingly a conquered country … We love this country from afar, and we’re really sad about what’s happening to it, and what has happened to it”.On his first show after returning to the US, Kirk described the UK as a “totalitarian third world hellhole”, adding: “It’s tragic. I don’t say that with glib, I don’t say that with delight. It is sad. It’s chilling and it’s depressing.”He claimed he had seen a cafe in which “every single table was taken by a Mohammedan and a fully burqa-wearing woman – not a single native Brit” and that people were being arrested for online posts that displayed no apparent harmful intent.“They invented free speech,” he said. “Now there’s so much wrong with that country and it is not worthy of making fun of. I mean, you can have some laughs and some comedy, but it is depressing. It is dark.”View image in fullscreenWhile he was fond of referencing Europe in his shows, Kirk’s only other recent public visit there appears to have been a trip to Greenland in January in the company of Donald Trump Jr.He said afterwards that Greenlanders should be allowed to “use personal autonomy and agency to disconnect from their Danish masters”, then have “the opportunity to be part of the US, no different than either Puerto Rico or Guam” (two self-governing “unincorporated territories” of the US) in order to be “wealthier, richer … and protected”.Kirk was also sharply critical of many countries in his videos and podcasts. “France has basically become a joke, for a lot of reasons,” he said last year, amid widespread French protests over pension changes. “What’s happening in France should serve as a warning to America.”After JD Vance attacked Europe for alleged free speech shortcomings this year, Kirk hit out at Germany. “Germans are a bunch of troublemakers,” he said. “German prosecutors say someone can be locked up if they insult someone online. Free speech is not a German value. Totalitarianism is a German value.”He was a vocal supporter of Trump’s China-focused policies, backing the president’s attacks on Harvard University in April, and the punishing trade war with Beijing.In April, he claimed Harvard had “raked in” more than $100m from China. “We need to ask serious questions in this country about whether we can trust our elite universities to put America first when so much money is flowing to them from America’s number one rival.”The same month, he told Fox News the US had become “a glorified vassal state” subservient to the Chinese Communist party, by relying on China for rare earth minerals. He said the CCP wanted to create “lots of little colonies all around the world through the belt and road initiative”.He also waded into the complicated waters of cross-strait relations. In April, Kirk told his podcast he had “a soft spot for the people of Taiwan”, but also showed a limited understanding of its history and the complexities of the dispute.“I would say, sadly if we took Taiwan, it would probably start a nuclear war. Our leaders have largely mishandled China. We probably should have taken it in 1950 right after world war two,” he said.There has never been any discussion of the US “taking” Taiwan. The US is Taiwan’s most important backer, providing billions of dollars in weapons and some military training, and has not ruled out coming to its defence in the event of a Chinese attack or invasion.In a video in May, Kirk used the escalating hostilities between India and Pakistan to push his argument against US military intervention abroad. Describing Pakistan as a “very, very sneaky actor”, Kirk was emphatic that “very simply, this is not our war … This is a great test of whether every great conflict is America’s problem”.Kirk was equally dogmatic on the issue of Indians being granted more visas as part of a US-India trade deal, accusing Indians of taking American jobs.“America does not need more visas for people from India,” he said. “Perhaps no form of legal immigration has so displaced American workers as those from India. Enough already. We’re full. Let’s finally put our own people first.” More