Friday, January 5, 2024

When Donating Thinking about Impact Potential

 The idea that foundations can have contest feels like an odd idea to contemplate. Nonetheless, noble cause depend on benefactors not only for the beneficent demonstrations that they perform yet additionally for their actual endurance.


How do Charity stick out?


They normally do as such by discussing how much their work is helping a specific reason. Be that as it may, getting misdirected by such talk can be simple. Numerous associations could drill down unambiguous insights regarding how they are helping individuals. In any case, the inquiry you ought to pose to yourself is what the effect was.


Did their activities really prompt a decrease in the issue that they are attempting to address? Or is this one of those instances where the treatment focuses solely on the symptom rather than the root cause?


Recollect that assuming a cause figures out how to take care of an issue, it kind of prevents that specific road from getting gifts.


You likewise need to be cautious while giving to a foundation after a cataclysmic event like the new Turkey seismic tremor.


Preferably, you need to give to an association that as of now has an on-the-ground presence. Those all around on the ground have deep rooted coordinated operations and means to rapidly dispatch help.


Exploring the amount of an effect your gift will make is likewise essential in guaranteeing that assets are going to something that will really help individuals. This is firmly connected with the following point, which is about believability?

Crucial Aspects to Keep in Mind When Donating to an NGO

 


Giving to a foundation is a demonstration that can possibly change the existences of individuals across the world. Sadly, we actually live in when not every person approaches the essential necessities of life.


Indeed, even in 2023, there are endless issues that plague countless individuals, large numbers of whom live in surprisingly evolved nations.


In today's article, we're going to look at a few things that should be known by anyone who is thinking about giving to a charity.


Tragically, there are numerous associations that exploit the generosity of individuals, and the cash you give might in all likelihood never contact individuals they guarantee it will. We should plunge further.

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Fetterman and the End of “Progressives Except for Palestine”

 Last year, when I wrote an article for Jacobin called “John Fetterman Is Right About Many Things – but He’s Dead Wrong on Palestine,” some readers took me to task for imposing a “purity test” in the middle of an election on a candidate who, however flawed, was surely far better than his opponent.

The problem with that argument is that there’s always an election coming up. Even if the last election was the day before yesterday, there’ll be a new one coming up. And probably whatever Democrat you’re criticizing is under attack from the Right and you can argue that now isn’t the right time — so the can is perpetually being kicked down the road.

What I find encouraging is how little of that pushback I’m seeing against Fetterman’s Palestine position now. Even the fact that the gap between him and his supporters on this issue has gotten so much attention in outlets like Politico and the New York Times is a positive development.

Once upon a time — and it wasn’t so long ago — leftists who took an interest in electoral politics took it for granted that otherwise promising politicians would be bad on this. “Progressives Except for Palestine” were so common that they got their own acronym: “PEPs.”

Now, thanks to the leadership that’s been shown by members of Congress like Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib and democratic socialist elected officials in places like New York, the grassroots pressure coming from the Left’s activist wing, and the general weakening of the American public’s support for Israel in the face of the most recent atrocities against the Palestinian population, all that’s starting to change.

Someone like Fetterman can no longer expect a “well, what do you expect from a mainstream politician?” pass on his awful views on these issues. He’s starting to feel the heat. We’re seeing an expectation being formed that of course progressive politicians will face friction with their base if they’re bad on Palestine. At long last, in other words, the era of the PEPs might be coming to a close.

It’s about time.

Is Ethnic Cleansing OK When “Progressive Nations” Do It?

 In an interview a week earlier with the New York Times, Fetterman expressed surprise that so many of his former supporters seemed shocked by his position. “I do find it confusing,” he told the Times, “where the very left progressives in America don’t seem to want to support really the only progressive nation in the region that really embraces the same kind of values I would expect we would want as a society.”

In terms of the substance of the argument, this is the thinnest possible reed on which Senator Fetterman could hang his enthusiastic support for a state currently engaged in ethnic cleansing of an internal noncitizen population. It’s a fairly popular rhetorical strategy, though, and so it’s probably worth spending a moment explaining why it makes so little sense. Fetterman isn’t being terribly original. I’ve heard many apologists for the Israeli government using variations of this point — think about all the right-wing sneering about “Queers for Palestine” or about secular leftists in the West “siding with radical Islam.”

It’s true that, on average, the Palestinian population, especially in Gaza, is more religious and more socially conservative than the Israeli population. The full truth about this is complicated, since the most religious and conservative enclaves within Israel are very religious and conservative, and the political parties which represent that population have exercised quite a bit of political power from within various coalition governments. To pick an obvious example, it’s not as if same-sex marriage, for example, is legal within the “green line” separating Israel’s original territory from the Palestinian lands it conquered in 1967. But overall the Israeli population is vastly more secular and Israel’s laws within the green line are far more socially progressive than the ones in Palestinian areas that have been granted limited autonomy under the Israeli occupation — especially Hamas-run Gaza.

The real question is: What of it? How is that supposed to be relevant to anything in the context of talking about Israel’s atrocities against the noncitizen Palestinian population?

To spell this out, Israel is not fighting to impose secularism or liberalism on the population of Gaza. Whether the survivors of the current atrocities are allowed to stay in Gaza under direct Israeli occupation or whether — as some have suggested — they’re mass-transferred to the Sinai desert, neither scenario will lead to gay pride marches or secular education among the survivors. As obscene as it would be to endorse mass displacement and the indiscriminate mass murder of tens of thousands of innocents as a way of spreading progressive social policies, the Israelis have never pretended that this is a thing they’re trying to do. In context, talking about comparative levels of progressivism is a head-spinning non sequitur.

This would be true even if it made the slightest sense to call Israel a progressive nation. But it doesn’t — at least if you believe that ethno-religious pluralism and equal rights for everyone regardless of faith or ancestry are “progressive” values.

Belief that any sufficiently internally progressive nation has a right to engage in ethnic cleansing against groups it rules over would be truly grotesque. But the premise itself is absurd in this case. Would we consider the United States, for example, a progressive nation if it had achieved equal rights for women and gay people but also passed a law declaring it to be “the nation-state of” white Christians everywhere but not ethnic and religious minorities who actually live within the country?

If not, surely Israel’s grotesque nation-state law should count against its internal progressivism. So, for example, should the law forbidding Palestinian citizens of Israel who marry Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza from living together with their spouses inside Israel.

But the most important point here is the fact that Israel has ruled over millions of Palestinians since 1967 without ever once offering them Israeli citizenship — because doing so would undermine what Israeli commentators often openly call the “Jewish character” of the state. That’s apartheid, and anyone who thinks apartheid is compatible with progressivism is using the word “progressive” in a way with which I’d prefer to have nothing to do.

John Fetterman Keeps Defending the Indefensible in Gaza

 Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman has always been staunchly pro-Israel, but the events of the last few months have shined a particularly harsh light on his indifference to Palestinians.

hen he was running for Senate last year in Pennsylvania, there were plenty of things for the Left to like about Democrat John Fetterman. He was the only statewide candidate who’d endorsed Bernie Sanders back in 2016, he seemed to care a lot about organized labor, and he combined solidly progressive stances on social issues with a refreshingly populist style of political communication.

In 2022, he’d already started to get worryingly vague about such basic points of a Bernie-derived policy platform as Medicare for All. But in the context of his race against the clownish right-wing Republican Mehmet Oz, aka “Dr Oz,” it was easy to ignore that part. Watching Fetterman and his team rhetorically grind Oz into the dust was too much fun for many left commentators (myself included) to give him as hard a time as we should have about his political shortcomings.

To any progressive paying close attention, though, a fly in the ointment too big to ignore was that Fetterman’s position was awful on Israel/Palestine. As I noted at the time, “When it comes to Palestine, Fetterman might as well be Dr Oz.” He was on record back in April against imposing any new conditions on US aid to Israel — a country that rules over millions of people permanently denied Israeli citizenship or basic rights like access to regular civilian courts when they’re accused of crimes, and which even last April was keeping well over two million Palestinians locked in the twenty-five-mile-long open-air prison camp that is the Gaza Strip.

Even in a world where the Israeli government had heeded various warnings and headed off Hamas’s attack on October 7, this would be an ugly blotch on whatever record Fetterman would otherwise be able to claim of standing for justice. But in the last three months, Israel has committed atrocities in Gaza on a level that dwarf anything it’s done since the original“Nakba” (catastrophe) that drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of the country during the creation of the state.


Israel’s brutal campaign of collective vengeance started almost immediately after October 7. Since then, about 90 percent of Gaza’s civilian population has been displaced from their homes. Tens of thousands have been killed — a much higher number than the entire estimated civilian death toll of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even though Ukraine has a much larger population and Russia has been rightly condemned for its frequent violations of the laws of war.

Israel has denied the necessities of life to most Gazans since the war began, and starvation and disease may ultimately kill more Palestinians there than the bombs — though the bombs are killing plenty. Anyone who follows a large number of Gaza-based Palestinians on social media has likely seen several instances of people saying things like “this may be my last post” and being killed in an air strike shortly thereafter. Senior officials in the Israeli government keep talking about the “voluntary” mass removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza — and indeed from the country — as the ultimate goal of the war. Most recently, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly advocated a postwar scenario where there are “100,000 or 200,000 Araba in Gaza and not two million.”

And through it all, Fetterman has continuously doubled down on his enthusiasm for the Israeli state. He told Politico at the end of December that whatever “diversity of opinions” existed among Senate Democrats with regard to the onslaught on Gaza, and however much the caucus might “splinter” on the issue, he would always be “the last man standing to be absolutely there on the Israeli side on this with no conditions.”

Israel-Hamas War Day 88 | Israel-Hamas Negotiations Halt Amid al-Arouri Killing, Sources Say; Two Hamas Military

 

WHO chief condemns 'unconscionable' Israeli attack on Gaza hospital

Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus condemned Israeli attack on Al-Amal hospital in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) Ghebreyesus said that "the attacks, according to the PRCS, killed at least five civilians, including a 5-day old infant."

Ghebreyesus calls for an immediate ceasefire, adding that "if the conditions for a cease-fire in hostilities have not been met by now, I do not know what it will take."

Two Israeli wars on Gaza. This current one is the worst

After seven weeks of relentless Israeli bombing throughout Gaza, according to the modest estimates of the UN as of November 23 (right before a humanitarian ceasefire came into effect), more than 14,800 people have been killed in the enclave, including about 6,000 children and 4,000 women. While these Israeli attacks on Gaza are by far the worst yet, with Israel dropping a reported 40,000 tons (update: now 50,000 tons) of explosives in less than two months, it is worth recalling that Israel has repeatedly waged assaults against the Palestinians of Gaza over the past 15 years. Living in Gaza for years between late 2008 to March 2013, I was witness to two major Israeli assaults (and countless smaller ones over the years). Here, I will highlight what I saw and documented, to show that the horrific Israeli war crimes we are seeing coming out of Gaza are not new, even if they are exponentially worse this time around.
On December 27, 2008, Israel unloaded 100 bombs on Gaza within the first minutes of what would be its three week war on Gaza Lead. I saw a large crowd, some running from the direction in which I headed, others running in that direction. Some ran to escape, others ran to help pull bodies to safety. Around the corner and down Omar Mukthar street I saw the remains of a police station, rubble and blood strewn everywhere. As I watched Palestinians approach the station to begin extracting bodies, I witness a last rocket hit the street 150 meters away, where crowds had already gathered to try to extract the dead bodies. The Shifa Hospital (Gaza’s main), was receiving the dead and the injured non-stop. The ICU beds were filled, and doctors told me that as soon as one patient died another took their place. Together with a handful of international activists in Gaza I made the decision to ride in ambulances with Palestinian medics as they searched for the wounded and took them to hospitals. We did so aware that Israel barred journalists from Gaza, and knowing that, in the past, medics and ambulances had been targets for the Israeli army. I would see this first-hand soon after first joining the medics, when an Israeli sniper targeted the ambulance I rode in, injuring one medic in the leg. The last of at least 14 bullets hit the rear of the car as we sped away.