This week marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The United States has experienced much political and social upheaval since then, but the subsequent “War on Terror” paved the way for our current moment, and there are booming echoes of the era all around us.

Once again, the United States is waging a disastrous war in the Middle East with no discernible end in sight. Islamophobic rallies targeting NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani conjure up memories of the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy. The government designates activist and advocacy organizations as terrorists. The Guantánamo Bay detention camp remains open. In fact, a legal immigrant was just sent there.

CBS reveals that the Taliban seized roughly $7 billion worth of American-purchased military hardware after the United States officially lost that war 5 years ago.

“Taliban fighters patrol in armored vehicles once supplied to Afghan forces, wearing American tactical gear and carrying American weapons,” reads the report. “CBS News saw one Humvee in the Afghan capital still adorned with a faded Green Bay Packers decal — a remnant from its past operators.”

The small number of Americans who opposed that war were either dismissed or attacked. So too were those who warned that the Bush administration’s overreach would result in disaster.

“The civil libertarians were mostly ignored, and as one new threat followed another — Iraq, ISIS, ‘lone wolves’ — the president’s reach continued to grow. Across the Bush and Obama administrations, the commander in chief was given, or simply took, new powers to prosecute, shut down and seize the assets of alleged terrorist groups and their supporters,” writes Radley Balko in the New York Times. “With the arrival of armed drones, the president assumed the right to remotely assassinate anyone, anywhere outside U.S. borders, at any time, including American citizens.”

“If the ratcheting diminishment of our liberties came slowly and sometimes without much outcry under Presidents Bush, Obama and Joe Biden, the consequences of all those years of expanded presidential power are plainly visible now,” he continues. “Mr. Trump is using every authority we have given the president since Sept. 11, 2001, and some we haven’t, in ways the civil libertarians had tried to warn us about at the start.”

One of the major differences between the current war on Iran and Bush’s war on Iraq is that a sizable chunk of the population fell for the administration’s lies back then. The polling shows that’s not the case this time around, and, despite information from the region being consistently repressed, there seems to be a growing understanding that the United States military is losing quite badly.

They say Americans don’t vote based on foreign policy, but that isn’t exactly true. Many people voted for Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary because he opposed the Iraq War. People voted for Trump because he claimed he wouldn’t launch any new wars. It’s quite obvious that Kamala Harris’s connection to Israel’s genocide hurt her at the polls.

Whether or not this typically translates into policy shifts is a separate debate.

Obama’s election effectively killed the domestic antiwar movement, and he launched the largest assassination campaign in world history. Trump’s rhetoric predictably turned out to be nonsense. The Democratic Party’s establishment certainly didn’t rethink its Israel policy as a result of the Harris loss.

This is all to say that the war in Iran, which the administration now says might last through 2029, could help propel the Democrats back into power during the midterms, but will that actually result in a foreign policy reset?

In recent weeks, Democratic leaders and presidential hopefuls have directed their anger toward Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, hoping to quash the party’s left flank before the 2028 nomination process. For them, it’s an existential battle that transcends the question of which party may or may not control Congress at any given time and there’s no broader discussion about reversing our current course beyond removing Trump from office.

Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, was recently attacked for an old 9/11 tweet in which he expressed sympathy for those who died on that day and those who were killed in the wars after.

“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith,” it read. “Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.”

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, an additional 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, which brings the overall death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.

25 years after 9/11, the American Empire is undoubtedly in decline, but its demise seemingly remains far off, and we’ve yet to collectively reckon with its ongoing crimes.

A Câmara Municipal de Loulé, através da Revista Al-’Ulyà do Arquivo Municipal de Loulé, está a promover a 4ª edição do Prémio de Investigação Joaquim Romero Magalhães.

O prémio bienal visa galardoar estudos de investigação sobre o património histórico e cultural do concelho de Loulé nas suas diferentes abordagens, tais como na Histórica, Arqueológica e Etnográfica.

Os candidatos deverão enviar um exemplar da obra candidata para pserra@cm-loule.pt, até 15 de maio de 2027, ano a que respeita o concurso, de acordo com o regulamento disponível em www.cm-loule.pt

O trabalho vencedor terá um prémio pecuniário de 4000 euros, para além de ter a sua primeira edição publicada pela revista Al-’Ulyà. A cerimónia de entrega do galardão acontece no dia 21 de novembro de 2027, data comemorativa do lançamento desta revista. 

O Prémio foi criado para homenagear o ilustre Professor e Historiador, autor de uma obra histórica notável, promotor e divulgador da documentação histórica do Arquivo Municipal de Loulé, que desde 2021 passou a ter o seu nome.

Joaquim Romero Magalhães nasceu em Loulé, 18 de abril de 1942, e faleceu em Coimbra, 24 de dezembro de 2018. 

Licenciou-se em História na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, em 1967. Obteve o grau de Doutor, em 1984, na Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra, e integrou o corpo docente dessa Faculdade. Foi nomeado, em 1994, Professor Catedrático daquela Universidade. Foi Presidente do Teatro dos Estudantes da Universidade de Coimbra (1963), Presidente da Associação Académica de Coimbra (1964) e Presidente do Conselho Diretivo da Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra (1985-1989 e 1991-1993).

Foi Professor convidado da École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, de Paris (1989 e 1999), da Universidade de São Paulo (1991 e 1997) e da Yale University (2003).

Desempenhou as funções de Comissário-Geral da Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses (1999-2002), e dirigiu a revista Oceanos (1999-2001).

Foi membro da Comissão Consultiva das Comemorações do Centenário da República (2009-2011).

Dirigiu a revista “Anais do Município de Faro”, de 2012 a 2018.

A 12 dezembro de 2018 recebeu o título de Doutor Honoris Causa da Universidade do Algarve.

The great temptation for left-wing forces to fish in the waters of the new antisemitism in search of votes is nothing new. It costs little; the Jews pay the price. In Rome, there is an eagerness to cast aside the common sense demonstrated by the Italian government, in coordination with Germany, and embrace this easy and politically rewarding line—this time by following Britain in imposing sanctions against Israel. Ignorance and double standards provide the backdrop. The ambition to embrace a new crusade against Israel emerged immediately after British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, announcing sanctions concerning Judea and Samaria, told Parliament that Israel is engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and attempting to erase the two-state solution, writes Fiamma Nirenstein.

This, of course, ignores repeated Palestinian rejections of peace proposals and the reality created by the 7 October 2023 Hamas massacre. At the same time, British politicians have presented themselves as champions of human rights while ignoring monstrous violations committed by Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. Now that Britain has announced sanctions on products from Judea and Samaria, and has been followed by a procession of European countries driven by the pursuit of left-wing votes and fear of their growing Muslim populations, the parliamentary group leaders of Italy’s Democratic Party (PD), Five Star Movement (M5S) and Green and Left Alliance (AVS) on the Chamber of Deputies’ Foreign Affairs Committee have demanded urgent consideration of legislation imposing similar sanctions.

Angelo Bonelli, co-leader of AVS; Elly Schlein, leader of the Democratic Party; Giuseppe Conte, leader of the Five Star Movement and a former Italian prime minister, and others have signed on. Indeed, they consider it “shameful” that Italy, of all countries, is missing from this campaign. The document speaks of “illegal occupation” and offers other banal examples of the ignorance of those who wrote it. It also demonstrates the irresponsibility of a move whose primary consequence will be to further fuel mass antisemitism. We have already seen another demonstration of this phenomenon at a protest against legislation addressing antisemitism, where Hamas and Hezbollah flags were brought into Parliament. Only ISIS was missing.

Why is the path of sanctions wrong? First, those responsible for violent acts should be punished. But contrary to the propagandist image being presented, they constitute a fraction of the roughly 500,000 Israelis living in Judea and Samaria, a population representing a wide variety of cultural and social backgrounds. Most condemn violent extremists and are themselves the targets of thousands of Palestinian terrorist attacks each year. Israel prosecutes its own criminals. Some are in prison; others are standing trial. But Judea and Samaria are not territories “illegally occupied” by Israel. The area was occupied by Jordan, whose annexation received almost no international recognition, until Jordan attacked Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and was defeated. After repeated Israeli attempts to exchange land for peace, the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 divided Judea and Samaria into Area A, under Palestinian control; Area B, under Palestinian civil control and Israeli security control; and Area C, under Israeli control. Israel has the right under those agreements to build in Area C, which also includes the E1 area between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim.

Some of the greatest conflicts arise when Palestinians attempt to expand into Area C. Expelling Jews from Judea and Samaria would risk producing the same disastrous result as Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip—the creation of the conditions that eventually produced Yahya Sinwar and Oct. 7. There is another British mistake. It concerns the safety of Britain’s own citizens. Israel has helped protect Britain from serious terrorist threats. In 2015, for example, British authorities discovered three tons of ammonium nitrate stored by Hezbollah-linked operatives in London after receiving information from Israel. On the basis of what unfounded prejudices should a relationship encompassing security, science and culture be dismantled? Associating Israel with “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” is a lie.

Forcing Israel to surrender is unthinkable. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, with Israel’s decision to close the British Consulate in eastern Jerusalem, has delivered the first clear response. But the larger answer must be equally clear. Neither Miliband nor Schlein will draw the borders of a Palestinian state. It is absurd to imagine that they can. Only Israelis and Palestinians can negotiate those borders; they cannot be imposed from London, Rome or anywhere else. And no sanctions campaign can erase a fundamental historical truth: The Jewish people are not strangers in Judea and Samaria. Their roots there reach back thousands of years. Whatever the future of this land may be, it cannot be decided over the heads of the Jews whose history, identity and destiny are bound to it.