IV597 - October 2024

With war and genocide spreading from Palestine to Lebanon and Iran, with Florida and southern states inundated by the twin biggest climate-change flood disasters in U.S. history, and people’s general insecurity about their own and the country’s future, the United States lurches toward what’s called “the most consequential election in our lifetime” that may resolve little or nothing.

The nature of the attack carried out by the Israeli Air Force against Iran on 26 October is very significant for the near future. It clearly is a prelude to a subsequent attack.

In a presidential election dominated by domestic issues, the Iran-Israel conflict pushes foreign policy to the fore. Still, Americans’ concerns about the economy and immigration are likely to determine the outcome.

As the results of Mozambique’s presidential election approach, tension is mounting and the ruling FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) party is not about to relinquish power, hoping to benefit from the gas windfall. Nearly 17 million voters were expected in Mozambique for the parliamentary, provincial and presidential elections on 9 October.

Below we publish three articles from Jospeh Daher translated from L’Anticapitaliste about Lebanon.

One of the key decisions of the “Social Movement” (Sotsialnyi Rukh) Conference, which took place in Kyiv on October 5-6, 2024, was the adoption of a Resolution titled "The Path to Victory and the Tasks of the Ukrainian Left."

Lebanon’s Hezbollah is a unique phenomenon, and any attempt to reduce it to one of its facets would be either unfair or excessive in sanctification. The party’s complex and intricate nature is evident in the very circumstances of its birth. It started as a Khomeinist splinter group coming out of the Amal movement, seeking to establish an ideologically committed “Islamic resistance” against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982 as an alternative to the “Lebanese resistance” that Amal upheld (the latter’s name itself is the Arab acronym of “Lebanese Resistance Brigades”). The motive for the rift that led to the party’s foundation was twofold: on the one hand, ideological loyalty to the regime instituted by the 1979 “Islamic Revolution” in Iran, but also, on the other hand, an aspiration to a resolute and radical position against the Zionist occupation, unlike the ambiguous position that Amal had taken towards it, especially in southern Lebanon.

Fascism has now become a central issue in the U.S. presidential election largely as a result of recent statements by Donald Trump that he would use the military to suppress “the enemy within” made up of “radical left lunatics.” He is referring here to his rival Kamala Harris whom he has on several occasions called a “radical left lunatic.” He also named Democratic Party Congressman Adam Schiff, who led the first impeachment trial of Trump and is now a candidate for Senate as ‘the enemy within.”

The so-called ‘Mazan rape trial’ commenced in France in early September. Over the next four months, 51 men will be tried for the rape of Gisèle Pelicot, drugged by her husband Dominique Pelicot who also recruited these men on the internet.

A statement on the position of the new French government and state in relation to the extraordinary mobilisation of the people of Kanaky was expected in the general policy speech of the French prime minister Michel Barnier on 1 October.