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Hundreds of Thousands Form 'Red Line' Around The Hague
The red line the government has failed to set.
Jun 15, 2025
Hundreds of thousands of people dressed in red marched through the streets of The Hague on Sunday to demand more action against the "genocide" in Gaza.
NGOs such as Amnesty International, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and Oxfam organized the demonstration, which ran through the city to the International Court of Justice. The protesters were all dressed in red, creating a "red line".
Organisers described it as the country's largest demonstration in two decades. Many waving Palestinian flags and some chanting "Stop the Genocide", the demonstrators turned a central park in the city into a sea of red on a sunny afternoon.
“The Dutch cabinet still refuses to draw a red line. That is why we do it, for as long as necessary,” Marjon Rozema of Amnesty International Netherlands said in a statement.
Protesters walked a 5-kilometer loop around the city center of The Hague to symbolically create the red line that the government has failed to set.
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Even Once Reluctant Scholars Now Agree on Israel's Gaza Assault: It's a Genocide
"Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn't consider it genocide?" said one researcher. "No."
May 15, 2025
Only a tiny number of progressive Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. have used the word "genocide" to describe Israel's relentless bombardment of Gaza, and the U.S. public divided, with less than 40% of Americans saying last year that the term described the Israel Defense Forces' bombing of hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and other civilian infrastructure.
But for seven leading international experts on genocide, the question is not controversial—even for those who previously rejected the label.
The seven experts were interviewed Wednesday by NRC, a newspaper in the Netherlands, and were unequivocal: Not only have they all come to believe—some earlier than others—that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, but the vast majority of their peers in academia concur.
"Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn't consider it genocide?" said Raz Segal, an Israeli genocide researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey. "No."
Uğur Ümit Üngör, a professor at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, added, "I don't know them."
The interview was published the day before Nakba Day, the 77th anniversary of Palestinians' forced expulsion from their lands when Israel was established, and as the death toll in Gaza reached 53,010. At least 15,000 of those killed have been children, NRC reported.
When it comes to defining the last 19 months in Gaza as a genocide, reported the newspaper, "even cautious voices have changed."
Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman of Open University of Israel "opposed the genocide label" until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government flouted the International Court of Justice's January 2024 order to prevent genocide by allowing emergency aid into Gaza and halting top officials "incendiary language on Palestinians." Israeli leaders have called Palestinians "human animals" and "Amalek"—an ancient enemy in the Hebrew Bible who Israelites were commanded to exterminate.
Lederman also began to see his government as genocidal after the Israel Defense Forces seized control of the Rafah crossing last year, cutting off the only humanitarian aid route as international experts warned famine was imminent, and as analysts warned the true death toll in Gaza could ultimately be close to 200,000.
"For me personally, the combination of this and the continued destruction of Gaza made the turn from harsh criticism of the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza and warnings that we are getting close to that place, to the perception that the cumulative effect of what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocidal in every sense," said Lederman on the social media platform X on Thursday. "I think the second half of 2024 is the point at which a consensus emerged among genocide researchers (as well as the human rights community) that this was genocide. Those who may have still had doubts—I estimate that they have dissipated following Israel's actions since the cease-fire was broken."
Since March, when Israel reimposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid and broke a temporary cease-fire, nearly 3,000 Palestinians have been killed in bombings, and nearly 250,000 people are now facing "extreme deprivation of food," according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.
Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, told NRC that Israel's deliberate blockade on "food, water, shelter, and sanitation" convinced her the Netanyahu government was carrying out a genocide, while Segal pointed to "openly genocidal statements" by Israeli leaders.
"But for all it is about the sum of what would apply separately as 'ordinary' war crimes," NRC reported. "The picture as a whole makes it a genocide. That is how the term is meant, says [British professor Martin] Shaw: 'holistic.'"
"Apart from social debate, genocide is also the subject of science," reads the article. "And that field of research, genocide studies, does not see it as a yes/no question, but as a process. Not a light switch, but a 'dimmer,' in the words of professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Uğur Ümit Üngör."
NRC noted that the Western media and political debates have been consumed with "misunderstandings and simplifications."
Those who continue defending Israel's actions insist that "it is a military war to destroy Hamas, there is no clear eradication plan, not all Gazans have been killed, it does not look like the Holocaust, the judge has not yet ruled."
As historian Rutger Bregman said on X Thursday, the scholars interviews by NRC make clear: "Genocide is a process, it's not a binary switch. And it's not about matching the Holocaust."
Segal, who is Jewish, told NRC that he is "regularly accused of antisemitism" for speaking out against Israel.
"A German authority in the field that wants to remain anonymous calls the subject 'poisoned' in his country," reported NRC. "You are, he says, called directly [antisemitic] if you mention 'possible genocide.' If these acts are subjected to a country other than Israel, he says, all Germans would immediately sound the alarm and speak of genocidal violence, as happened with the Russian massacre in the Ukrainian city of Botzja. But now, he says, it remains silent."
Dirk Moses, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research, said that portions of the field of research are "in crisis" if experts don't "combat the artificial distinction between [genocide] and military targets" and continue to defend Israel's actions.
"Then parts of the field of research are actually dead," he said. "Not only conceptually incoherent, but complicit."
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Dear Canada: Beware of Peter Hoekstra!
As long as U.S. policy is one of annexation and domination, Hoekstra deserves to be treated as a hostile guest—not an ambassador worthy of distinction or trust.
Mar 08, 2025
On February 22nd, the Michigan Republican Party met in Huntington Place in Detroit to elect a new chair. After the ballots were counted, State Senator Jim Runestand prevailed over President Donald Trump’s choice, “fake elector” Meshawn Maddock. Even though he had delivered Michigan to the GOP column, incumbent Peter Hoekstra didn’t run again. He couldn’t, because as of November he is awaiting confirmation by the U.S. Senate to be Trump’s ambassador to Canada.
During his three-decade plus career in government, Hoekstra has amassed quite the right-wing record. In the 90s, he was a fierce foe of workplace safety and union reformers. Teamster warehouse director Tom Leedham called Hoekstra “a congressman who tried to eliminate the forty-hour workweek, and gut overtime and job safety laws.” As chair of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, Hoekstra led a witch hunt into the Teamsters that ended up removing Ron Carey, the only reform president ever elected in Teamsters history, from office shortly after the union won a hard fought battle against UPS. Hoekstra proclaimed in 2000 that if he and his allies “had not acted, Ron Carey would still be president of the Teamsters.”
On foreign policy, Hoekstra’s tenure was similarly malicious. After voting for the Iraq War, Heokstra remained convinced well into 2006 that Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction. To that effect, he announced that U.S. troops had actually found WMDs that year. Too bad for Hoekstra they turned out to be defunct weapons that predated the Persian Gulf War. The WMD lie remained just that, a lie. He also palled around with David Yarushalmi, an anti-Muslim bigot who once called Blacks “the most murderous of peoples.”
Hoekstra’s views and previous tenure as a diplomat should make his appointment a complete joke, but there’s danger in his appointment as well.
In 2012, Hoekstra attempted to unseat Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenhow. His campaign’s Super Bowl ad featured an Asian woman, bicycling through a rice paddy, who castigated “Debbie Spend It Now” in broken English. A clear attempt to resuscitate the “Yellow Peril,” a journalist called it “the most racist political ad of the year.” Heokstra’s campaign floundered and he lost in a landslide.
Hoekstra’s post-Congress years saw him argue that the CIA’s torture program, euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation,” produced “actionable intelligence.” He took time in 2016 to defame Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin over her “egregious” ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. After co-chairing Donald Trump’s winning Michigan campaign in 2016, Hoekstra was back in government. For his services, he was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the Netherlands, his birthplace.
As Trump’s ambassador, Hoekstra was dogged by reporters over his false 2015 claims that there were Muslim “no-go zones” in the Netherlands, in which cars and politicians were “being burned.” In 2020, the official Twitter account for the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands posted a bizarre image of a graveyard containing German soldiers from World War II. The account said the graves were a “terrible reminder of the cost of going to war and why we must always work towards peace,” seemingly forgetting what side the U.S. was on during the war. The whole thing was reminiscent of when President Reagan went to a graveyard containing bodies of Hitler’s SS to declare the dead Nazis were “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”
Hoekstra’s tenure was marked by accusations that he openly interfered in Dutch politics. In 2019 he hosted a party for the far-right Forum for Democracy whose anti-Islam, anti-immigrant views nicely dovetailed with his own. Diplomats are prohibited from interfering in their host countries politics by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Although other political parties in the Netherlands complained, Trump lost the following year’s presidential election and Hoekstra was out. Or was he? Hoekstra’s reward for helping Trump win the Mitten State, is once again, an ambassadorship, but this time to Canada.
Hoekstra’s views and previous tenure as a diplomat should make his appointment a complete joke, but there’s danger in his appointment as well. Given that he has already violated diplomatic protocol via his involvement in the domestic politics of the host country, and that a stated goal of the Trump administration is the annexation of Canada as the 51st state, it stands to reason that Hoekstra will use any available means to further that project as ambassador. In short, he will attempt to undermine Canadian sovereignty under the guise of diplomacy.
Although Peter Hoekstra will almost certainly be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that’s no reason for him to be treated as just another ambassador in Canada. As long as U.S. policy is one of annexation and domination, Hoekstra deserves to be treated as someone who will undermine Canadian independence in the service of American empire.
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