fARTissimo is what people do not see when they see a piece of expression
but what they project in what they think they see.
For more fARTissimo, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
fARTissimo #017 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
Will we truly see the whole truth? By Robert Perez
On the surface, this is a rare moment of bipartisan triumph; Congress has passed a bill by a thundering 427-1 vote in the House, and carried by unanimous consent in the Senate, to force the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s investigative files. The Epstein Files Transparency Act now heads to Donald Trump’s desk, and he’s said he’ll sign it. To outsiders, it might look like a corrective to years of secrecy, a vindication of survivors, and a moment of reckoning. But beneath that veneer, one must ask: how sure are we that what emerges will really be all of it, rather than the selectively polished, politically acceptable parts?
There’s no denying the significance of this legislation. Epstein’s web of wealthy acquaintances, foreign dignitaries, and powerful officials has long fueled conspiracy theories and public distrust. Survivors have demanded transparency. And for many, passing this bill is less about political theater and more about accountability. But the danger lies in assuming that “release” equals “revelation.”
First, the law does not override every possible barrier. Redactions are still permitted to protect victims’ identities, ongoing investigations, and potentially national security interests. In other words, some files can be withheld or scrubbed. Yes, the bill prohibits suppression “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity,” but that doesn’t mean everything will be made public unfiltered. What happens when the redactions are justified under the cloak of “ongoing prosecutions” or “federal investigations”? The devil, as always, is in the details.
Second, Trump’s dramatic reversal deserves scrutiny. He once dismissed the Epstein scandal as a “Democrat hoax,” only to climb aboard when passage seemed inevitable. That raises a basic question: does he now embrace transparency in principle or merely in performance? Trump’s history suggests he’s more attuned to optics than to unbridled disclosure. He could sign the bill, and simultaneously direct his Department of Justice to interpret it as narrowly as possible. Or worse: grant selective access to files that reflect well on him, while resisting release of documents that cast a darker light.
Third, once these files land in the public domain, the story doesn’t end. It may just begin. Conspiracy theorists will pore over redacted or missing passages and draw wild inferences. The very act of partial disclosure may fuel more speculation than silence ever did. If entire sections are absent, or names are redacted, people will assume the worst; if documents are dated and incomplete, critics will still question what isn’t there. No matter how much is released, suspicion will thrive in the gaps.
Fourth, consider the political incentives. Trump and his allies may want the law to pass as a way to appear cooperative even magnanimous without conceding real risk. By supporting a transparency bill, he can deflect critics who accuse him of obstruction. But once signed, his administration can still influence how aggressively the DOJ complies, how quickly files are made available, how user-friendly their format is, and how redactions are justified. He doesn’t have to go all in.
All of which means that the triumph of passing this bill is more symbolic than substantive at least until the first tranche of documents surfaces. For survivors, for the public, for history, the promise of transparency is powerful. But the execution will decide whether that promise becomes a breakthrough or a smokescreen.
Moreover, in the context of Trump’s legacy, the release (or partial release) of Epstein’s files could backfire politically. While he might hope to appear untouchable, with nothing to hide, the reality may be messier. If his name or the names of his friends appear in damning correspondence, or in previously unrevealed contexts, the optics could turn sharply. Worse, if the released documents reflect poorly on others in his orbit, he may find himself entangled in a scandal he once dismissed as fiction.
And if he tries to spin it, pointing to redactions, or insisting the sensitive parts had to be kept private he risks amplifying distrust. Rather than silence being his safe space, partial disclosure could become a minefield.
In a New Yorker-esque sense, this feels like a high-stakes gamble: Trump is wagering that he can absorb the pain of modest exposure while containing the blowback. But the public and especially survivors are betting on something more profound: genuine accountability. The test will come not when he signs the bill, but when the first PDF drops, when the first memos appear, when the first flight logs are scrutinized, and when the full landscape of Epstein’s world is laid bare.
If Congress meant for this to be a true reckoning, it must not stop at a show of unity or a broad declaration of intent. Transparency is more than a gesture, it is a commitment to letting the full, inconvenient, dreadful truth emerge. If we settle instead for the version Trump and his allies allow, we risk a replay of the old scandal theater: half-exposure, selective memory, and political damage control masquerading as atonement.
In short, yes, this bill is a victory. But it may also mark the opening chapter of a very different fight, one over what is actually released, how it is released, and who controls the narrative afterward. And unless the American public and the media remain vigilant, we might find that the “files” are only partially disclosed, leaving us to wonder whether in the end, we ever truly got the full story.
The convenient conversion of Ahmed al-Sharaa by Fahad Kline
There is a particular choreography to geopolitical reinvention, a kind of diplomatic yoga that allows former enemies to clasp hands without ever acknowledging the awkward contortions required to reach one another. Few recent spectacles illustrate this better than Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s triumphant appearance in Washington, an event staged with the pomp and theatricality of a reluctant wedding, announcing Syria’s decision to join the U.S.-led coalition against ISIL. One might almost forget, in the halo of flashing cameras, that al-Sharaa once kept far warmer company with al-Qaeda than with any Western statesman. But Washington has never been a city burdened by too much memory, and al-Sharaa, to his credit, has always known the value of a good amnesia.
The Syrian leader’s sudden enthusiasm for battling ISIL feels like a comedian stepping onstage just after the punchline: he’s late, but still eager for applause. For years, his government maneuvered within a labyrinth of opportunistic alliances, tolerating extremist factions that proved useful against domestic opposition. The distinction between “enemy” and “instrument” blurred in the desert haze. Now, however, with his country fractured, his economy eviscerated, and his foreign patrons fatigued, al-Sharaa finds renewal in the gleam of the White House portico. A strategic baptism, one might call it, emerging from past associations scrubbed clean enough for a ceremonial handshake with an American president who never met a convenient contradiction he couldn’t embrace.
As for the U.S. administration, its enthusiasm for the partnership rests on a well-worn American logic: yesterday’s rogue can be today’s ally, provided he says the right things in front of the right lectern. There is something quintessentially American about welcoming a figure once steeped in alliances with al-Qaeda into a coalition to defeat ISIS, a bit like hiring an arsonist as your new fire marshal because he now insists he’s turned over a new matchbox. It is a move justified, as always, by the necessities of stability, counterterrorism, and the ever-nebulous “regional balance,” a phrase that often means doing whatever prevents the situation from turning even more chaotic than it already is.
Al-Sharaa’s pivot is not the graceful ideological conversion he claims, but a calculation drawn with the precision of a man balancing on political crutches. His alliance with al-Qaeda affiliates may once have been a marriage of convenience, but marriages of convenience have a way of lingering in the family album. Even now, as he positions himself as a steadfast opponent of extremism, one can sense the nervous shuffling behind the curtains, aides rewriting the past tense verbs in his official biography, spokespeople oscillating between denial and reinterpretation, and the diplomatic corps stitching together a narrative sturdy enough to withstand at least a couple of news cycles.
In Washington, meanwhile, the welcome felt less like an ideological endorsement and more like an impatient shrug. The foreign-policy establishment has always harbored a soft spot for a repentant autocrat. A stern lecture here, a promise of reform there, and suddenly the slate is negotiable clean. President Trump, never a guardian of moral coherence, framed the partnership as evidence of his unique ability to “bring former adversaries into the light” a phrase that should perhaps have come with an asterisk large enough to fill the Oval Office. For Trump, al-Sharaa is not a relic of a complicated past but a prop in a reassuring narrative: America leading a grand coalition, America defeating terrorism, America directing the play even as the stage buckles beneath it.
What makes this alignment particularly surreal is the shared enemy at its center. ISIL, the splinter whose rise was partly nourished by the broader instability of the Syrian conflict, becomes the convenient monster both leaders now vow to slay. It is a promise that allows al-Sharaa to rehabilitate himself in Western eyes while permitting the U.S. to claim that partnerships are justified by the magnitude of the threat. The fight against ISIL becomes the moral detergent cleansing past sins, and both nations hold the bottle.
Of course, no one seriously believes that Syria’s participation in the coalition will transform its internal dynamics. The structures of repression remain; the shattered neighborhoods, the displaced millions, the unresolved grievances all persist long after a photo op ends. What this new alignment does offer al-Sharaa is permission to present himself as indispensable once again: a leader too central to exclude, too useful to discard, too committed at least on paper, to be left out of the grand strategy against extremism.
For the U.S., the calculus is equally transactional. Stability, even the brittle kind, is more appealing than the unpredictable repercussions of abandonment. And in the scorecard of counterterrorism, having a new signature on the ledger looks better than admitting that the situation has grown too tangled to manage cleanly. Al-Sharaa’s past allegiances are treated as unfortunate footnotes, obstacles of etiquette rather than ethical concerns. He speaks the language of cooperation now, and in Washington, linguistic compliance often matters more than historical record.
The great irony, of course, is not merely that a man once entangled with al-Qaeda now joins a coalition to defeat its ideological cousin. It is that this shift is met with so little astonishment. The modern geopolitical landscape is littered with such reversals, yesterday’s enemy becoming today’s strategic asset and the world has grown accustomed to watching these moral somersaults executed with straight faces. Al-Sharaa’s reinvention is not remarkable because it is implausible, but because it is so profoundly expected.
In the end, this partnership may be remembered less for what it accomplishes and more for what it symbolizes, the triumph of expediency over consistency, the elastic nature of alliance-making, and the peculiar global tradition of allowing powerful men to rebrand themselves with nothing more than a podium and a handshake. And if al-Sharaa stands a little taller beside an American president, it is not because he has shed the shadows of his past, but because he has learned how easily those shadows can be rearranged under the bright lights of diplomacy.
Nigeria learned the hard way by Eze Ogbu
Some lessons are learned the hard way. Some are learned the absurd, blinding, national embarrassment way. And now, Nigeria, a country of nearly 230 million people, has learned one of the most ridiculous but undeniable truths of our era; never, ever, ever get in Donald Trump’s way or, God forbid, attract his attention. Because if you do, you might just find yourself the target of his self-proclaimed genius, his petulant temper, and, heaven help you, the threat of war.
Yes, war. Not diplomacy. Not measured, considered responses. Not careful negotiations. War. That’s the “solution” that the former reality-TV star, who somehow became the leader of the free world, prefers when his ego is challenged or his attention is piqued. And now, Nigeria knows. They have officially been schooled.
This isn’t about politics as usual. This isn’t about left versus right, Republican versus Democrat. This is about chaos, unpredictability, and the terrifying spectacle of a man who believes his Twitter feed is the highest seat of authority in the known universe. He does not think in terms of strategy; he thinks in terms of personal affronts, insults, and victories that fit neatly on a bumper sticker. And if Nigeria thought they could quietly navigate global affairs without getting a tweetstorm or worse, a declaration of war, they were dreaming.
Let’s be honest the world has been slowly, painfully learning that Trump does not negotiate. He does not compromise. He does not weigh consequences. He reacts, and he reacts with the fury of a child whose sandcastle was just kicked over. He weaponizes attention, turning minor slights into international crises, because in his mind, the very act of acknowledging a problem is tantamount to personal defeat. And this is what makes Nigeria’s “lesson” so painfully instructive.
It is one thing to witness this behaviour from afar, to shake one’s head and mutter about “American politics.” But it is entirely another to experience it firsthand. Imagine being Nigeria, a country with monumental challenges, economic instability, security crises, internal politics that could fuel novels and then, on top of it all, having to deal with the spectacle of a former U.S. president’s tantrums aimed squarely in your direction. Suddenly, the absurdity of global leadership becomes all too real.
Some will argue that this is exaggeration. “Trump is out of office,” they’ll say. “He can’t actually declare war.” Ah, but therein lies the subtle genius of the danger. It is not the formal mechanisms of war that are most terrifying in this context; it is the theater of war that Trump is so uniquely capable of producing. The media frenzy. The hysteria. The distraction. War doesn’t always need tanks and missiles; sometimes, all it needs is one man’s ego and a megaphone, and suddenly a country finds itself negotiating not for peace, but for the preservation of its reputation under a global spotlight.
Nigeria, to its credit, has handled much worse in its long, complex history. But this is the new era. The era of the unpredictable, of the Twitter-fueled crisis, where global stability is hostage to a man whose primary qualification for office was the ability to entertain millions. The problem is not just that Trump exists, it’s that the world is still forced to respond as if he were a serious threat, because for all his absurdity, his words carry weight. And when those words drift toward the absurdly aggressive, suddenly international relations resemble a high school playground more than a structured, accountable system of diplomacy.
Let’s be clear: this is not just Nigeria’s problem. This is everyone’s problem. Any nation that thinks it can operate under traditional assumptions of diplomacy is in for a rude awakening. There is no precedent here. There is no logic. There is only the mercurial whim of a man who thrives on chaos and who, for reasons that defy reason, remains relevant long after leaving office.
What is the takeaway? The takeaway is brutal in its simplicity: in the age of Trump, caution is no longer a virtue; it is survival. Every policy decision, every public statement, every minor affront, must be filtered through the lens of, “Will this anger him? Will this provoke a tantrum?” If Nigeria had hoped to operate in the world without this burden, it has learned, painfully, that hope is naive. The only realistic approach is calculation, avoidance, and perhaps a grim sense of humor.
And yet, there is a strange poetry in it all. The world is forced to confront the absurdity of its own systems: the colossal responsibilities of nations placed into the hands of someone who measures power in terms of attention, ego, and insult. Nigeria’s latest lesson is a mirror, reflecting not just Trump’s instability, but the fragility of global diplomacy itself when subjected to the whims of one man.
In the end, Nigeria learned the hard way. The rest of the world would be wise to pay attention. Because in this new era of attention-driven power, being out of Trump’s orbit is not just preferable, it is existential. Ignore it at your peril. Because the moment you catch his eye, the theater begins, and you, dear reader, may just find yourself a tragic, unwilling star in his ever-unfolding, ego-fueled spectacle.
Trump doesn’t negotiate. He doesn’t compromise. He declares, he insults, and he escalates. And Nigeria? Well, they’ve just had a front-row seat to the most absurd and terrifying lesson in modern geopolitics: never, ever, ever draw the eye of Donald Trump.
If Obama had said ...“Quiet, Piggy” by Kingsley Cobb
Imagine for a moment that instead of Donald Trump, it was Barack Obama standing aboard Air Force One on November 14. A Bloomberg reporter asks a follow-up about Jeffrey Epstein’s emails and Obama snaps: “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” Let that sink in. The reaction would have been thunderous, blistering, immediate. Conservative media would have run headlines for days. The Republican Party would cry foul, demand apologies, call for resignations. Fox News would plaster the remark across every screen, playing it on loop in slow motion, cadging outrage from every corner of its cable universe.
In that alternate reality, Obama would be accused of disrespect, of bullying the free press, of calling a female journalist derogatory names. Republicans would host endless panels dissecting the “deranged dictator temperament” of a once-moderate president. The very idea of a Black man in power humiliating a reporter would be framed in grotesque caricatures, a show of arrogance, entitlement and disdain for democratic norms.
Instead, when Trump made the exact same jab, calling a reporter “piggy” mid-flight, few of those same voices raised their voices in righteous fury. There was no 24/7 outrage cycle. No stern congressional resolution condemning presidential conduct. No concerted campaign to demand accountability. Instead, some dismissed it as quirk, as theater, as just another moment in the Trump reality show.
That discrepancy reveals more than a double standard. It showcases a kind of selective moral outrage, leveraged for political convenience. When a Republican slips, it’s glossed over or excused. When a Democrat missteps, real or imagined it becomes a morality play. That’s hypocrisy masquerading as principle.
Let us consider why. For many on the right, Trump’s brand of rough-edged banter is part of his appeal. It’s woven into his identity, marketed as unfiltered authenticity. He says out loud what others might only mutter. That plaintiff disregard for decorum becomes, in their eyes, a feature, not a bug. Trump’s insults are not aberrations; they are expected, even celebrated as long as they’re delivered from their side of the aisle.
If Obama had launched into such an insult, the message would be transformed. It wouldn’t just be about the remark itself, but about ideological betrayal. He’s not supposed to act that way. He’s supposed to be composed, refined, measured. When he deviates, Republicans would instantly weaponize it: proof that he’s secretly authoritarian, emotionally unfit, or disrespectful to foundational institutions.
Meanwhile, when Trump spits out a disparaging phrase in the heat of the moment, it’s shrugged off or rationalized. It becomes part of his brand: bold, spontaneous, provocative. The media cycle may note it, but the outrage rarely sticks. Trump may even get a pass because his base often sees such episodes not as failures, but as theater, evidence that he refuses to be muzzled, even by the press.
But make no mistake: words have power. A leader lashing out at a reporter, calling her names, is not simply a rhetorical stumble; it’s an attempt to dominate, to silence, to humiliate. If we normalize that moment, we are normalizing an assault on the free press. We’re tacitly endorsing a view in which journalists are not interlocutors but adversaries, to be shamed or shut up.
And yet, in Trump’s case, the backlash often subsides without meaningful consequences. No formal reprimand, no apology foist, no steep political price. That unevenness in accountability raises a troubling question, for whom do we hold power to higher standards? The answer is stark, and it corrodes democratic norms.
There is also something deeper at play here, a kind of outrage inflation. If we only issue alarms when a Democrat misbehaves, while allowing a Republican to get away with bullying or mendacity, we cheapen the whole concept of outrage. We make it partisan. We reduce moral critique to a weapon of convenience.
A genuine defense of decency means applying the same standard across the board. It requires discomfort. It demands we call out insults and incivility, regardless of the political stripe of the speaker. It means refusing to treat verbal abuse from our own side as a charming quirk, while treating it from the other side as existential danger.
If Obama had said “Quiet, piggy,” there would be rightly be condemnation and a clamor for accountability. But if we only demand accountability from those we oppose, we betray the very principles we pretend to defend. We undermine public trust. We diminish the value of respect and restraint.
So yes, imagine that alternate world, one in which Obama utters the same words. Then ask yourself: should the verdict be any different? If not, why so hesitant when it's Trump? The real test of our commitment to principle isn’t how loudly we cheer when our side wins, but how consistently we hold every leader to the same standards of civility and decency.
Sudan Is Bleeding While the World Looks Away by Javed Akbar
Sudan is living through the world’s largest humanitarian collapse. More than 25 million people now depend on emergency aid. Nearly nine million have been driven from their homes. Entire cities have been pulverized—reduced to ash and absence with chilling precision. And yet, from world capitals, the silence is deafening.
In Darfur, the crisis has crossed the threshold into genocide. What began in April 2023 as a struggle for power between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has mutated into a war of annihilation. The RSF—direct heirs of the Janjaweed militias—has turned its fire on non-Arab civilians in a ruthless bid to seize Darfur and its lucrative trade corridors.
The toll defies language.
Mass executions. Ethnic cleansing. Systematic sexual violence against Masalit and other non-Arab communities.
In El Fasher, the last major city not under RSF control, indiscriminate shelling has levelled neighbourhoods, hospitals and displacement camps. Satellite images show scorched villages and fresh mass graves. Human-rights observers describe nothing less than a coordinated, methodical genocide. Survivors speak of communities erased before sunrise.
In Sudan, every pledge of restraint is merely the prelude to the next atrocity.
And behind this slaughter stands a network of regional patrons who have turned a suffering nation into a profitable battleground.
The RSF’s war economy runs on gold smuggled through networks linked directly to the United Arab Emirates. Weapons and fuel flow with ease through Chad and Libya. Meanwhile, the SAF draws support from Egypt and remnants of Russia’s Wagner apparatus.
Sudan’s war is no longer internal. It is a marketplace of geopolitical ambition—a theatre where foreign states finance carnage to secure influence and extract mineral wealth.
Sanctions have targeted a few RSF commanders, but the financiers remain untouched. For years, RSF-controlled companies have dominated the Jebel Amer goldfields, moving tonnes of illicit gold through Chad and the Central African Republic to the UAE, where it is refined with minimal scrutiny. Investigations by The Sentry, Global Witness and Reuters have traced these networks to Dubai-based firms shielded by opaque corporate structures. Abu Dhabi denies complicity, yet remains the largest importer of Sudanese gold—and flight data reveals cargo shuttling between RSF airstrips and Gulf airports.
Western measures—piecemeal sanctions, calls for transparency, selective asset freezes—are toothless without enforcement. Every loophole is exploited. Every embargo breached. Civilians bleed while foreign patrons profit.
Meanwhile, the UN warns of famine. Aid groups say Sudan is collapsing faster than any country since Rwanda in 1994. Yet the world barely whispers. The images of mass graves in El Fasher should have provoked global protest, emergency sessions, and moral reckoning. Instead, Sudan has been pushed to the margins of conscience, treated as though African suffering were inevitable rather than engineered.
After two decades in human rights work, I know the fatigue that shadows global crises. Democracies are faltering. Authoritarianism is rising. Ideological battles consume attention. But Sudan will not be stabilised through indifference. Without sustained pressure, this conflict will spill across borders, destabilising an entire region and deepening a refugee crisis already among the world’s worst. When millions flee toward Europe and the Gulf, the very governments looking away today will confront the consequences tomorrow.
Most damning is the selectivity of global outrage.
Voices who thunder against Christian persecution in Nigeria fall silent as Sudanese Muslims are slaughtered.
Liberal groups who rally for Gaza under an anti-colonial banner avert their gaze as foreign powers fuel a genocide in Sudan for profit.
The moral inconsistency is breathtaking. Outrage, it seems, has become a curated performance.
And then there is the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation—an institution created to safeguard Muslim lives and dignity. Today it stands silent, paralysed, astonishingly indifferent. As Muslim communities are massacred in Darfur, the OIC issues no emergency summit, no unified denunciation, no pressure on member states who finance the bloodshed. Its inaction is not merely disappointing—it is a betrayal of its founding purpose.
The UAE, for its part, cannot hide behind denials while Sudanese gold finances mass atrocities. Its role is not peripheral; it is central. And every day it refuses transparency, accountability, or sanctions compliance, it deepens its complicity in the unraveling of a nation.
History’s ledger is unforgiving. The world failed the victims of the Holocaust, Bosnia and Rwanda. It vowed “never again,” only to abandon that vow repeatedly. Today, Sudan stands at the same precipice.
The question is no longer whether the world sees Sudan’s agony. It is whether it cares enough to act.
Javed Akbar is a freelance writer with published works in the Toronto Star and across diverse digital platforms.
A childhood under siege by Marja Heikkinen
Today is Universal Children’s Day, a day meant to celebrate the innocence, curiosity, and boundless potential of children around the world. And yet, while the world lights candles and tweets hashtags, there are children whose childhoods have been obliterated before they even had a chance to live them. Gaza is one of those places. There, every news bulletin, every smothered sob, every cratered street, is a brutal reminder that childhood, in certain corners of the world, is a luxury.
We like to think of children as eternal symbols of hope, yet in Gaza, hope has become almost a cruel abstraction. A child should be defined by scraped knees, playground laughter, and the occasional defiance of bedtime. Instead, they are defined by body counts, by the echo of bombs, by the hunger that gnaws as insistently as fear itself. They are waking up to airstrikes instead of cartoons, to walls of rubble instead of classroom walls, to the sound of wailing rather than the songs of birds. And still, they are expected to endure, to persist, to be children in the smallest slivers of life that are left to them.
The statistics, if they were ever fully digestible, would feel like a betrayal. Numbers can never capture the tremor of a tiny hand gripping a parent’s, the wide eyes of a child who has seen a neighbour torn from existence, the long nights huddled in basements wondering if morning will arrive. Yet, somehow, the world treats these numbers like abstract data, like footnotes in a faraway tragedy, rather than urgent calls for action. And Universal Children’s Day, with its perfunctory speeches and performative hashtags, often feels like a reminder of that very failure.
There is something morally jarring about celebrating children while the most basic of their rights, safety, education, freedom from violence, are systematically denied. It is a stark reminder of the fragility of humanity’s promises. The international community talks about ceasefires and negotiations and humanitarian corridors, yet for a child in Gaza, these phrases may as well be fairy tales. They do not make the air any less explosive, they do not make the hospitals any less overwhelmed, they do not bring back the classmates who will never return to school.
We often speak of resilience in children as if it is a badge of honour rather than a testament to systemic failure. Gaza’s children are resilient because they have no other choice. Resilience here is not a triumph of spirit; it is a forced adaptation to a reality that should never exist. There is something grotesque about applauding a child for surviving the unimaginable. We should be mourning, demanding, raging, not patting shoulders and calling it bravery.
And yet, these children live in the paradox of existence: even amid destruction, life persists. Laughter, where it can, peeks out from the shadows. Art appears on walls scarred by bullets. Dreams, fragile, fleeting, still flutter like tattered flags over the ruins. But we cannot let these sparks of life seduce us into complacency. They do not absolve the world of responsibility; they are not substitutes for justice. Every child killed or wounded is a verdict on our collective humanity. Every traumatized child is a mirror reflecting the failure of adults who could, and should, do more.
Universal Children’s Day should not be about feel-good declarations. It should be a reckoning. It should be an acknowledgment that the future we celebrate imagination, curiosity, the right to learn and play, can be stolen with terrifying ease. And when it is stolen, the consequences extend far beyond the immediate. A generation raised in fear, in displacement, in grief, will bear the weight of that trauma in ways that shape every corner of their lives and every society they inherit.
The world must confront a simple, uncomfortable truth: children are not collateral. They are not statistics. They are not pawns in political chess games, nor are they incidental victims in cycles of violence that others have engineered. To speak of children today without speaking of the children of Gaza is to participate in selective amnesia, to choose narrative over reality, to celebrate innocence while tacitly condoning its annihilation.
So on this Universal Children’s Day, it is not enough to offer platitudes. We must look at the children of Gaza and recognize that their plight is a moral indictment of us all. To ignore them is to pretend that childhood is something that can exist in isolation that joy can exist without safety that hope can flourish without justice. It cannot. And until the world acknowledges this, until we refuse to let political expediency eclipse human decency, every declaration of celebration rings hollow.
A child should never be defined by fear. A childhood should never be measured in rubble and sirens. And yet, here we are. Universal Children’s Day is meant to remind us of what children deserve. Gaza is meant to remind us of what children are being denied. We cannot, in good conscience, celebrate one while ignoring the other. The question is not whether we can act, it is whether we will.
Because childhood under siege is not just a tragedy in Gaza; it is a reflection of a world that too often values power over empathy, convenience over justice, and silence over outrage. Universal Children’s Day should be a day of accountability as much as celebration. Until then, it remains a bitter reminder that the world has, once again, failed its most vulnerable.
In orbit of Washington’s convenient amnesia by John Reid
Donald Trump has always possessed a talent for redefining the unacceptable as merely unfortunate, a linguistic downgrading that softens even the sharpest edges of history. But his recent attempt to recast Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist murdered and dismembered inside a Saudi consulate, as “extremely controversial” is a new entry in the encyclopedia of moral inversion. It is one thing to quibble over tariffs or tax brackets; it is another to imply that a columnist’s political views somehow justify the bone saw.
This defense delivered with the familiar mix of casual revisionism and transactional loyalty, serves as yet another shield for Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a man whose portfolio includes both rapid modernization and ruthless suppression. MBS, as he is shorthand-known in Western geopolitical circles, is arguably one of the most authoritarian figures operating on the world stage today. His critics vanish. His rivals evaporate. And his supporters, be they business titans or former American presidents, often wrapping themselves in a kind of moral bubble wrap to avoid confronting the sharp reality of whom they’re praising.
Trump’s remark is not simply a political statement. It is a calibration of narrative, one meant to blur the lines between victim and perpetrator, critique and crime. Khashoggi is no longer the writer who risked his life to criticize the kingdom’s suffocating consolidation of power; instead, he’s repositioned as a troublesome figure, someone who perhaps invited danger, someone whose death was tragic but maybe not entirely unjustified. It is this “maybe” that corrodes public memory.
One can almost picture the rhetorical gears turning as Trump justifies the crown prince, look, he’s done some bad things, but the guy’s in charge, OK? Very powerful, very important. Power, in Trump’s formulation, instantly confers legitimacy. Brutality becomes efficiency; dissent becomes suspicion; murder becomes “a rough patch.” And because Trump is both influential and unfiltered, this moral reframing doesn’t drift into the ether, it becomes a political weather system.
What makes this particular defense so chilling is not just the content but the ease with which it was delivered. To minimize the assassination of a journalist, an act universally condemned, an act investigated and described in grim detail, is to declare that truth is inconvenient and therefore mutable. It signals that reality may bend, if only one asserts forcefully enough that it should.
Of course, the ex-president has long demonstrated a certain admiration for the world's strongmen. There is something hypnotic, it seems, about leaders who don’t have to bother with the cumbersome rituals of democracy. Trump has, at various points, expressed envy for the decisiveness of autocrats, misreading their repression as efficiency, their brutality as “strength.” That this admiration now extends into the realm of defending a murder is less a pivot than a predictable crescendo.
MBS, for his part, benefits from the spectacle. The Saudi crown prince has spent years cultivating an image of the modern reformer, the man who allowed cinemas to reopen, who permitted women to drive, who talks about a gleaming futuristic megacity rising from the desert. But beneath the marketing gloss lies a machinery of fear. Dissenters are intimidated, detained, silenced. The Khashoggi assassination was not an aberration of this system it was the system speaking plainly.
And yet, in Trump’s telling, this architect of repression is merely misunderstood, the target of unfair criticism. The implication is clear: if someone so powerful, so economically essential, commits an atrocity, perhaps the atrocity should be reconsidered. It is a worldview that treats morality like a currency, exchangeable, negotiable, revocable. A worldview in which human rights become optional accessories rather than foundations.
What is so corrosive about this rhetorical reshuffling is that it asks the public not only to forget but to participate in the forgetting. It beckons Americans to file away the gruesome details of Khashoggi’s killing under “complicated matters” rather than “state-sanctioned murder.” It invites the public to see scrutiny of authoritarianism as unnecessarily “political.” And in doing so, it pushes society into a dangerous normalization of the unthinkable.
It is here that journalism becomes both vulnerable and essential. Vulnerable because the loudest voices may attempt to drown out the truth with bravado and rebranding. Essential because without journalists, the powerful would narrate their own mythologies unchecked. Khashoggi was not “extremely controversial” in the way Trump implies. He was, instead, a writer who dared to map the shifting power structures of his homeland, who criticized corruption at the highest levels, who believed that his country could choose a different future. For that belief, he was lured, trapped, killed, and disassembled. No euphemism can soften that reality.
And so when Trump casually varnishes this murder with the gloss of “controversy,” it is more than a mischaracterization. It is an assault on memory itself. It tells us that cruelty committed by the powerful is negotiable, that truth is elastic, that morality can be reverse-engineered to suit the needs of the moment. It encourages us to accept the unacceptable so long as the perpetrator is rich enough, or strategic enough, or friendly enough to those in high office.
The danger of this sentiment is not confined to the past. It radiates outward, shaping the way future abuses of power are perceived, justified, or ignored. If a murdered journalist can be retrofitted into a problematic figure, what else can be reimagined for convenience? Which other truths will be softened, dismissed, or rewritten?
In the orbit of convenient amnesia, everything becomes negotiable. But the facts of Khashoggi’s death are not negotiable. The moral stakes are not negotiable. And the casual defense of one of the world’s most authoritarian figures should alarm anyone who believes that truth, however “controversial” still matters.
Universal Children's Day by Rene Wadlow
The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed 20 November as Universal Chlidren's Day, a day devoted to promoting the welfare of the children of the world. The date of 20 November was chosen as it is the anniversary of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959 and the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The Convention, which is the most widely ratifies international human rights treaty sets out a number of children's rights including the right to life, to health, to education and to family life.
When the Convention on the Rights of the Child was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989, governments took a major step forward in establishing a framework of world law to protect the basic dignity and rights of children in all parts of the world. Thus, we remember with gratitude those who worked to develop the concepts and reality of the Rights of the Child but also to measure the tasks that are before us, especially as members of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This universal framework is based on the principle that each child should have the possibility to develop into an active and responsible member of society. The way in which a society treats its children reflects not only its qualities of compassion and protective caring, but also its sense of justice, its commitment to the future and its urge to better the human condition for continuing generations.
The effort to create a legal framework for the welfare of the child began early in the League of Nations efforts with the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924 largely influenced by the Polish educator and writer Janusz Korczak (1878-1942). He promoted the idea of the rights of the child within the broader framework of progressive, child-centered education. His ideas were developed into a Charter of Children's Rights, written by Eglantyne Jebb, founder during World War I of Save the Children International Union. Her proposed Charter based on the ideas of Korczak were given to League of Nations delegates. The Geneva Declaration was the first major declaration after the creation of the League in 1922 − a reflection of the wide awareness of the suffering of children during the World War but also a reflection of the growing influence in the early 1920s of progressive education. Child welfare has always been a prime example of cooperative efforts among governments, scholars highlighting the conditions of children, and NGOs working actively in the field. The Geneva Declaration served as the basis for the UN General Assembly resolution on the Declaration of the Rights of the Child adopted also on 20 November 1959. The 1959 Declaration was followed with more specific provisions of the Declaration on Social and Legal Principles relating to the Protection and Welfare of Children, the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice, and the Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict.
In 1978, some representatives of both governments and NGOs in the UN human rights circle in Geneva felt that it was time to bring together these different declarations and provisions into a single text that would have the legal force of a UN convention. The Polish delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights took the lead in this effort, but some governments felt that the different declarations needed to be closely reviewed and measured against changing realities. Thus a Special Working Group on the Rights of the Child was created in 1979 under the chairmanship of the Polish representative, the legal specialist Adam Lopatka. Government and NGO representatives worked together from 1979 to 1988 for a week each year. There was a core group, including the Association of World Citizens, which worked steadily and which represented a wide range of different beliefs, values and traditions, as well as a wide range of socio-economic realities.
As a result of serious discussions, the Convention covers a wide range of human rights which can be summarized as the three “Ps”: provision, protection and participation. Each child has the right to be provided with certain things and services, such as a name and a nationality, to health care and education. Each child has a right to be protected from certain acts such as torture, exploitation, arbitrary detention and unwarranted removal from parental care. Each child has a right to participate in decisions affecting their lives as well as in community life.
The Working Group managed to come to a consensus on the final version in time for the General Assembly to adopt it on 20 November 1989, the anniversary date of the Declaration. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is meant to provide guidance for governments to review national legislation and policies in their child-related initiatives. It is by examining national law and policy and the effectiveness of government structures and mechanisms that progress can be measured. The Convention also provides a framework of goals for the vital activities of NGOs. NGOs, such as the Association of World Citizens, work on two lines simultaneously: to remind governments of their obligations through approaches to ministries, elected officials and the media and to undertake their own operational efforts.
To help governments to fulfill their obligations and to review national practices, a Committee on the Rights of the Child was created as called for in article 43 of the Convention. The Committee is composed of 10 independent experts elected for a four-year term by the States which have ratified the Convention. The Committee usually meets three times a year for a month each time in Geneva to review and discuss reports submitted by governments, once every four years. The sessions of the Committee are largely carried out in a non-confrontational dialogue with an emphasis on “unmet needs”.The discussion usually lasts six to nine hours for each country. The Committee members have received information and suggestions from NGOs in advance. The Committee members ask many questions and based on the government's responses, make suggestions for improving the promotion and protection of children's rights in the country.
By creating a common legal framework of world law, the Convention on the Rights of the Child has increased levels of governmental accountability, bringing about legislative and institutional reforms, and increasing international cooperation. As James P. Grant, then UNICEF Executive Director said “Transcending its detailed provisions, the Convention on the Rights of the Child embodies the fundamental principle that the lives and the normal development of children should have first call on society's concerns and capacities and that children should be able to depend upon the commitment in good times and in bad, in normal times and in times of emergency, in times of peace and in times of war, in times of prosperity and in times of recession.”
**********************************
Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
fARTissimo #017 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
fARTissimo is what people do not see when they see a piece of expression but what they project in what they think they see. For more fARTi...
-
The straight answer is yes, Islam is a Judeo-Christian hoax. Firstly, here are some menacing warnings in the Quran, Sura Baqarah 2:120 ...
-
We have seen thus far that there is NOT one practice in the entire religion of Islam that can be traced directly to the Quran – NOTONE.The ...
