"Perhaps I should be terrified by this announcement from a man who, for all his sins, knows a thing or two about technology. But I’m sick of hearing about the hypothetical dangers of AI when the technology is being used to kill people today. Gates may not be directly involved in Microsoft any more, but, rather than making prophecies about the future, I’d love to hear what he thinks about the company’s role in the AI-enabled destruction of Gaza." Arwa Mahdawi

Bill Gates thinks AI could kill a billion people – but can we trust his judgment after Epstein?

Arwa Mahdawi

in The Guardian  

He knows a thing or two about tech, but what to make of the views of a man who met Jeffrey Epstein 30 times and couldn’t see what a monster he was?

The Bill Gates rehabilitation tour is in full swing. After having his carefully cultivated image tarnished by the revelation of his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, Gates lay low for a while. Now, however, the Microsoft co-founder is once again thrusting himself into the public consciousness, this time with a dire warning about AI. If left unchecked, AI could cause “a billion deaths”, Gates declared in an interview with NBC on Sunday.

Perhaps I should be terrified by this announcement from a man who, for all his sins, knows a thing or two about technology. But I’m sick of hearing about the hypothetical dangers of AI when the technology is being used to kill people today. Gates may not be directly involved in Microsoft any more, but, rather than making prophecies about the future, I’d love to hear what he thinks about the company’s role in the AI-enabled destruction of Gaza.

Another thing I’d like to hear Gates explain is why he reckons anyone should trust his judgment about anything... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/30/bill-gates-thinks-ai-could-kill-people-can-we-trust-judgment-after-epstein

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Ben-Gvir did not come into power in a vacuum: he was helped into his position by an international community that has afforded Israel complete impunity

Arwa Mahdawi

Ben-Gvir posts Palestinians on conveyor belts to detention camps. The world is silent

Arwa Mahdawi

Thu 3 Sep 2026 06.00 EDT

Let me introduce you to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of Israel’s far-right Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party, the minister of national security, and an almost cartoonishly evil man. You’ll have heard his name before: he made international news when he filmed himself taunting bound activists who had been detained trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. But you might not be familiar with many of his recent shocking comments, because they haven’t been widely covered by much of the US media.

Let’s start with an AI-generated video that Ben-Gvir posted on Twitter/X on Sunday and then deleted. It shows portly Palestinian prisoners being loaded on to a conveyor belt and going into a detention camp, then emerging emaciated. The caption is “we promised – we delivered!” which seems to be a reference to the national security minister’s promise to worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners. An ambitious goal, considering conditions are already hellish: Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has likened the prisons where Palestinians are kept to “torture camps”.

I’m being diplomatic with my summary of this latest video, by the way. I suggest you go watch it yourself to fully take in how awful it is. (It may have been deleted, but it lives on online). If the podcaster Hasan Piker had tweeted something similar, with Israelis as the subject rather than Palestinians, it would be front-page news. US lawmakers, all of whom seem to be obsessed with Piker, would be demanding that the podcaster be punished.

Ben-Gvir, by the way, has some imaginative ideas for punishment. One of his sick fantasies is to put crocodiles in moats around prisons where Palestinians are held to stop prison breaks. The plan is now on hold because Israeli rights groups have said it is cruel to crocodiles.

I can’t stress enough that, in any discussion of Palestinian “prisoners”, it’s important to remember that many of these people have not gone through any sort of due process. Thousands of prisoners, including about 200 children, are held under “administrative detention”: a technocratic name for a dystopian practice.

To quote the B’Tselem definition: “In administrative detention, a person is held without trial without having committed an offense, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit. The person is detained without legal proceedings, by order of the regional military commander, based on classified evidence that is not revealed to them.”

In other words: if you are Palestinian, heavily armed Israeli soldiers can come into your house in the middle of the night, drag you into a de facto torture chamber despite the fact that you haven’t committed a crime, and hold you there indefinitely without telling you why you’re being held or informing your family where you are.

When you hear the word “prisoner”, people like Ben-Gvir want you to think of dangerous terrorists who deserve everything they get. In reality, many are people like Layan Nasir: a 23-year-old woman who was taken away at gunpoint from her parents’ home for no clear reason and only made international news because she is a Christian... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/03/ben-gvir-palestinian-comments

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The rebranding of ‘Lake America’ is Trump’s desperate attempt to distract us. Ignore Iran, the Epstein files, and your wallet – not to mention Trump’s plummeting approval ratings

Arwa Mahdawi 

As well as being a distraction, this pathetic maneuver is supposed to be a middle finger to Canada.’ Photograph: Al Drago/Pool/Al Drago - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock

 The Week in Patriarchy

 Donald Trump 

Sat 29 Aug 2026

Don’t mention the war! Or the economy, for that matter. Or the Epstein files. Or Natalie Harp. Or “affordability”, which, as Donald Trump recently said at a rally, is a word that was “never used” by the media before he took office. Best not to talk about anything that affects ordinary people or embarrasses the president, really. Instead, let’s all rejoice in Trump’s latest triumph: renaming Lake Ontario, which is shared by Canada and the US, as Lake America.

On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to America-fy the lake’s name on US maps and documents, which is an excellent use of time and resources. I suppose we can at least be thankful that the president, who is trying to slap his own name on everything from airports to the Kennedy Center, didn’t decree that the body of water be called Lake Trump.

This is not an isolated embarrassment: the Lake Ontario name change follows the president’s rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America last year. “We have a gulf and we have a lake – now all we need is an ocean. Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific,” Trump told reporters.

Give it a few more months of the disastrous war in Iran and a bruised Trump may well make good on that threat: the man will do anything to distract from his failings.

As well as being a distraction, this pathetic maneuver is supposed to be a middle finger to Canada. Trade negotiations between the US and Canada recently collapsed, with the Trump administration imposing a 50% tariff on some goods and the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, promising a “dollar for dollar” response. One suspects that Trump thinks Lake Ontario is named after the Canadian province it borders. Ergo he reckons a unilateral name change is a good way of showing the US’s northern neighbour who is boss.

However, as Carney was forced to point out on social media, the name Lake Ontario has been used for more than 400 years and comes from the Indigenous Wendat/Huron word Ontari’io, meaning: “The lake is beautiful, the lake is big.” It predates both the Confederation of Canada and the US Declaration of Independence.

A US president ordering the name change of a Great Lake in order to antagonize one of its closest allies would have been headline news for weeks in a normal timeline. Now it’s just another Thursday. Still, this is more than a silly stunt that both Canada and the governor of New York have made clear they are going to ignore. It’s a glaring demonstration of just how desperate, isolated and out of ideas Trump is... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/29/lake-america-trump-approval-ratings   

Israel has killed at least 100 Palestinians in Gaza in the last two weeks

This is more than 10 months into a “ceasefire”

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Israel launches an ‘investigation’ into killing of Hind Rajab

In January 2024, 335 bullets were fired into a car containing five-year-old Hind and six of her family members in Gaza. When paramedics came to help, they were killed too. IDF vehemently denied responsibility for this atrocity, despite investigations making it obvious that its military was responsible. This week, Israel finally admitted its troops fired into the car and said there would be an investigation. Which is not particularly reassuring: Israel’s investigations into itself rarely result in any sort of accountability. Wesam Hamada, Hind’s mother, is demanding an independent inquiry, which is the least Hind deserves.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/22/natalie-harp-republicans-feminists 

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  The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film about a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2024, has been nominated for best international feature film... Palestinian actor, Motaz Malhees, who plays the role of a call center operator attempting to help the girl, can’t attend Oscars because of US travel ban

   

  The Voice of Hind Rajab gets record 23-minute ovation at Venice premiere

   

  Anne Frank 1929-1945 Hind Rajab 2018- 2024 ... NEVER AGAIN MEANS NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE !

   

  Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead- Many of the children who survived attacks have life-changing wounds... More than 40,000 children have been injured in the war, according to the UN. Gaza is now home to more child amputees than any other place in the world.

   

  How much is your support for Israel worth? Try $1 billion [that we know of]... Israel is spending wads of cash on public diplomacy in a desperate attempt to reverse waning American support for the country after it stands accused of genocide in Gaza and pushing the U.S. into the Iran war.

   

  America's "Trail of Tears" refers to the forced relocation of approximately 60,000 native First Peoples tribes who were cruelly displaced from their homes and communities by white settlers between 1830 and 1850. Times and technology have changed since then. We now know that forced displacement is wrong. Very very wrong... So why we are arming Israel to disenfranchise and forcibly displace and/or kill indigenous Palestinians?!!!

   

  Never Forget! Hind Rajab- a little 5 year old Palestinian girl hit by 355 bullets fired by Israel's IDF in Gaza

   

  "When future generations read about Gaza with horror and wonder how the western world, with all its moral superiority, its rule-based order and its focus on international human rights law, allowed a livestreamed genocide to happen, what will you say? " What did you do during the genocide in Gaza? Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian

   

  Dear America - Please stop funding and fueling Israel's wars and the ongoing destruction of historic Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria... and Iran.

"... Propaganda has proliferated: Israel has quintupled its PR budget to $730m to take control of the narrative. Criticizing Israel can now stop you from getting a green card in the US and, it would seem from the Piker decision, a visa to the UK. Despite all this, however, more people are coming to understand that what is happening to Palestinians is not complex; it is fundamentally wrong."

Why is Hasan Piker ‘not conducive to the public good’? Because on Gaza, we punish the witness, not the crime

Arwa Mahdawi

The UK has banned Piker and Cenk Uygur from entry – but the objectionable things they’ve said are not more dangerous than Israel itself

This week, the British government banned Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, two leftwing US commentators with millions of followers, from entering the country on the grounds that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good”. It did not spell out what it meant by this very broad phrase, but Piker and Uygur have accused the government of denying them entry because of their prolific criticism of Israel. Some critics have accused the pair of antisemitism, which they deny.

A lot has been written about the Piker-Uygur ban, and I don’t think I need to litigate everything they have ever uttered here. They have undeniably said some objectionable things (Piker, for example, said some Orthodox Jews are “inbred”, which he later apologized for). What sort of speech crosses a line that makes you detrimental to the public good, is not clear, however. Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, for example, has said that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage”. While he later apologized for this, he has repeatedly characterized Arabs as barbarians who “value murder”. The British government has never banned him from speaking in the UK.

Neither Piker nor Uygur have said anything that is more divisive or dangerous than former Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s declaration that all Palestinians were responsible for the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. A UN commission of inquiry found that Herzog incited the commission of genocide with this statement and said that his later modifications of that utterance were an effort “to deflect responsibility for the initial statement”. Still, the British seem fine with that first statement: Herzog met with Keir Starmer in London in 2025. Clearly that meeting was deemed to be conducive to the public good.

But, again, I don’t want to pronounce on each of Piker or Uygur’s statements here. I don’t want to fall into the trap of making this a story about two American commentators or the limits of free speech. Because at its heart, the Piker-Uygur ban is about a far more insidious issue. It’s about what Britain, and the US and Israel, wants us to believe is “good” – about the way in which our fundamental sense of what is “good” and “bad” are being manipulated.

Wherever you live, whatever you believe, wherever you sit on the political spectrum, most of us have a shared understanding of basic moral concepts, of what is good and what is bad. We understand that children are innocent and should not be killed in the thousands. We understand that a region’s healthcare system should not be systematically wiped out and medics targeted. We understand that there should be laws around warfare to protect civilians. We understand that people should not be expelled en masse from their land, their homes replaced with luxury settlements. We understand that collective punishment is a crime, one that is very much not “conducive to the public good”.

None of the above is complex, no matter what some people would have you believe. I come back to the diaries of American peace activist Rachel Corrie often because they very eloquently show how there is no room for moral confusion when you are watching atrocities unfold in front of your own eyes. When Corrie went to Gaza in 2003, more than two decades before 7 October 2023, she wrote how nothing could have prepared her for what she was seeing, which she characterized as “a somewhat gradual – often hidden, but nevertheless massive – removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive”. It terrified her, she said. “I just want to write to my mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature,” Corrie wrote. Not long after writing this, she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to save a Palestinian home in Rafah from destruction. Now, of course, the entirety of Rafah, once home to 275,000 people, has been razed to the ground.... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/04/uk-hasan-piker-ban-israel 

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"Thank God for Pope Leo. He’s the leader our world desperately needs. Even for nonbelievers like me, the pope has become a reassuring – and all too rare – voice of moral clarity " - Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian

‘He is still a mere mortal, he is not perfect, but he is proving to be a much-needed force for good.’ Photograph: Remo Casilli/Reuters

 

OpinionPope Leo XIV

Arwa Mahdawi

Wed 3 Jun 2026 05.00 EDT

Do you remember the early 2000s, when Silicon Valley buzzed with idealism and tech bros told us they were going to save the world? “Don’t be evil” was Google’s unofficial motto; it’s 2004 IPO prospectus declared that doing “good things for the world” was more important than “short term gains”. Mark Zuckerberg similarly wrote in Facebook’s 2012 IPO letter that the social network was “built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected”.

As was obvious to anyone paying attention, this was all performative bullshit. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic about that period of time – which came to a definitive end in 2018, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. By and large, billionaires and CEOs still cared what the hoi polloi thought of them. They were self-aware enough to realize that, even with all their billions, there’s a lot more of us than there are of them.

Now, however, there has been a seismic vibe shift. Donald Trump has made cruelty cool, and normalized greed and corruption. Tech titans, meanwhile, have lined up to kiss the ring – and extract as much money from his administration as they can. Elon Musk has gone from quirky rocketman to rightwing agitator. Zuckerberg is in his macho era, urging companies to unleash their “masculine energy” and saying he regrets apologizing so much in the past.

As for the mantra “don’t be evil”? Ha. Now tech companies are unapologetically fueling unimaginable evil. Project Nimbus, for example, a $1.2bn contract awarded by Israel to Google and Amazon, has been accused of playing a role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, meanwhile, has said using the term genocide in connection to Gaza, which scores of leading human rights organizations and scholars do, is “offensive”.

Amid this vibe shift, something odd has happened: the Vatican City has... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/03/pope-leo-ai-technology

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"Given the way things are going in the US, corporations seem to have more freedom of speech than university students. And it might not be long before datacenters have more rights than women."

 The Week in Patriarchy  AI (artificial intelligence)

Pity the poor AI datacenters facing ‘discrimination’

The centers are diverting much-needed resources from regular people. Local resistance has the industry playing defense 

 

by Arwa Mahdawi 

 

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/16/pity-the-poor-ai-datacenters-facing-discrimination

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‘The people getting filthy rich from AI will never have to live next door to their moneymaking creations.’ Photograph: Mark Hertzberg/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock