It’s chilling to watch as Trump and Netanyahu adopt the methods of regimes their countries once condemned
In Syria, where I worked during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s terror, people were often taken away to torture cells before dawn by masked men. The timing was deliberate. It disoriented them at their most vulnerable, ensuring the torture to come would be even more agonising. The testimonies I recorded from survivors almost always contained the same phrase: “The morning they came for me.” One young woman, shattered by rape and violence, later told me that her life had split in two – before and after the masked men came for her.
In Iraq, those who spoke against Saddam Hussein – even abroad, even casually – were punished in cruel ways by a vengeful leader determined to crush any hint of dissent.
In Egypt in 2016, Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian academic researching labour unions, was abducted, beaten and tortured to death, it is thought, by president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s security services. His own mother had difficulty recognising his mutilated body.
During the second Chechen war, I met the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Chechnya. She repeatedly attacked Vladimir Putin’s policies, documenting human rights abuses during Russia’s military campaigns. To punish her, a bullet was put in her brain on Putin’s birthday – a warning to other truth-seekers. Stay silent or die.
In the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli soldiers, masked and unmasked, kill, torture and imprison Palestinian doctors, journalists, teachers, activists and scholars not for what they have done – but because of who they are.
After decades of documenting state terror, I know how it starts. Governments begin to use words like security, order, deterrence. Every excuse for Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct in Gaza is framed as “security”. ICE agents are trained in a language of order in which violence becomes procedure.
What happens when democratic states adopt the methods of the regimes they once condemned? Terror is not only masked men and arbitrary detention. It also operates through fear. Policies are designed to make people more compliant, more submissive.,…
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After the truth-shower 