Like millions of other people around the globe, in the US and elsewhere, I was transfixed by the testimonies of both Dr Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh, watching them from beginning to end.

I found her testimony believable, and his not.

This is not a matter of blind partisanship.  This is the result of being a witness in real time to a noble truth shining against a whole regime of falsehood – from President Donald Trump who had nominated him to the 11 Republican members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee who were trying to railroad him to confirmation and to Judge Kavanaugh himself.    

Dr Ford is one among a number of women who have accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault and who had dared to go public against a powerful man and the even more powerful men supporting him. They came forward with their allegations of sexual assault at a time when the #MeToo movement has falsely promised that such daring attempts to bring up sexual violence against women would be met with more sympathy by the public.  

Dr Ford’s courageous act exposed how the class supremacy of white wealth and power would instantly resort to vindictive anger and fury to silence and dismiss anyone, who would dare challenging its institutional privileges. 

After watching the two testimonies, I am more than ever before convinced that Judge Kavanaugh would be a calamitous appointment to the Supreme Court and would tip the balance in a decidedly reactionary right-wing swing for decades to come. 

Witness for the prosecution 

Facing accusations of multiple sexual assaults by a number of women, Judge Kavanaugh made even more evident his schoolyard bullying tendencies, brazen partisanship, and disdain for those who challenge his politics and doubt his judicial integrity during that fuming, sniffing, self-pitying spectacle he staged on September 27. 

In sharp contrast to him stood the towering courage of Dr Ford who came forward, faced the brazen hostility of 11 white Republican men tipping the balance of the US judiciary committee, and accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when she was 15 years old. 

Why do I find her testimony more believable?

Because her first and final witness was Judge Kavanaugh himself!  

The quiet power and the neuroscientific precision of Dr Ford’s testimony reduced Judge Kavanaugh to a 17-year-old boy sitting in a 53-year-old man’s suit, angry, conspiratorial, vindictive, in full denial, self-entitled, and seemingly caught red-handed. It was as if he was sitting in the principal’s office with his parents, vehemently and nervously defending himself.  

In his spectacular performance, Judge Kavanaugh produced the single most believable eyewitness Dr Ford needed to convince me in her story: The man I saw on TV behaved like a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh the morning after he had sobered up from a terrible deed he had done the night before and had moved into full, self-entitled, white boy denial.

Dr Ford’s supporting evidence was her own life – going through extensive therapy, suffering from anxiety and claustrophobia to the point of demanding a second security door in her home and more importantly, dedicating her career to the very science that would teach her how never to forget the precise scientific description of what had happened to her.

She sat there in front of the Senate judiciary Committee having earned an undergraduate degree in experimental psychology (1988), a master’s degree in clinical psychology (1991), a PhD in educational psychology (1996), writing her dissertation on “Measuring Young Children’s Coping Responses to Interpersonal Conflict,” before earning yet another master’s degree in epidemiology (2009). 

Dr Ford had translated her teenage trauma into a lifelong academic and scholarly career. On September 27, she sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee the victim, the eyewitness, and the expert – all in one. 

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said, when asked what she remembered the most of that night. 

When Senator Dianne Feinstein inquired: “How are you so sure that it was he,” Professor Ford simply said: “The same way that I’m sure that I’m talking to you right now, just basic memory functions, and also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain… That neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus, and so the trauma-related experience then is kind of locked there whereas other details kind of drift.” 

The scream that Dr Ford said that horrific night was stifled finally come out in the precise, specific, scientific, staccatos of her testimony 36 years later for the whole world to hear.  

Has something broken? 

There is much more at stake here than the barefaced, boastful, ambitions of an ultra-conservative judge riding on the political wave of Trump and Trumpism – brandishing his toxic masculinity, repeatedly yelling:  “I drank beer with my friends, almost everyone did.  Sometimes I had too many beers, sometimes others did… I liked beer, I still like beer.”  His pathetic bravura machismo had only one audience: Donald Trump, so he would not drop him cold and move on to the next on his list. 

The spectacle of the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings and the obscenity of a gang of 11 white men shamelessly disregarding a woman describing a traumatic experience dismantled every shred of credibility the US Senate may have ever thought it had. 

“The US Senate used to be known as the world’s greatest deliberative body. On Thursday, it shredded most of what remains of that reputation.”

That is the judicious opinion of Edward Luce of the Financial Times, who seems to have a distant and generous memory of a time when the US Senate was worthy of that praise. I have no such memory.  

For the over 40 years that I have lived in the US and for as long as my memory of racism and misogyny in the US remembers, the US Senate has never been anything but what we saw during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing – an overwhelmingly white privileged, self-entitled group of men perpetuating the privileges of their race and class. 

Their outrageous demographic obscenity was emphasised that much more by the presence of a Rachel Mitchell, a sexual crimes prosecutor who they had brought to do their dirty work for them: questioning Dr Ford as if she were a suspect.    

A New York Times editorial published on September 28 rightly pointed out the cowardice of those 11 Republic senators who did not dare face Dr Ford themselves. It noted: 

“Eventually, as Judge Kavanaugh testified, the Republican senators ventured out from behind their shield.  Doubtless seeking to ape President Trump’s style and win his approval, they began competing with each other to make the most ferocious denunciation of their Democratic colleagues and the most heartfelt declaration of sympathy for Judge Kavanaugh, in a show of empathy far keener than they managed to muster for Dr Blasey.”

This is at the crux of the matter – the structural white masculinity at the heart of right-wing American politics. There is a long distance between the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville and this spectacle of white male privilege ganging up against a vulnerable woman. But the two poles connect the same spectrum of raging white power. 

Historical context 

Over the more than four decades I have lived in the US, this is the fourth time that I have seen the nation transfixed by a public spectacle on which hangs the fate of the country – its moral fiber, its sense of self-respect, its fear of decadent implosion.    

The first was the July 1987 televised congressional hearing of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council on the Iran-Contra affair, when the Reagan administration was implicated in illicit exchange of arms for the release of US hostages and the use of the proceeds to finance a covert operation in Nicaragua. On that occasion, the depth of US clandestine treacheries interfering in other nations’ affairs was put on full global display.    

The second was the testimony of attorney Anita Hill, who accused Judge Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee, of sexual assault. During those proceedings the selfsame shameless masculinist abuse targeted a young African-American woman daring to share publicly her harrowing experiences. 

The third was the trial of O J Simpson in 1994, when the racial divide tearing this country asunder was on full display. 

And the fourth was these US Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Kavanaugh, a de ja vu of the Anita Hill hearings, which look and feel as if nothing has happened in between. Some of the very same Republican senators are still serving on the same committee staging an identical, callous disregard for another human being’s suffering. 

All these four events were massive dramatic spectacles, which brought the entire nation in front of TV screens, wondering where their country was headed. 

The point at issue in all of these cases and in this most recent trauma is not just the overwhelming testimony of Dr Ford and the categorical way in which it was disregarded by the Republicans. 

It is also the structural misogyny that comes down from Trump, spreads to almost the entirety of the Republican party, represented by the 11 white men serving on this committee, and then manifested in the angry, vindictive, and arrogant screed of Kavanaugh. 

In the end, Dr Ford’s testimony will go down in history as one of those pivotal moments which pave the way for women to have a safe and dignified space to live, work and thrive, to be taken seriously in their pain and suffering, so the deep-seated misogyny of power can be dismantled.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has said it launched ballistic missiles into eastern Syria, targeting fighters it blamed for a recent attack on a military parade in southwestern Iran.

“Our iron fist is prepared to deliver a decisive and crushing response to any wickedness and mischief of the enemies,” the Guards said in a statement on Monday.

The attack took place at 2am local time and targeted the bases of “takfiri terrorists” backed by America and regional powers in eastern Syria, the statement said. Iranian officials often use the word “takfiri” to describe Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL also known as ISIS).

The powerful military force said at least six missiles were fired into Syria. It added that seven drones were also used to bomb rebel targets during the attack, which killed a number of fighters and destroyed supplies and infrastructure used by the group.

Syrian state media did not immediately acknowledge the missile strike – the second such attack on Syria in more than a year.

Footage aired by the Iranian state television showed one of its reporters standing by as one of the missiles was launched, identifying the area as being in Iran’s western province of Kermanshah.

A state TV-aired graphic suggested the missiles flew over central Iraq near the city of Tikrit before landing near the city of Abu Kamal, in the far southeastern region of Syria.

Abu Kamal is held by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but occasionally it has been targeted by fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), who have lost almost all the territory they once held in Syria and Iraq.

Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi, reporting from Tehran, said Iran is illustrating it has the “ability and the military might to target any threat it sees to itself”.

“The missile attacks were followed by bombardment … signaling their military capabilities in the region,” he said.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had said the deadly Iran attack was linked to the United States‘ “allies in the region”.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have denied involvement in the attack.

The Ahvaz National Resistance, an Iranian ethnic Arab separatist movement, and the ISIL have both claimed responsibility for the September 22 attack in which 29 people were killed. Neither group has presented conclusive evidence to back up their claim.

The attack prompted President Hassan Rouhani to warn of a “crushing response”, as those killed included members of the elite Revolutionary Guards and women and children who had come to watch the parade.

Iran initially blamed Arab separatists for the attack in which gunmen disguised as soldiers opened fire on the crowd and officials watching the parade from a viewing platform in the southwestern city.

A year after the October 1 referendum on seceding from Spain, Catalonia is no closer to independence, and many of the figureheads of the movement remain in jail.

The unauthorised poll produced a “yes” vote but saw leaders of the independence movement either imprisoned or exiled. It was the country’s largest political crisis since it began its transition to democracy in 1975.

At least nine politicians and civil society leaders remain in jail and others are in exile. Their loved ones told Al Jazeera the political fallout has been profound, both inside and out of Spanish prisons.

Carme Forcadell, the former president of the Parliament of Catalonia, was jailed in March for her role in the vote.

Her husband, Bernat Pegueroles, said: “At first, my wife didn’t suspect she would be arrested, but later on, she packed a bag and always had it at hand, as if she knew that she’d be gone soon.

“In the beginning, she wasn’t coping well [in prison] and had to take anti-depressants. My wife went from being a very active person to not being able to do anything in a small, enclosed space. It had a huge impact on her.”

Spain’s 1978 constitution says the country is “indivisible”.

Madrid charged Catalan leaders with rebellion and sedition for their secessionist efforts.

Protests against imprisonment

Pedro Sanchez, the new Spanish prime minister, is more conciliatory than his conservative predecessor, Mariano Rajoy, but he, too, has rejected calls to intervene and free the prisoners, saying he has no control over Spain’s independent judiciary.

Sanchez became prime minister in June after Rajoy lost an unrelated confidence vote.

The Catalan government also underwent changes, with separatist Joaquim Torra replacing Carles Puigdemont as the acting president of Catalonia since May.

After the referendum, Madrid used Article 155 of the Constitution of Spain to suspend the region’s autonomous powers and impose direct rule.

You can’t start a dialogue with people in jail.

Alberta Puig, daughter of Lluis Puig

After fresh elections were held three months ago and a new regional administration was formed, the Spanish government lifted Article 155.

“In the current political climate, it is very unlikely that Sanchez will run the risk of making any move that could increase the chances of the prisoners being released,” Xavier Cuadras-Morato, an associate professor of economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, who has written extensively on the subject of secession, told Al Jazeera. 

Alba Puig, the daughter of Lluis Puig, the Catalan minister of culture in exile in Brussels, blasted efforts at dialogue between Spain and Catalonia.

Puig accompanied Puigdemont, who also remains in Brussels, when he fled to the city on October 30 last year. 

Family members are eyeing the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg as the eventual solution, but the process may take years. 

“We are prepared,” said Puig. “Our other option is waiting for 20 years for the charges to expire”.

She added: “You can’t start a dialogue with people in jail”.

Dismissed Catalan President Carles Puigdemont is now in exile in Brussels [Reuters]

The issue has reverberated throughout the region, with “liberty for the political prisoners” posters and yellow ribbons, a symbol of Catalan independence, hung Barcelona’s balconies.

However, rights groups such as Amnesty International have refrained from using the term “political prisoners”, saying there is no generally accepted definition of the term in international law.

The annual celebration of the Catalan National Day or “La Diada” on September 9 was dedicated to the imprisoned and exiled leaders. 

But they are not just remembered on La Diada. Every week, several hundred people gather to sing, read poetry and protest for the release of the prisoners throughout Barcelona and in front of the prisons where the leaders are jailed.

Each week, between 200 and 500 people gather in front of Lledoners, a men’s prison 70km from Barcelona where seven of the nine leaders are detained, and sing for them.

The two female prisoners, Carme Forcadell and Dolors Bassa, are staying in two other prisons that are also visited weekly by supporters.

The prisoners communicate with the crowd by waving a yellow scarf out of the window or turning the lights on and off. 

Carme Forcadell, the former president of the parliament of Catalonia, was jailed in March for her role in the vote. Her husband, Bernat Pegueroles, said she was depressed at the start of her imprisonment [Sergio Perez/Reuters]

“I think it’s a problem for Spain that there are political prisoners,” said Susanna Barreda, the wife of Jordi Sanchez, president of the Catalan National Assembly, a civic group that has led the campaign for secession.

Sanchez was imprisoned in October 2017.

“It’s the first point that should be addressed in any political solution,” she told Al Jazeera.

Barreda and Sanchez have three children. They can visit him once a month, sometimes twice a month, for 90 minutes. 

“My children all take it differently. The eldest son has really taken the cause to his heart,” Barreda said. “My daughters are finding it very tough and can barely speak about it.”

She said there have also been financial consequences for the family. 

“We went from two salaries to one straight away and then we went through all our savings.”

But they were supported by the Catalan Association of Civil Rights (ACDC), which was set up for the families of those in jail or in exile.

Cofounded by Alba Puig, ACDC also sends members across Europe to educate others on the situation in Catalonia, and recently released a children’s book with 11 short stories about civil rights.

Pegueroles, Forcadell’s husband, said he found it difficult to understand the moral and legal reasoning behind the detentions.

“I asked my wife’s defence lawyer if the judges can sleep at night; if they’re not ashamed of what they’re doing,” Pegueroles said.

“His answer was: ‘They’re not ashamed. They sleep well, because they know they’re saving Spain.’”

The United Nations’ latest attempt to bring the warring sides in the Yemen conflict to the table failed last week when Houthi rebels did not make it to Geneva, blaming travel restrictions.

But the UN Special Envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, has refused to give up and is hopeful that a new round of talks can now take place.

The UAE, which backs the Yemeni government, says it will “fully support” Griffiths’ efforts, with Yemen’s foreign minister saying his government is willing to recognise the Houthis as a political entity.

More than 10,000 people have been killed since the war began in 2015 and tens of thousands more are suffering from hunger and disease.

Presenter: Adrian Finighan 

Guests: 

Hussain  Al Bukhaiti – journalist based in the Yemeni capital Sanaa

Andreas Krieg – assistant professor at the King’s College London’s Defence Studies department 

Sabah Al-Khozai – lecturer at City of Bristol College, UK

Source: Al Jazeera News